Asatru Folk Assembly - 7⧸15⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 210 - Prose Edda： Skáldskaparmál, Part 1

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

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

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

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

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

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

00:03:13.860 Today happens to be the day of remembrance for our true hero, Alexander Rudd Mills.

00:03:22.280 so i figured we would i don't know just start the show by recognizing that

00:03:32.040 mentioning him um through producer nick some pictures uh one of the things that is

00:03:41.880 is for anybody who does not know he was born in 1885 and during the early part of the 20th

00:03:52.440 century isolated from others doing this or anything adjacent he lays a pathway for our

00:04:03.960 folk in Australia and you couldn't be much further in the world from our ancestral homelands

00:04:14.120 and he decided that his folk our folk needed this or you know his his version of this that he put

00:04:26.680 forth there he uh against all odds he got folks together to worship our gods and to practice

00:04:36.120 house true in a time where he was literally all alone starting fresh getting this off the ground

00:04:46.120 and it was a difficult time because a lot of things were cracked down on during the

00:04:52.760 second world war and that made his job a lot harder he was a poet and an author as well as

00:05:00.040 his day job being a barrister and his stream of this was particularly important in a couple of

00:05:13.480 ways it was different than others his his efforts in pioneering this had

00:05:25.560 a distinctly modern when i say modern contemporary i guess

00:05:33.160 feel to it there was none of the

00:05:36.440 reenactment kind of face there was none of the i guess what cynical people would call larping

00:05:47.240 portion of it at all as a a man of his time successful man of his time in the the dress of

00:05:55.880 his time engaging in religion in a way that was contemporary to his time but realizing

00:06:05.800 that our gods and our faith is eternal and timeless he didn't go through the same phase of

00:06:16.040 historical fetishism that has characterized some other people's efforts so it was really

00:06:22.120 inspirational for him to have skipped that whole stage that so many other people went through and

00:06:29.240 And to, upon its outset, practice our faith in a very contemporary and relevant way to his time.

00:06:37.820 And I've always found that very inspirational.

00:06:40.960 Continue to find it inspirational.

00:06:43.280 And, yeah, we want to acknowledge him on his day of remembrance.

00:06:47.380 And it is fortuitous that it happens to be on a night that we have victory never sleeps.

00:06:55.280 So, hail Alexander Red Mills.

00:06:58.280 Hail.

00:06:59.240 um anybody who is curious uh and nick can get this link up because he's quick draw on it

00:07:09.520 but our days of remembrance are laid out at runestone.org slash remembrance and it's got

00:07:18.840 kind of a full calendar of our days of remembrance for our house of true heroes

00:07:25.200 Yeah, it's a fun thing to check out if it's something you're not familiar with or if you

00:07:29.740 want to get your bearings on what's coming up and when we celebrate.

00:07:37.140 Also, in the chat room, we are joined by Rolfham06.

00:07:44.380 I have seen all of your comments on so many of the stuff that we post on our channel.

00:07:48.880 I appreciate you digging in, and I'm glad you made it on the chat room tonight.

00:07:53.920 Welcome.

00:07:55.200 Um, other stuff before we start, I will be joining the good folk at Thorshoff, celebrating, uh, Sigurbloat here this coming week. So, uh, if you can make it there, that is in Linden, North Carolina.

00:08:13.940 it's an amazing time i hope that you you know make it there whenever you can but i would love

00:08:20.900 to have the opportunity to meet you if i haven't or to uh shake and give you a hug if i've already

00:08:26.020 met you and celebrate victory with you so i will be there love to see you then um

00:08:35.780 other news and notes i'm going to talk about our normal fundraising things that i

00:08:40.900 you know mentioned to you guys first uh pavilion at siggerheim coming along nice uh

00:08:52.580 we're almost a third of the way there towards that total that we're trying to raise again

00:08:58.740 awesome we're looking forward to having it up and ready for i'm harry a bloke this year um

00:09:05.460 but you guys have been very generous if you would like to help with any of these

00:09:09.700 things donate you can donate at roomstone.org slash donate but um yeah so we're at what 28

00:09:20.500 percent and change on that one also on our paying off phrase off which i'll remind you we just

00:09:27.860 dedicated on the 6th of december 2025 we are already 45.3 paid off with that

00:09:36.260 so uh thank you guys all for that i think if each afa member were to pony up 93 today that would be

00:09:44.580 all the way paid off just as an idea of how to chunk it um other other things so this all right

00:09:52.740 All right. People who are familiar with the program and have heard me on here, I have mentioned over and over and over again, and I'll do it again now. Get a will done. Don't care how old or how young you are.

00:10:08.680 get your will done. You can get your will done at doyourownwill.com. That is legally binding

00:10:18.720 and acceptable in all of the states, the United States of America, as well as some provinces in

00:10:26.420 Canada. And I haven't checked. It may be completely valid for other places as well.

00:10:32.260 Get one, get it done. It's very easy. It takes about five minutes. Take as long as you want if

00:10:37.120 got a bunch of complicated things but it doesn't have to get it get originals signed and notarized

00:10:44.880 and send a copy to our law speaker so that we can help advocate for you and your wishes

00:10:51.760 in the circumstance that you might pass i've mentioned a lot of the time that afa members

00:10:58.160 have neglected to do this when they find themselves at the end of their life and i've

00:11:04.240 seen far too many that have not gotten what they wanted done so you may have uh you may recall

00:11:11.920 not too long ago a member of ours melinda harris passed away and she was one of those many who had

00:11:20.800 a terminal uh disease and she knew that her end was coming and she was not able to get one

00:11:28.960 made in time but she expressed to us what she wanted done uh with her remains and you know

00:11:36.960 with dealing with yeah basically with her remains and her final resting place um

00:11:45.440 the tragedy of that was she never wrote it down anywhere she didn't have any document

00:11:49.760 so kind of got into the system and had fairly distant relations with her with her family

00:12:00.560 and so we thought for sure that that ship had sailed and that she was not going to get what

00:12:08.320 she wanted the body was was taken by whoever stepped in in the county or whatever and put

00:12:16.400 in the system and dealt with well it turns out last month we got a request to help with the cost

00:12:23.920 of cremation for her and that opened up the conversation we would love to help take care

00:12:29.520 of that cost but we would like to make sure that we honor her the way she wanted to be on

00:12:35.440 and have her ashes brought to us and interred at odenshof cemetery so that was agreed upon

00:12:45.920 and um that's what's gonna happen but we'd appreciate all of our afa family's help in

00:12:53.120 making sure that uh one of our afa sisters gets what she wanted in uh her final resting place

00:13:02.400 here in midgard so with that said we are raising some funds to take care of her cremation

00:13:09.280 of the transport of her remains to Odenshof, and a simple urn. She will be provided a headstone

00:13:18.640 by, she's a veteran, so the Department of Defense will get her squared away with

00:13:24.340 the marker she's entitled to, and yeah, we will be able to enter her there with honor and love

00:13:34.000 it opens off so any uh that's going to run us probably 2200 is what it looks like i know that

00:13:43.020 sounds like a lot and it is but that's kind of going right we can check it out to make sure

00:13:47.660 um if we're able to negotiate any of that down we will but if not that's what we're looking to

00:13:54.300 raise you guys have already been very generous um but yeah if anybody is interested you can again

00:14:00.440 donate at runestone.org slash donate um that's here it goes i see i see the difference there but

00:14:09.800 donate will get to it and that's confusing so i didn't want to throw a different uh name

00:14:13.560 for the website at the folks um i mean is that what you were coming at it was fun i'm sorry no

00:14:21.160 i was absolutely going to let everyone know like yes the the cost of funerary um there was a brief

00:14:29.480 stint where i was attempting to go into the mortuary services i did not it's one of the

00:14:36.040 jobs i didn't do but i i did a heavy amount of research and um the uh cremation costs

00:14:45.240 though lower than burial and casket um are you know again quite expensive if and i don't think

00:14:53.880 a lot of people know it just because perhaps they haven't encountered that in their lifetime but

00:14:59.480 i i wanted to bring up one point is that living ausitru and you're not if you're not sure on where

00:15:08.760 to start holding bloat and giving gift to our heroes is one of the best ways to start and then

00:15:17.560 of course ensuring your end of life process um ensuring the legalities of it those are

00:15:29.000 two things that I think any beginning Alcintreur would want to consider doing immediately

00:15:36.660 in order to get into the community. And speaking of, Gilbert, you are awesome. We appreciate you.

00:15:46.640 Gilbert just donated $150 towards getting Melinda taken care of. So thank you.

00:15:53.120 And for me, I will say, if you could do the math and look at the amount on the thermo, I messed up on the remaining. It's a typo. It's 1860 remaining, minus the 150 thanks to Gilbert.

00:16:10.260 all right so don't don't mind nick's fake news um but no we appreciate that uh i should note

00:16:19.760 for anybody who may not know maybe just joining us that is something really special with us

00:16:26.180 having hoffs and you know sacred land of our own

00:16:29.960 we are there to do womb blessings and asa botanies which is our baby naming ceremonies

00:16:41.120 we do marriages we do funerals and we are able to uh inter the ashes of our loved ones

00:16:49.900 in uh cemetery spaces at each of our hoffs every one of our hoffs is equipped and ready for that

00:16:58.860 um and

00:17:01.440 excuse me i'm getting over some kind of cough but um odenshoff thor's off

00:17:12.260 um all right so odenshoff was our first uh opportunity to inter one of our loved ones

00:17:19.740 and we have uh three of our loved ones interred there now soon to be four when melinda makes her

00:17:28.860 there um thorshoff we're set up and ready thorshoff had a graveyard attached to it that was

00:17:38.540 separated on the sale of property and is still maintained by the former congregation that owns

00:17:43.980 that property currently but it came with um the remains of uh one of their very early members of

00:17:53.100 that congregation that passed so uh we have mr philip buffet who is buried there and we we take

00:18:00.620 care of that plot and you know as our people pass and we need to enter them there we've got spot for

00:18:08.300 them at uh baldershoff we have not yet had somebody who has wanted their uh their remains

00:18:15.820 interred there. At New York's

00:18:18.020 Hoff, we have two of our loved

00:18:19.900 ones interred there.

00:18:22.920 None so far

00:18:24.000 at Frey's Hoff, because as I mentioned, we only

00:18:25.820 dedicated it this last December.

00:18:28.220 And we have folks

00:18:29.820 interred at

00:18:31.820 Sigurheim, which will eventually be the home 0.81

00:18:33.880 of Tears Hoff. So 0.97

00:18:35.700 that is an option, and

00:18:37.580 you know, whatever

00:18:39.580 your... So this is another important

00:18:41.780 thing while I'm on it on the wills.

00:18:44.300 Do what you want.

00:18:46.300 like you can do what you like with your remains or with whatever you'd like for a funerary

00:18:53.260 situation whatever you want to do with your assets all of that we just want to make sure

00:18:59.900 that you get what you want and i've seen too many of our folk not have that will in place

00:19:06.860 and not end up getting what they wanted and we're very committed to fixing that so you know don't

00:19:12.460 think it only applies if you want an afa funeral or if you want to be interned at one of our plots

00:19:17.980 or i don't know what whatever connection with the afa on that you want or don't

00:19:25.340 as one of our folks we would love to help make sure you get what you want with the final

00:19:30.220 disposition of yourself and your assets and that literally your will gets executed so keep that in

00:19:38.460 mine um that's what i got for the top of the program um before so swan and i have spent the

00:19:50.140 last over half of a year now uh going through by the gift forgetting so this first time in a long

00:19:59.340 time we have started a new piece uh tonight we will be starting the uh scout scout about and

00:20:08.460 it basically is the language of poetry so part of it is uh expository about some of our lore

00:20:19.580 a lot of it is instructional on different poetic ways of phrasing terms of a phrase

00:20:28.860 of haiti which is our haiti which is um alternate names for stuff

00:20:38.220 kind of nicknames but with a lot more poetic meat to it um and it's important it's important

00:20:49.740 a number of ways so something that is

00:20:51.660 is really special about Iceland. Not only did it produce its favorite son, Svan Harald,

00:21:05.320 but it preserves our lore and some cultural touchstones in a very special way. Linguistics,

00:21:19.300 The art of speaking, the art of poetry has been enshrined as a national treasure in Iceland.

00:21:30.880 They have done amazing work to preserve and care for a poetic and a literary tradition

00:21:38.240 that span into the, you know, the last era of our faith and our ancestors' day and of

00:21:48.120 those traditions.

00:21:49.120 And that's one of the reasons that it's come down to us so beautifully in the sagas and

00:21:55.760 the Eddas the way that we have was because of this tradition of Icelandic preservation

00:22:01.200 of poetry.

00:22:03.680 And that is kind of the backdrop to which this is presented to us today.

00:22:09.680 Swan, I will take it from here.

00:22:13.000 What do these folks need to know before we get into the meat of it?

00:22:15.820 And before I hand off, Velozfow.org is where we're going to be reading from.

00:22:25.760 This is in the prose edda.

00:22:28.360 Feel free to follow along wherever you want to find it in whatever translation you like

00:22:32.960 whatever works best for you, but Svahn and I will be working off of the translation presented at

00:22:40.000 thelospow.org. Svahn, all yours. Yeah, I was gonna say too, I find the comparison of Rome to Greece

00:22:50.400 very much how Ausatru of modern day to Iceland. It's not that others were discounted, but that

00:22:58.320 the culmination of of philosophical knowledge in greece influenced the romans so greatly it's the

00:23:05.920 same as our folk nation our folk religion is deeply influenced by that culmination of of all

00:23:15.840 that knowledge um being the last bastion of worship we're not discounting the english or the

00:23:23.200 germanic or um even the the migration period tribes but no one can go but so far before

00:23:33.280 you end up back dropping into the language and the structure of our faith in the nordic context

00:23:41.600 and i know that that kind of um does irk some people but the truth is still the truth um

00:23:49.200 So I always find that, you know, when we see the Romans, how they lent into the Greeks, it is very much akin to the same concept.

00:24:00.420 So we're doing the Skal de Skalparsmal, which literally means poet creation edicts or speech.

00:24:15.240 So it's the creations of poetry, and this is more of a classified sense, but it is kept in a story format.

00:24:24.380 And that's because the tradition of Germanic poetry, which we can also reverse assume or presume, I guess would be the better word, that the Germanics and the Anglo-Saxons and the migration period were also filled with this, but were not really remarked or marked down because we see these consistently over and over and over again.

00:24:54.380 There are some people who try to discredit it and say that this is simply the complete construction of Snorri Stuttlarsson or Simon Durr, and the reality, they try to say, oh, you know, these Christian monks basically created.

00:25:12.480 They're attempting to devalue, but the sheer pattern recognition of the way that Germanic poetry works and the volume of it, there was, I think, very little intrusion and a lot of simply getting it down.

00:25:33.860 It was so important to Saimondur and to Snorri and to all of the students of their school of literary works.

00:25:43.600 And it was not based entirely on religion, as even then, Icelanders were not particularly Christian.

00:25:50.960 And that had always been a point of contention for the Catholic Church in Norway.

00:25:55.780 But, um, so this is the edicts of the poet and it predominantly takes place in a very interesting

00:26:06.620 setting. Uh, it is in the hall of Ayer, who is the Lord of the deep oceans. He is a yachting

00:26:19.080 and for everyone. And I've said this numerous times and I will say it over and over and over

00:26:24.260 And yes, there are many etymological sources that point towards certain deconstructive and consumptive points of the Yotin. 0.73

00:26:35.420 But the biggest thing for anybody who's new to Ausitru, when you hear the word Yotin, you should simply think ancient being.

00:26:44.020 They're not a different race of people in a sense.

00:26:49.040 No, they're an ancient being that preceded the Aesir in their construction, and it preceded their formulation, their desires.

00:27:01.020 Lord Odin, of course, comes from Jotun descent, though not of Ymir. 0.57

00:27:08.300 He comes from the Jotuns of Nibelheim, the primordial ancient beings.

00:27:13.800 and I like to dispel a lot of that confusion

00:27:17.760 because I think people try to weaponize that

00:27:19.740 in various ways

00:27:21.000 so 0.98

00:27:23.060 Ayr is the lord of the deep ocean 0.96

00:27:27.100 now this is comparative to another Aryan religion 0.98

00:27:30.820 which is the Hellenics

00:27:32.940 everyone is familiar with Neptune

00:27:35.680 or Poseidon

00:27:37.940 or Poseidon

00:27:39.380 and the Titan

00:27:43.620 like Jotun or Jotun is Oceanus, where we get the word ocean from. And in the Hellenic

00:27:54.620 cultural stories of the divine gods of the Aryan peoples, they do a kind of a replacement 0.81

00:28:05.300 and not so much through war, but through imprisonment. So there's some interesting

00:28:11.360 parallels but you know we can see cultural differences uh whereas in our faith and our

00:28:19.820 stories the cultural understanding that was passed down to us by classier and by uh king

00:28:25.620 and uh the stories from beyond uh the reckoning of of writing um ayur is an ancient being who is

00:28:37.400 brought under control of the gods of heavenly order and natural law, but he is very much

00:28:46.840 primordial. There's a reason why there are things in the ocean that have been around

00:28:52.500 since Ymir was alive, if you will. So when they bring the ocean under yoke through oath,

00:29:04.900 and it's it's a tentative piece and from that point though there is a the the setting is the

00:29:13.980 mead hall in the ocean uh the cauldron there of course being a the the great symbol of the center

00:29:22.280 of the ocean that that kind of anchoring point that the gods bring into the ocean and place

00:29:28.780 their dominion. And there the gods go and they feast with Aegir. It's spelled A-E-G-I-R. You'll

00:29:40.960 often hear people say Aegir. But Aegir is the lord of the deep ocean and he is comparative to

00:29:50.080 the Hellenic Oceanus. Now, Bragi is the lord of poetry, music, and meter, numeric meter. And I

00:30:03.480 often try to encourage people to think of Lord Bragi as even going into mathematics and musical

00:30:11.420 compositions um in in a numeric sense so we have the lord of poetry speaking to the host in the deep

00:30:23.260 ocean and this kind of is the idea that there is a yachting who is now brought into alignment with

00:30:33.500 the gods through oath. And he's learning about the way of the Aesir, the way of the gods that

00:30:43.240 are the Aesir and the Vanir who become one. And so he's new to all of this and this exchange,

00:30:51.300 but he has ancient knowledge as well. So for everyone here to think about the setting is

00:30:58.700 the mead hall and the host is engaging with the scald the scald of scalds uh the scald of the

00:31:07.220 gods um and what ends up happening is as al-sergothi said haiti haiti is your station um but it can

00:31:18.100 also mean your your pseudonyms um the things you have gained by action that you know calling lord

00:31:26.960 Odin, the valfather, the chooser of the slain or the chooser of those who are elevated,

00:31:37.500 is because that's what he does. It's from his deeds. So we will be going over a lot of

00:31:45.560 different Haiti. And I think also too, it's worth noting that this will also explain why I've spoken

00:31:52.100 about cosmology being different for our ancestors than it is for us today but yet how they are

00:31:59.460 completely integrated so um scald scalpers mall section one

00:32:12.100 Ayr seeks out the home of the Aysir.

00:32:20.780 A certain man was named Ayr, or Hler.

00:32:25.400 He dwelt on the island, which is now known as Hler's Isle, and was deeply versed in black magic.

00:32:34.660 So right out the gate, it's worth noting that this is a euhemerization.

00:32:39.900 This is based off of the Greek philosopher Euhemaris, who believed that the stories of the gods of old were humans.

00:32:51.820 I think that this was done to minimize, but also correlate since the new religion that was coming in was based off of a mortal living in the Levant and was based around mortal people who were subjected to Rome, etc.

00:33:10.840 So there needed to be kind of this wrangling down.

00:33:15.840 When you hear things like this, though, the biggest point I would say for everyone is the black magic part is referencing to a wildness and a danger that is present.

00:33:33.440 The Jotuns are always seen in that sense, and he is brought into the knowledge of the gods, but it's with an air of warning, even though this is euhemorized into more mortal frameworks. 0.96

00:33:54.500 So, he is deeply versed in black magic. 0.97

00:33:58.460 He took his way to Ausgard.

00:34:01.020 Oh, excuse me.

00:34:01.680 Yes. And, uh, the, uh, mentioning of the hall in the ocean, I got it reversed and bear in mind

00:34:08.640 that happens all the time. I, uh, I, I know a lot, but I don't know everything. And so sometimes I

00:34:16.620 get things mixed up. Um, so he makes his way to Ausgarth, but the Isir had foreknowledge of his 0.98

00:34:26.080 journey, and he was received with good cheer, and yet many things were done by deceit, with eye 0.66

00:34:35.700 illusions. And at evening, when it was time for drinking, Odin had swords brought into the hall,

00:34:42.540 so bright that light radiated from them, and other illuminations was not used while they sat

00:34:51.620 at drinking. A couple of other things. This is another layer of the euhemerization is not only

00:34:59.340 were the powerful gods of cosmic nature really just humans, but they were humans of deceit.

00:35:09.860 They were humans that had magical powers that tricked people into believing that they were

00:35:19.380 gods. And that is, again, another reemphasization of the euhemeristic practice of trying to make

00:35:26.680 the gods human. And by this time, too, as this is being written and read, the faith in the gods

00:35:38.160 had diminished greatly. So they were kind of driving home and didn't want any sense of the

00:35:48.240 God's being placed back in the consciousness of the folk at the level that they were.

00:35:55.000 So he brings swords into the hall and they are so bright that there is no other illumination. 0.98

00:36:02.320 We do this often during our sumble with candles and we turn off all artificial light.

00:36:10.600 So they're, in essence, having a sambal, or they're having a festival, a drinking session.

00:36:20.220 Then the Aesir came into their banquet, and in the high seats sat them down, those 12 Aesir, who were appointed to be judges.

00:36:31.860 These were their names, Þór, Njörður, Frér, Týr, Haimdottlur, Dragi, Výðar, Váli, Útlur, Hjónur, Fórseti, and Lóki.

00:36:52.900 And in like that manner, the Ausenir, Frick, Freya, Kevion, Idun, Gerdur, Sikion, Fudla, Nanna.

00:37:10.260 It seemed glorious to Ayer to look about him in this hall.

00:37:15.660 The wainscoting there were all hung with fair shields.

00:37:21.120 There was also stinging mead, copiously quaffed.

00:37:27.740 The man seated next to Ayr was Bragi, and they took part together in drinking and converse.

00:37:36.420 Bragi told Ayr of many things which had come to pass amongst the Aesir.

00:37:42.700 So, one, it's a very beautiful setting of what I think many Ausatruer who have been to Sambal would immediately recognize.

00:37:54.380 The other point is that the 12 that are mentioned here are not a copy of the 12 mentioned in the Gilvagining, but that it is worth noting that the ultimate indicator of the Aesir unto themselves is their judgment seats at the well.

00:38:18.540 and in this time this is before the kin slaying that is committed by loki um so it just kind of

00:38:28.440 gives you more of a time reference in a way um but i don't think that people should get caught

00:38:34.960 up on oh it's not following the exact no the this is the the case for the the the party in a way you

00:38:42.580 could look at it as not everyone was able to be there or you know and there is other people there

00:38:48.040 that perhaps, you know, were destined to fall out of grace from the gods, but at this moment,

00:38:56.300 they're there. So, this is Bragi, and he begins to speak. He speaks of a story. Now, why is this

00:39:07.500 being done? It's because the ultimate purpose of this whole corpus of lore is to teach about

00:39:16.500 poems and poetic structure to new poets. We spoke about that during the Snorri Stutlarsson

00:39:26.200 episode, where Snorri was, in essence, angling for the return of the skald in Norwegian

00:39:36.720 courts. And he was angling that there would be a time in which Icelanders would be a fixture in a

00:39:49.520 court in the Nordic lands, and they should know all of the ancient stories of their ancestors.

00:39:58.240 And I think the reason why a lot of this didn't come to pass, other than the politics of the age,

00:40:04.040 was also to the threat that this yearning towards pre-Christian ancestry posed to the church

00:40:17.980 and to the political systems at the time.

00:40:21.300 Before we go forward, because we're at kind of a break,

00:40:25.860 Ronald Blake, thank you very much.

00:40:28.220 He donated $100 towards taking care of Melinda.

00:40:33.620 we appreciate that very much thank you for that um we'll get back to it i think we're going to read

00:40:42.020 uh this next chunk about uh fiazi uh carried off idun and then we will hit some of the questions

00:40:55.300 that we've got stacking and we'll kind of do that a little bit throughout the program so

00:40:59.140 So if you've asked a question, know that we will get to it.

00:41:03.340 It just, you know, if they're immediately relevant to the text, we kind of hit them right then.

00:41:09.460 And if not, we try to break, you know, top of the hour-ish to clear some questions before we proceed.

00:41:17.000 So with that, carry on.

00:41:19.240 And these stories are also elsewhere in the lore.

00:41:23.320 These are highly condensed versions with the purpose of being given to the skull.

00:41:29.140 So bear that in mind as well, folks. And, you know, if any of these interest you, I encourage you to go and read the full poems.

00:41:37.940 So the giant Thiazi carried off Idun.

00:41:44.260 He began the story at the point where three of the Aesir, Odin and Loki and Hyonur, departed from home and were wandering over the mountains and the wastes. 0.96

00:41:58.800 And food was hard to find.

00:42:01.300 But when they came down to a certain dale, they saw a herd of oxen.

00:42:06.940 They took one ox and set about cooking it.

00:42:10.980 Now, when they thought it must be cooked, they broke up the fire, and it was not cooked.

00:42:18.760 After a while had passed, they having scattered the fire a second time, it still was not cooked.

00:42:26.940 Then they took counsel together, asking each other what it might mean.

00:42:31.940 When they heard a voice speaking in the oak tree up above them, declaring that he who sat there confessed he had caused the lack of virtue in the fire.

00:42:46.920 So through magic, a Jotun is in the form of an eagle, and he says that the reason why the meat is not cooking is because of him, presumably because he has control, and that the gods are in Jotunheim at this time.

00:43:05.760 And this kind of goes along with the cosmology of our ancestors, seeing the gods on Himenpjarkar, on the mountains of heaven, and they walk down and they pass over rivers, and they either go into the land of men or they go into the land of the ancient ones, the Jotans. 0.95

00:43:27.620 And so, in this case, that is. And this is, of course, another interesting point is the traveling of Lord Odin and Loki. But we see this happen throughout our story. So, there's these pairings. And there is significance, but we'll go with the story as it is.

00:43:50.120 We'll also take a moment to thank Stephen in Japan for his donation of $15 towards helping take care of Melinda.

00:43:59.700 Thank you for that, Stephen. We always appreciate your donations on the program. Carry on.

00:44:07.220 So he said that he was the one blocking the virtue of the fire and stemming its energy away from this meat.

00:44:17.240 Then the eagle said, If ye are willing to give me my fill of the ox, then it will cook in the fire.

00:44:28.400 They assented to this.

00:44:30.500 Then he let himself float down from the tree, and immediately the fire was alighted.

00:44:38.000 and forthwith that the very first took unto himself the two hams of the of the ox the two

00:44:45.520 great legs and both shoulders this angered loki loki snatched up a pole brandished it with all

00:44:56.080 his strength and drove it at the eagle's body the eagle plunged violently at the blow and then

00:45:02.520 immediately took to flight so that the pole was fast to the eagle's body and Loki's hand fast to

00:45:10.480 the other end of the pole. So he's stuck now. Again, magic. He's unable to remove the stick

00:45:19.040 from the eagle's body and his hands are held fast. The eagle then flew with such a height

00:45:27.000 that Loki's feet down below

00:45:29.680 knocked against the stones

00:45:32.000 and the rock heaps and the trees

00:45:33.880 and he thought his arms

00:45:35.580 were going to be torn from the shoulders

00:45:37.580 as he's drug over the heath in Jotunheim.

00:45:41.200 The eagle flew.

00:45:43.760 He cried aloud.

00:45:46.460 He entreated the eagle urgently for peace

00:45:49.360 but the eagle declared

00:45:50.780 that Loki should never be loosed

00:45:52.660 unless he would give him his oath

00:45:54.840 to induce Idunn to come out of Ausgarth with her apples.

00:46:01.520 Loki assented and being straight away,

00:46:04.660 Lucind went to his companions,

00:46:07.740 nor for that time are any more things reported

00:46:11.460 concerning this journey until they had come home.

00:46:16.040 So now we set the motive and the plot of,

00:46:21.580 or the instigation of the entire story.

00:46:24.840 As he is drug across the heaths, he can't be let go.

00:46:30.020 And the true goal of the eagle, Jotun, is to find the very heart of the gods, the very source of their life and continuance, and have her be lulled out of heaven so that he may take her.

00:46:53.700 So, when he returns, that deed or that deal is not mentioned, and he has to carry that with him until they get back.

00:47:04.520 So, at the appointed time, Loki then lured Idun out of Ausgard into a certain wood, saying that he had found such apples that would seem to her a great virtue, and prayed that she would have her apples with her.

00:47:22.880 and compare them with these.

00:47:26.200 Then Fiazzi, the giant, came there in eagle's plumage

00:47:30.640 and descended upon Ethan and flew away with her,

00:47:34.840 off to Threemheimr, to his abode.

00:47:39.760 So, obviously we have the legend

00:47:45.840 and the body of the story being built

00:47:49.960 in a format that is very akin to most European stories, slightly euhemorized and easily

00:48:00.660 attached into the audience's mind. This is, so much is going on that can simply be understood.

00:48:12.200 Now, is there more in a cosmic level? Is there the sense that, of course, Edun is the bearer of the golden apples? There is always the linchpin of all of the gods of the Aryan faiths having a sustenance that they eat from, like humans eat food from the land around them.

00:48:37.080 the holy gods do take in and it is gold or and light it is the apples um and a lot of folks don't

00:48:46.180 realize uh like when they hear the name even they immediately think that there might be some

00:48:51.640 connection with eden in the bible um but there are no apples ever mentioned in the bible it's

00:48:58.760 it's mentioned as a fruit and it was probably a pomegranate considering the locale being um

00:49:06.700 babylon or iraq as kind of the the backdrop of the story um but even those stories take

00:49:15.560 on these kind of mythical times if you will and so now we have the setup that he is taking

00:49:26.380 the heart of

00:49:29.840 the gods into

00:49:31.580 Threemheim.

00:49:36.320 And then we move to section three.

00:49:37.960 Do you want me to press on?

00:49:44.300 Negative. I want to get to some of these questions.

00:49:46.300 We've got a few and I'd like to go ahead and knock them out.

00:49:48.400 So, from Caleb, does it make a significant difference to donate smaller amounts more

00:50:01.300 consistently or larger amounts yearly if the total sum is the same?

00:50:07.580 Does the answer change if the total sum is greater for the yearly amount?

00:50:12.220 um so to the first question

00:50:18.580 no as far as

00:50:23.700 general the the only so the caveat is this if it is a timely thing like melinda's um

00:50:36.300 dealing with her remains and getting her interred at the off there's a time frame on that there's

00:50:43.680 a certain amount of time to uh pay the the crematory services to get possession of her

00:50:51.820 remains and to inter them hopefully that is in a few months so something yearly on a um something

00:50:58.920 that's going to be resolved in the short term may miss that opportunity as far as general donations

00:51:04.940 to the Ask True Folk Assembly, no, it doesn't matter if all things being equal. It doesn't

00:51:10.860 matter if that's done monthly, yearly, quarterly. We even have now some people who do that weekly.

00:51:19.260 So any of that doesn't matter. It's kind of whatever you would like to do.

00:51:25.520 To your second question, though, you could only give once a year, but that total be greater

00:51:33.580 than doing 12 monthly things then the higher total is always going to be the best

00:51:40.060 we are financially solvent enough to where one donation or one person's donations aren't going to

00:51:48.140 um make the difference in solvency so whatever would be the greatest amount total um would be

00:51:56.380 the the best uh the best way of or i guess the most

00:52:03.580 sorry i'm tripping over my words way more than i should be on this

00:52:06.620 yeah more money is better than less money over whatever the time period is

00:52:12.780 but thank you for asking that and thank you for you know considering donations to us we appreciate

00:52:18.780 that quite a bit. Vanaheim Vibes, are you allowed on base to serve spiritual services to our

00:52:31.020 soldiers? It's been a long time. I would assume the answer is yes. The only point of reference

00:52:37.960 that I have was I was allowed at the Miramar National Cemetery on the installation in San

00:52:47.820 Diego to do a funeral there a number of years ago now but um I had the honor of doing that and that

00:52:56.820 went off with no problem so I assume that is still the case. Svon have you ever um had to get on an

00:53:04.380 installation to do uh any spiritual services? I have been talking to a gentleman out in the on

00:53:11.980 west coast technically um though he's currently on deployment and he was asking and is pushing

00:53:21.340 for the same things but what what i think the clarity of the question would be is that

00:53:27.820 there are no chaplains but chaplains are obligated to ensure that the troops have religious

00:53:36.940 um consolidation and considerations so uh there are a couple things you could do one of course

00:53:46.060 is reach out to your local folk builder and um the other is uh you could speak to your chaplain if

00:53:55.340 you are in the military the the other point is is that unfortunately because of the the transient

00:54:03.100 nature of the military, that people move in and out so swiftly that one of the things that could

00:54:10.000 be done is, you know, lay members could create points of contact, much like as if they were to

00:54:18.280 create a kindred, where folks that are Ausitru and are folkish can come together and give honor

00:54:28.320 to the gods and then organize from there uh the idea of like building the local group that reaches

00:54:35.760 out to the folk builder and works with the chaplain but it is still very very um

00:54:44.400 adaptive because the situation is so spread out um i think that this is a huge advancement though

00:54:54.160 we know that Ausatru is recognized but there takes some organizational points on the folk

00:55:03.280 at the bases and in the individual branches because there's no no chaplain corps that's

00:55:11.040 dedicated to Ausatru there are many chaplains who are familiar with Ausatru and if getting

00:55:18.960 them to reach out to us or getting a folk builder to have the ability or or a go there or give you

00:55:25.200 that's nearby to uh work in that area is absolutely possible but the infrastructure 0.66

00:55:32.080 isn't set there from the military side at all all right so next question is black magic like voodoo

00:55:43.360 haha i see what you did there um but is there any more that you would like to say

00:55:52.000 to what's referred to in the start of the text as black magic what kind of what sort of arts

00:55:59.040 are included in this definition of black magic so uh the the usage of the word black isn't even

00:56:07.360 there um black magic and its connotations as kind of nefarious magic but the magic

00:56:14.880 that is being referred to is is is ill or malicious magic um and i think that that had

00:56:26.000 far more connotations in the later nordic period where christianity was

00:56:33.520 was becoming far more prevalent is that magic, all magic, anything that wasn't, you know,

00:56:42.940 ordained by the church was considered malicious, evil, or, you know, able to open up some sort of 0.75

00:56:53.620 kind of chink in the armor of the sovereignty of Christianity. And it still holds today. You see 0.98

00:57:06.460 many of them acting like this online. And we even see it in some of the kind of internet circles

00:57:14.500 that discuss our religion. And they try to classify magic that is, say, from a gender

00:57:23.380 as being specifically bad or or what have you but the reality is the uh masculine and feminine

00:57:31.980 in our lore have all been connected to magic of healing magic of wisdom and also magic of malice

00:57:42.220 and sometimes uh of of all three but it's just the fact that he's well versed is the part that

00:57:51.340 is really important there he's well versed in magic with malicious intent which

00:57:58.540 builds the air of danger clearly there he's he's up to no good

00:58:04.380 yeah um just a little look at it the word they actually use um

00:58:09.340 um fuel coming which is a combination of fuel which is uh many much or great and

00:58:20.920 uh meaning knowing learned acquainted with um and the combination word means like

00:58:30.640 knowledgeable about sorcery um so yeah that would be anybody who is

00:58:38.640 so and

00:58:43.880 it's funny because it's an issue of terminology um because i the uh the christians of the time they

00:58:55.380 would believe there's they would not refer to it as good magic but there's magic that the priests

00:59:04.920 do and then there's you know the black magic that either refers to other religious traditions or to

00:59:15.360 you know spooky witchcraft so it could be any of those things

00:59:19.800 um so another question is there a re-emergence of aussitru in modern-day iceland that is a

00:59:34.680 complex question so there was in parallel with ours until into the 90s um the aussitruer feleget

00:59:48.840 is, was founded as a very legitimate Ousatru institution there. And a number of our heroes

00:59:59.480 were involved in that founding. It lost its way when it ousted one of the last of the original

01:00:09.420 founding founding gothar and uh installed a professed atheist into their position of leadership

01:00:22.380 and as an organization they don't take it too seriously it's about stories and heritage and

01:00:33.480 archetypical kind of understanding but their uh their uh alas herriagothi their hillmar

01:00:43.240 has openly said that they don't really believe in the gods and i say that i their founders

01:00:49.960 certainly did and i believe probably quite a few of their members do

01:00:54.600 that is the option that presents itself to alsatur in iceland so i assume that

01:01:03.880 sincere pious alsatruar find their way into that organization but as an organization it's

01:01:11.720 become much more about you know wokeism and gay marriage than it is about the gods or about

01:01:19.000 but again it is supported by the taxes in iceland so it is kind of institutionalized there in a way

01:01:27.240 and I'm not sure about the internal politics

01:01:31.440 or if there's, you know, a group involved

01:01:34.660 or a, you know, coalition of practitioners there

01:01:39.220 that are devout out of shore or not.

01:01:41.620 I'm certain there are some in Iceland.

01:01:44.460 But yeah, it's a complex question

01:01:46.260 because it is, technically it is the fastest growing religion

01:01:51.560 but what that means is there's a church tax there

01:01:56.680 so a portion of your tax money will go to a church regardless so if you don't want it to

01:02:04.080 go to the lutheran church then having it go to this silly viking thing keeps the money away from

01:02:10.940 the christians and that explains a lot of its growth but like i said i i believe there are

01:02:19.220 probably there are probably many devout assature there so i would want to um take that from the

01:02:26.020 island of Svon's birth

01:02:28.600 but

01:02:29.580 yeah some

01:02:32.000 that

01:02:32.680 chew the rotten shark

01:02:35.680 do worship the gods

01:02:37.520 I would love for those folks to find the 1.00

01:02:39.880 Astru Folk Assembly

01:02:40.680 and hopefully they will at some point 1.00

01:02:43.200 it's fine do you have more to

01:02:45.100 add for your countrymen

01:02:48.160 and their

01:02:48.760 current situation in

01:02:53.720 regards to Astru

01:02:54.780 yeah i would i would encourage any uh icelander who um is aware of the sacredness of what it means

01:03:06.860 to be icelandic in iceland um and and please folks bear in mind too and we joke about it but uh i am

01:03:14.780 i i'm very much american i you know my family calls me the american uncle um the ameriki and um

01:03:24.780 But, you know, I would encourage folks in Scandinavia who are definitely working in a different environment where there can be a lot of pressure.

01:03:38.060 But, you know, you are free to do these things and you can gather and gather other folks and actually honor the gods.

01:03:48.820 um because as you said elsewhere go the a lot of the folks that are doing this are kind of doing

01:03:54.340 this in this larping uh framework and that only hurts us in the long run as we often will be

01:04:03.780 associated with those people but those those people uh you know practicing some uh during

01:04:11.620 in a magic form or it's just a kind of traipsing through tradition um and it really started i

01:04:22.260 noticed when um i spoke to uh jorman gringy or uh jorman der ingy uh who was the uh leader of their

01:04:34.900 um last legitimate i was here to go with you of the ostrich right uh and he spoke about

01:04:44.420 the fact that they were going to put a fee thought or a um a four-armed or four-footed

01:04:51.060 which is a uh swastika a very sacred symbol throughout all

01:04:56.500 of the european peoples not just the nords not just the germanics and um they ended up

01:05:03.940 getting shut down by the local government because of it they were going to put a large stone

01:05:11.680 fee fought on the side of the hill and that was kind of my first indication of of what they were

01:05:20.680 up against and again they didn't seem to have the gumption of fighting and then over time i think a

01:05:32.960 lot of the modernist pagan uh kind of swooping underneath or not taking a stand or or just

01:05:43.820 outright admitting that they're they're only doing this as some sort of um uh hobby and i think

01:05:52.080 there's a lot of iceland there's a lot of scandinavians who who think that uh if you know

01:05:56.600 if you are religious that you are somehow less intelligent um and unfortunately a lot of

01:06:04.600 scandinavians have this sense of being they don't want to come off as being uh ignorant or according 0.74

01:06:14.200 to whatever classification of intelligence they have and that includes just yeah we're doing this

01:06:19.000 for the hobby we're doing it for the culture but i mean in reality you know we're we're just normal

01:06:25.580 folks like anybody else who's smart and intelligent and they just kind of like reconfirm

01:06:33.020 their own biases um and it it's sad to see um i would encourage any icelanders out there

01:06:42.800 you may have one or two of you but get together um and hold bloat and join the

01:06:53.560 true folk assembly and then make yourself known and uh know now in these times as as uh expression

01:07:02.540 of religion and expression of speech are so important um that you know you it's incumbent

01:07:11.140 upon our folk to to step out there and start representing um our heritage and our gods but

01:07:18.760 right now the the organized version is led and permeated with not that

01:07:27.560 so you know how you you know how you tell how not American somebody is

01:07:34.100 is when they tell you that their family has to call them the American

01:07:37.780 my family's never called me the American

01:07:40.640 it was because of the guns

01:07:46.160 there you go no uh so i i tease but it's really cool that we have somebody on the show that does

01:07:56.800 have uh you know half of this family being from iceland that does have that touchstone and that

01:08:03.800 point of reference um yeah so it's a mixed bag if we have any audience in iceland that would be

01:08:12.860 awesome i hope you guys enjoy the program it'd be great to join up i know there's a lot of you guys

01:08:20.460 whatever you guys do it'd be great if you guys had something over there that was overtly religious

01:08:25.660 and uh i i want that for y'all and i certainly want that for our gods um

01:08:33.820 Um, other stuff in the meantime, Leroy donated $20 towards, uh, Melinda and we appreciate that Leroy

01:08:43.980 and Tabitha in Missouri donated a hundred dollars towards taking care of Melinda. Thank you for

01:08:49.660 that Tabitha and also $50 towards, uh, the steeple at Baldur's Hall. So thank you. We appreciate you

01:08:57.280 guys um other questions and things one i skipped over because i wanted your uh when you took your

01:09:05.200 hiatus there for 30 seconds um the soft g you find that in swedish and elf balian uh right

01:09:15.600 uh so one of the things about that is in modern icelandic and it's and the soft g in usage in

01:09:29.460 modern nordic languages is very prevalent however we don't fully know about old norse people are

01:09:38.080 still guessing about a lot of the structure so you'll hear some of the you know again i'm not

01:09:45.520 a linguist but so i'm i'm kind of defaulting um and you know knowing personally because i have

01:09:54.080 an uncle whose name uh was ayur um so that soft g was already kind of introduced to me at a young

01:10:03.840 age but it may very well have been um and we don't know if it's or if it's i gear with a

01:10:11.760 softer g or a kind of a sharper g we don't fully know and that's the unfortunate thing with a lot

01:10:18.480 of these um elder languages um the the morphology of of certain letters together may also be very

01:10:31.360 different than the way we use them today it depends where it's at too you've also you know

01:10:37.120 in your family have a ragnar yeah and that's the g is a case yeah and it's a very hard g

01:10:49.120 ragnar for anybody that yeah yeah it doesn't even sound like ragnar but

01:10:54.560 But it could have, in the Old Norse, been Ragnar or Ragnar.

01:11:02.680 I don't know.

01:11:05.520 Well, it's funny because we get tied up in a very small noise difference.

01:11:14.160 It may have been both.

01:11:16.220 It may have been all three of those things.

01:11:22.360 If you're in Reykjavik or Oslofjord or, you know, Ladby, you know, at the same time, the same language, our pronunciation here in Tennessee, where Svon is in Virginia, where, you know, our folk builder Ron is up in New Hampshire are real different.

01:11:48.520 and it's clearly the same language and i think that in a time where people are further

01:11:54.600 distance was a much further issue i think there's probably plenty of dialects

01:12:00.360 or accents um i mean it's true yeah given the filipino islands every uh landing spot on the

01:12:10.360 islands has a different version of the same language that is tagalog you know and looking

01:12:16.840 at germany and looking at many places in europe that was the case based solely on going over a

01:12:23.720 mountain um so and this is something we go over a lot but it clearly needs to be continued to go

01:12:34.280 over a lot and that's fine um i appreciate that we've got you know we have new people that listen

01:12:41.800 to the show all of the time and it's always good for us to remember that so are the norse

01:12:46.680 and slavic gods the same beings or actually different gods uh perun and thor uh have a lot

01:12:54.840 of similarities um and this follows on with um the follow or the next question by a different

01:13:02.920 questioner but still how does the afa even rationalize other gods from other peoples

01:13:08.200 are they considered the same or are they different and sovereign like hard polytheism and stuff so

01:13:15.400 hard polytheism absolutely when we compare caucasoid gods versus mongoloid gods and negroid

01:13:26.040 gods then sure they're completely different beings with completely different sovereignty 0.75

01:13:34.200 and dominion and agency in their own things um when we compare white people gods 0.87

01:13:45.240 they are so

01:13:50.440 it is very confusing to take the last

01:13:55.480 breath of them before christianization and compare them at that stage to compare them at

01:14:05.760 the medieval period becomes very messy it is much less messy when you walk that back through the

01:14:17.380 epochs of time. We did a whole show to illustrate this a week ago with folk builder Chris Savage

01:14:27.000 to illustrate a couple of things. But one of the things it illustrates is we are a people.

01:14:33.100 We are not a coalition of peoples. We are one nation of people being from the same belly button.

01:14:47.380 um we come from one group of people that was at one point united there was us and the iser

01:14:54.940 they were with us at the very dawn of our race that predates the word iser it predates

01:15:04.100 the concept of uh norse or slav it predates all of that

01:15:13.800 but our gods were there because they created us.

01:15:19.440 They shaped us.

01:15:20.660 They formed who we are,

01:15:22.820 and they raised us up to achieve our potential.

01:15:31.140 They've been with us since the beginning.

01:15:33.920 As language and geography influenced our understandings

01:15:41.040 and as our ancestors moved apart and some settled in one valley and some kept moving

01:15:47.600 and some moved by the coast and some moved up in the north and some were inland in the forest

01:15:55.760 the names of their gods changed the stories of their gods evolved and took the shape of things

01:16:05.120 in their environment and things in their experience their relationship with the gods

01:16:11.120 continued and evolved because they weren't taking a stagnant story they were told

01:16:16.240 on the caspian step with them they have a living relationship with their gods so

01:16:25.200 as they're separated by centuries and by you know hundreds of miles and thousands of miles in

01:16:31.600 different valleys and areas you have a deviating group of names and stories that are very similar

01:16:45.920 identical in some places further apart in different places that's mixed even further

01:16:52.240 when you get into areas where there's uh intermixture with other kinds of folks

01:16:59.440 like i think does happen in the mediterranean but you know the helens and the germanics and

01:17:06.640 the celts and the slavs were eventually just the arians and these are our gods so

01:17:16.720 yes they are the same beings some of them you can easily match one for one other places they

01:17:24.880 associate different things different stories with different names for their gods but yes

01:17:32.080 these are the same gods and logic logic makes that clear if you start at the beginning

01:17:37.760 it makes it trickier if you start at the end and try to work the way back um

01:17:43.920 i think george clinton would say that um

01:17:54.880 where were we at it's funny we've gotten a couple things pop up on the screen with comments

01:18:06.420 and i haven't seen that before this broadcast but it's cool and i've seen two things pop up like

01:18:12.100 that it's always been possible i just don't do it unless they're real real funny and tonight they

01:18:17.380 got some humor to them all right well that that entertains me feel free to do that from time to

01:18:23.540 time there was a question kind of connected to the other two questions before in relation to

01:18:30.740 the uhemarization that i spoke of i believe it was uh isaac 1ts

01:18:39.780 uh did the christian priests memorize all european gods

01:18:44.660 roman celts norse germanic or just the germanic deities

01:18:56.500 i mean i always figured you would take that first i didn't know if you wanted to pass it

01:19:00.180 it off to me. No, I hogged the last couple. Well, so the euhemerization, first off, the entirety

01:19:10.160 of the Gaelic versus the Gallic faith is euhemerized. The tripartite of the Dagda,

01:19:20.600 Lu, and King Nuwada are all seen as chieftains, tribal leaders, and traveling druids, magicians, 0.56

01:19:32.040 but you hemorrhized completely. And that's because they did stay in the Irish people's 1.00

01:19:40.660 purview, even long after Christianity. Much like in Iceland, these two islands 0.94

01:19:47.780 uh had the faith persist beyond conversion um but yes we see it everywhere and uh one of the

01:19:58.880 more egregious ones i see too is uh obviously uh saint bridget and the uh irish uh gaelic

01:20:08.280 goddess bridged uh bridget um is i you know just recently they um i guess

01:20:17.780 gave sainthood, or not just recently, but I just recently read it, that they gave sainthood to

01:20:25.280 Widukind, who was a folk hero, much like a Robin Hood character, who stood in opposition to Charles

01:20:36.020 or Carl the Great, Charlemagne. And after he was then brought into sainthood, even though obviously

01:20:45.280 his conversion is very uh you know it's what we have written is that he converted to christianity

01:20:52.640 but it's like saying you know it's like all we have left is the anti-whittacan propaganda but

01:20:59.200 what i ultimately am getting at though is that like he might have been more of a legendary

01:21:05.200 culmination of people but they they made him a saint because they needed to which i think lends

01:21:12.640 to a mark on them that there were consistent movements where they were making saints

01:21:23.160 totally for operational purposes. And the reason why they did this versus other places

01:21:34.480 is because most of these Christians were completely converted Gentiles.

01:21:42.040 They were folk.

01:21:43.140 And they were sanctifying these both gods and people or legendary people

01:21:52.120 because they were trying to change their fellow countrymen.

01:21:58.680 It's more subtle, but also more nefarious in this way.

01:22:04.480 There were other places where Christianity has spread where, you know, this is of the pagan religion of before and we don't take this.

01:22:15.300 But when it was the Europeans amongst the Europeans, Christianity took a much more all-encompassing fluid sense, and they absorbed many of the Greek, the Roman, and the Germanic gods.

01:22:36.860 And a lot of people don't realize the Slavic religion was deeply euhemorized, but then most of what people read and study now is actually a deconstruction of that euhemorization.

01:22:52.160 But it was, I think, even far worse than for the Irish. 0.96

01:22:57.200 So, yes, it was all over all the folk. 0.91

01:23:00.180 And that's predominantly because the Christians that were pushing their religion amongst the folk, they were of the folk.

01:23:08.720 They were not of a different people.

01:23:10.480 They had been converted.

01:23:12.360 Saul of Tarsus, who is an ethnic Jew who comes into Greece and he comes back from the fishing trip, says he sees Jesus on the water. 0.60

01:23:22.960 And Jesus says, hey, go be a fisher of men. 0.68

01:23:26.200 Go convert the Gentiles. 0.94

01:23:27.860 From that moment on, there was a new point of instead of trying to convert the Levant and convince them that the rabbi Yeshua is the Mashiach, no, we're going to go into the Greeks and the Romans. 0.98

01:23:46.000 And that's why you get the Last Supper looking like a Bacchanalia. 0.77

01:23:50.360 That's why you have the Rabbi Yeshua being born in a manger in relation to Bacchus is because at that time they were trying to convert the Greeks. 0.75

01:24:00.520 And then just every step they took forward, they didn't want to use the underworld or the punishment Gehenna in the Aramaic. 0.56

01:24:10.720 So they said Hades. And then by the time it got to the Germanic lands, they used hell and took her name as convenient for their placement.

01:24:23.360 we see it the morphology of it changing everywhere and if you go further further back you just have 0.80

01:24:30.300 to dig under the surface but a little bit and you realize that christianity is very semitic

01:24:36.440 very foreign not of european root and um it pains me that a lot of people don't see that

01:24:44.860 and again it's not i'm not weaponizing this in some way it it is clearly case it's the truth

01:24:55.180 and right as uh as as those hebrews would say the truth shall set you free um

01:25:06.060 so ron boardman donated 150 to uh help take care of melinda we appreciate that

01:25:13.020 and with the message attached jill an apprentice folk builder down in pennsylvania was into england

01:25:19.740 and generously treated a number of us to dinner the other night she accepted a return gift in the

01:25:25.660 form of a donation to the austral folk assembly here is that gift for a gift what we do on midgard

01:25:32.220 echoes through eternity and let those beyond the veil not think we've forgotten them we haven't

01:25:38.220 please accept this in the name of goodwill and frith between the afa members memory of melinda

01:25:46.220 and thank you ron and thank you jill for your initial generous gesture on that ron and jill

01:25:55.020 are both folk builders ron being up in new hampshire jill in pennsylvania and they are both

01:26:01.420 doing a fantastic job for us much appreciated guys uh next up hey matt could you talk about

01:26:08.780 the hierarchy of the afa a bit like explaining folk builders and other titles in the afa

01:26:16.460 absolutely so um

01:26:20.460 um all right folk builders are kind of the basic titled volunteer position in the afa

01:26:34.460 now we've got folks that can volunteer and do volunteer for a lot of different things and we

01:26:39.420 always really appreciate that folk builders in particular serve as the local representatives

01:26:47.260 of the afa they work towards recruitment of members but also towards maintaining and taking

01:26:58.780 care of the members that we have connecting them with the bigger afa hosting local events

01:27:06.220 helping support the needs of the gothar and the membership

01:27:11.820 um they take care of a lot of the back-end administrative work as well within the afa

01:27:19.020 and they're basically the local afa representative

01:27:31.340 a misconception that i think people have is they i don't think they think about it's not making fun

01:27:38.860 but i think people assume there's you know magical genie that makes afa stuff happen near them

01:27:45.500 the magical genie is these folk builders be starting out as members looking around saying

01:27:51.660 hey i think i could help build this area i think i could help make what we do successful

01:27:58.540 they volunteer they apprentice under um an oath to folk builder and they um

01:28:08.380 learn how to do that and any place that we have successful afa afa activity started out by

01:28:16.620 a folk builder a member such a member stepping up and saying hey i'd like to fulfill

01:28:22.300 and starting hosting things and starting the, you know, sometimes easy, sometimes difficult

01:28:30.560 process of gaining momentum and getting something going near them. So that's the folk builders.

01:28:38.540 Above them are our gothar, gothi and githia, gothi meaning priest, githia meaning priestess. 0.85

01:28:48.600 they are our clergy they have to do or at least be able to do all the things that folk builders do

01:28:57.400 but they tend to the spiritual needs of our folk and help run the afa they the bulk of

01:29:05.960 they're like an iceberg what you see on the top is they host ritual

01:29:10.360 and do that sort of thing they um sometimes lead discussions on spiritual matters they

01:29:19.780 they do that and that's important and we need that but the bulk of what they do

01:29:24.700 um most of us don't see the bulk of what they do is counseling and tending to the spiritual

01:29:31.280 needs of our membership and that is a lot of helping people deal with the challenges in their

01:29:38.240 life, be it career, be it family, be it personal things, be it dealing with trauma, but our

01:29:47.200 go-thar help our people spiritually and take a very deep commitment to make the AFA a fundamental

01:29:55.500 part of their life and their existence, and their ordination transforms them into something

01:30:01.620 that is set apart as in service of the gods in a in a very particular and very special way

01:30:10.820 um above the folk or above the gothar are our speckinger um collectively the speckingar

01:30:20.260 is the council of individual speckingers um so those are the uh

01:30:31.620 Um, those are our, they take a more direct role in administering Yastru Folk Assembly. 0.98

01:30:41.580 They serve as my advisors and, um, they partner with me in helping run this and making stuff work.

01:30:52.580 And they counsel me on all kinds of decisions and all kinds of things as far as the running

01:30:58.680 the austral folk assembly the management of the gothar and folk builders in their charge

01:31:06.280 um i'd say at this level you don't have to but that typically is the case more often than not

01:31:13.240 this is where our hof gothar are and those are the particular um people in that are responsible for a

01:31:22.040 hoff district which nick if you could throw that map up we've divided the world into districts

01:31:30.360 according to our hoffs i understand that's really ambitious looking internationally but in the

01:31:36.040 united states it makes sense to break things up that way so each of these colored districts

01:31:41.560 is overseen by a hoff gofi or hoff githia that is in charge of running that area and 0.56

01:31:49.800 tending to the gothar and the full builders in that area um and then above the uh speckengar

01:31:56.760 is me the all's harrier gothi um

01:32:03.320 yeah uh the buck stops with me i am responsible for

01:32:11.400 running this in to the best of my ability in accord with

01:32:16.520 It's my understanding of the will of the Aesir and I am responsible for maintaining the integrity

01:32:26.520 of the faith of Alcitru, of looking after and helping ensure the success of the Gothar

01:32:38.660 and of folk builders and directing the activity of the astro focus simply and and our mission so

01:32:49.060 that's the hierarchy as we have it at present there's some other positions that are kind of

01:32:54.420 um not directly in that tree but run alongside it like hoff steward that's not always a folk

01:33:02.100 builder sometimes that is a just a volunteer that that may be the only thing that they do

01:33:08.420 And that tends to be the person that takes care of the maintenance and care for the Hoth and the grounds associated with that Hoth.

01:33:18.980 That's what I think we got off the top of my head on that.

01:33:22.880 And that brings us to an opportunity to get back into the text. 0.63

01:33:29.000 In section three, Loki secured Edun and the slaying of Fiasi.

01:33:38.420 um also uh just side note with that threem heimer threem means noisy or or loud it can also mean

01:33:49.980 glorious they say that but that that has more connections to um anglo-saxon language of a later

01:33:57.380 date um generally when they speak of the the loudness of a place they speak of the wind or

01:34:06.240 the water um the the noise of the place but it also being a place that is unable to be quiet

01:34:17.680 it's a a howling craggy place um and also uh fiazzi fiazzi's name especially with the usage

01:34:30.240 of the letter z most people might not see that very often in old norse but the the root word of

01:34:37.840 his name uh fya is constraint binding um and it can be implied either through physical constraint

01:34:47.760 or through magical constraint which i find very interesting so linking that again back to um

01:34:55.600 the usage of of of the uh fjolconning the the foul cunning magic where he

01:35:05.120 is able to enthrall people against their will um so um we move into

01:35:16.440 okay section three loki secured even and the slaying of the azi but the icier became

01:35:31.080 straightened at the disappearance of even they become uh alarmed and speedily they become 0.84

01:35:40.040 hoary and old. So the source, the very wellspring, and this kind of reemphasizes the feminine and 0.96

01:35:50.900 masculine as the gods are the source of the natural world. Nature reflects divinity and

01:36:00.340 there is power and there is life that is given forth from the feminine. And that is taken 0.97

01:36:08.020 from the gods and so the word hoary h-o-a-r-y meaning kind of uh like akin to hairy and cragged 0.80

01:36:18.900 and uh bent and old if if you will um so they begin to age then those icier took counsel

01:36:31.660 together and each asked the other what had last been known of even the last that had been seen

01:36:39.980 was that she had gone out of ausgarther with loki thereupon loki was seized and brought to the finger

01:36:49.580 or the thing the council the uh the grand court and was threatened with death or tortures when he

01:36:57.740 had become well frightened he declared that he would seek after idun in jartenheim if freya would

01:37:07.580 but lend him the hawk's plumage which she possessed there's an interesting point there for those who

01:37:16.140 might, a hawk and a falcon are often used, they're not as keenly separated in the Old

01:37:28.080 Norse, so the translations will often use both of them. But her plumage, her magical

01:37:39.160 cloak that uh allows her to change shape and uh he asks for this and when he got the hawk's plumage

01:37:51.340 he flew northward into Jotunheim and came a certain day to the home of Fiazi the giant

01:38:00.200 Fiazi had rowed out to sea but Idun was at home alone Loki turned her into the shape of

01:38:08.900 a nut and grasped her in his claws and flew his utmost very very interesting points here

01:38:17.720 there are some speculations of the connections between uh you know jack and the and the

01:38:24.980 and the beanstalk and the concept of jack sneaking into the giant's abode while the

01:38:32.240 giants away you see a lot of these tropes being built in uh all um indo-european arian mythos

01:38:45.320 and this is no different so while he's away loki sneaks in and he uses his magic and he turns her

01:38:53.300 into a like a walnut or something of a of an akin to this and grasps her in his claws and then he

01:39:03.380 flies now when thiazi came home and missed idun he took his eagle's plumage a cape as well and

01:39:12.900 flew immediately after loki making a mighty rush of the sound with his wings and his flight

01:39:19.380 but when the isir saw how the hawk flew with the nut in its claws and then behind him the

01:39:25.940 eagle was flying they went out below ausgard and bore burdens of plain shavings thither

01:39:33.380 as soon as the hawk flew into the citadel he swooped down close by the castle wall then the

01:39:40.580 The Aesir struck a fire of the plane shavings, of the shavings from the cuttings of a wood plane.

01:39:49.940 But the eagle could not stop himself, and he missed the hawk, and the feathers of the eagle caught fire straight away. 0.57

01:39:57.160 His flight ceased. 0.95

01:39:58.820 Then the Aesir were near at hand, and they slew Theazi, the giant, within the gates of the Aesir. 0.95

01:40:07.540 And that slaying is exceedingly famous. So again, I think a lot of people when they read, they don't think about what these stories are in relation to the time. These are the entertainment of our folk.

01:40:26.620 So the usage of language to encourage imagination, our folk sitting in the hall, listening, seeing this, it is the movie in their head.

01:40:42.240 And this large, foreboding, eagle-clad wizard is chasing Loki, who has the walnut in his claws, and they light the outer walls on fire so that he is singed at just the right time and falls to the ground, and then they rush upon him and slay him.

01:41:12.240 Now, Skadi, the daughter of this Jotun, Tiazi, took upon her helm and her berni, her chainmail shirt, and all of her weapons of war, and proceeded then to Ausgar to avenge her father.

01:41:31.240 The Aesir, however, offered her reconciliation and atonement. 0.77

01:41:35.920 The first article was that she should choose for herself a husband amongst the Aesir and choose by their feet alone, seeing no more of him.

01:41:48.600 Then she saw the feet of one man, passing and fair. 0.59

01:41:52.800 I choose this one, for surely it is balder, and little can be loathly, little can be disgusting of his feet.

01:42:00.440 But that was not Baldr, it was Njardr of Novatn, the god of the sea, the god of the rivers.

01:42:11.060 And she had this article also in her bond of reconciliation that the Aesir must do a thing she thought they would not be able to accomplish. 0.68

01:42:23.040 She said that they had to make her laugh.

01:42:26.460 And Loki did this. 0.56

01:42:28.020 He tied a cord to the beard of a goat, the other end being about his own genitals, and each gave way in turn to a tug of war, each screeching loudly.

01:42:43.160 Then Loki let himself fall into Skadi's knees, and she laughed, and thereupon the reconciliation was made with her on the part of the Aesir.

01:42:53.700 bear in mind too this is condensed this is written separately so another thing that was

01:43:00.380 not mentioned was the fact that there is the astrological stars most likely castor and pollux

01:43:10.860 who our ancestors probably called thiazi's eyes they are thrown into heaven this is all part of

01:43:18.440 story and also the other part that's kind of not focused on here is um it's it the story is built

01:43:27.640 on okay i want to wed one of the icier and the gods gathered a council and they say yes you can

01:43:35.640 do it but you have to do it by only looking at their feet and then finally there's the okay fine

01:43:44.680 But you have to make me laugh. And then, of course, there's the absurd tug of war between the goat beard and the cordage to Loki.

01:43:59.800 And I think this really does reflect perhaps the court fool, the jester, that there were comedic acts that were part of courtly life. 0.81

01:44:15.320 And this was certainly a reflection of that. And again, the fun fact of this is that the cordage, that Skavi keeps the cordage. 0.78

01:44:34.520 And in a way, there's this symbolic nature of the self-castration of Loki, this kind of binding of his masculinity in order to make himself a fool, in order to prostrate himself before the interloper is there.

01:44:56.300 there's some deep symbolic meaning in that um and i i it's it's important i think for people to

01:45:05.280 understand that when we read these stories this is not like reading um a historical text that

01:45:11.760 claims to be complete and an absolute truth you know these are layered effects of understanding

01:45:19.020 But ultimately, what should be understood is that Skadi, who is a Yotan of the Middle Realm, goes to the Heavenly Realm to avenge her father and is, through trials, brought into alignment with the gods.

01:45:42.960 And that is not the only time that Skadi and Loki have a comparison in relation to the binding and or ultimately the no laughing matter binding and poisoning of the snake over Loki's face.

01:46:02.640 but there is this deep connection and both of them are of the middle world both of them are

01:46:09.560 of the material and of the the central and are interconnected with the gods of heavenly order

01:46:18.160 and i don't think that that's accidental either

01:46:20.420 do you want me to uh keep going section four is pretty small yes please

01:46:31.220 oh and it does kind of extend to with uh more about the ozzy so uh for about the ozzy's line

01:46:39.660 it is so said that ovin did this by way of atonement to skadi he took oh there we go

01:46:47.040 see again uh remembering things um uh i've got a lot of folks might not know this but like we're

01:46:56.040 i'm not reading from a script or we're not going over things ahead of time a lot of this is coming

01:47:01.480 straight from our our heads and our knowledge of of the years we've been doing this but things get

01:47:08.360 orders get mixed up so the aussie's also an interesting side note so it's cool because

01:47:17.880 there's portions of the lore that we are in all of the time reading and there's portions that we

01:47:24.840 read less and when you go over the same material a certain number of times a lot of things run

01:47:33.880 together because you become very familiar with the holistic arc of it as opposed to like where

01:47:39.800 each piece of it is so it's really beneficial and good for swan and i to get to go through

01:47:47.000 not only reading this but reading it and going through it aloud seeing where people have questions

01:47:53.160 or what is of interest to folks it helps us to um

01:48:02.120 mine the lore for entirely different information than maybe we pulled out of it

01:48:08.040 you know the first time or the second time or the 35th time we've read it it's

01:48:15.400 special to read it in this kind of different light with each other and with you guys because

01:48:20.120 we do notice different things that we didn't pick up on or didn't stand out in the same way

01:48:25.560 uh last time we went over it yeah 100 and and and this is uh like for folks who might be like why

01:48:33.320 should i be you know interested in some of this like here is a perfect example of the celestial

01:48:40.600 star mapping of our our nordic ancestors who were astoundingly good seafarer uh seafarers

01:48:49.000 And we know that it existed, but so little of it survived because it wasn't focused on in courtly matters.

01:48:58.860 So, you know, we have these speculations that Fiazi's eyes may very well have been the same as Castor and Pollux amongst the Mediterranean.

01:49:10.740 And we have Arvindil's Toe, which is another great story about Lord Thor carrying someone and his toe being thrown into the sky. And we, you know, speculate that that could be the dog star.

01:49:29.620 And there are so much. There's a really great source for folks if they are interested in reading Nigel Pennick.

01:49:37.620 Nigel Pennick has done some correlations between Germanic lore and astrology and or just astronomy in general, which I find just absolutely fascinating.

01:49:54.620 fascinating unfortunately you know we are just putting those pieces together so excuse me um

01:50:02.460 yeah so uh fiaz's line it is so said that ovin did this in a way of atonement

01:50:10.220 to scabby feeling uh bad or feeling not wanting her to seek any more aggression towards the gods

01:50:20.860 there is a sense of honoring.

01:50:25.620 And the point of this is that the atonement is honoring eternally,

01:50:30.700 is very, very important amongst our ancestors.

01:50:33.540 So it would be understood in the story why this would be important. 0.81

01:50:39.180 He takes the Aussies' eyes and he cast them up into the heavens 0.98

01:50:43.100 and made them into two stars. 1.00

01:50:47.840 Now we go back to Ayer.

01:50:50.860 Then said Ayir, It seems to me that Tiazi was a mighty man. Now of what family was he?

01:51:01.920 And Bragi answered, His father was Alvaldi. And if I tell thee of him, thou wilt think these things wonders.

01:51:11.780 he was very rich in gold and when he died and his sons came to divide the inheritance

01:51:17.980 they determined upon this measure for the gold which they divided each should take as much as

01:51:26.080 his mouth could hold and all the same number of mouthfuls one of them was the azi the second

01:51:34.160 and the third, and we have it as a metaphor amongst us now to call gold the mouth tail

01:51:46.140 of these giants. But we conceal it in secret terms or in posy in this way, that we call it

01:51:54.820 speech or word or talk of the giants. Then said Ayer, I deem that well concealed in secret terms.

01:52:06.380 So this part here is speaking of the wealth of speech, the wealth of knowledge, or the gold of

01:52:13.860 the mouth as a kind of kenning in relation to this. I also think it always is very interesting

01:52:21.980 the way that the dividing up of gold um obviously placing the gold on an otter skin placing it in

01:52:30.940 your mouth there's always fantastical ways that this is done um and again it's because the this

01:52:40.220 this entertainment but oftentimes there can be deeply metaphysical and cosmic truths that are

01:52:47.500 being spoken and then other times it is um fantastical stories built and enriched by the

01:52:59.980 culture that they come from and in this case particularly the nordic culture um so uh the

01:53:09.100 the gold of their mouths speech and word and talk and this again doubles down on the emphasis of

01:53:17.500 the importance of speech and the importance of spoken word amongst our ancestors

01:53:30.380 and then uh this part does switch to another story afterwards

01:53:40.060 so um

01:53:41.020 um let's all right let's keep going in that case okay yeah this is uh uh kind of lends to itself

01:53:57.340 because that now we're we're talking about a new gift of speech a new point but this uh gift comes

01:54:04.760 from the mouths of the gods and um we speak of the origin of the mead of sutungur now this is

01:54:17.320 the story of kwasir the first creation of the gods that walks amongst men and ultimately ends

01:54:25.240 up being inspiration and the divine nature of speech and poetry so then said ayer whence did

01:54:36.920 this art which ye call posy derive its beginnings pragy answered these were the beginnings thereof

01:54:47.800 the gods had a great dispute with the folk which they called the vanir and they appointed a peace

01:54:57.640 meeting between them and they established peace in this way they each went to a vat and with a

01:55:05.000 they spat spittle therein then at the parting the gods took that peace token and would not let it

01:55:12.360 perish, but shaped thereof in the form of a man. And this man is called Kvasir. And he was so wise

01:55:22.160 that none could question him in concerning anything, but that he knew the solution. He went

01:55:28.160 up and down the earth to give instruction to men. And when he came upon the invitation of the abode

01:55:35.200 of a certain dwarves, Fjallar and Gallar. They called him into privy converse with them and

01:55:43.880 they murdered him, letting his blood run into the vats and a kettle. The kettle, his name is

01:55:51.120 Ordreor, the stirrer of inspiration, and the vats, Son and Bodn. They blended honey with his blood

01:56:02.460 and the outcome was that of the mead by virtue of which he who drinks it becomes a scald or a scholar

01:56:11.420 the dwarves reported to ice to the icier that classier had choked on his own shrewdness

01:56:18.700 since there was none so wise there as to be able to question his wisdom

01:56:23.820 Um, so the, the story of Kvassia, a couple of things worth mentioning is, uh, I don't know,

01:56:34.260 there might be some Slavic folks out there and, uh, that are listening. Um, and there is a,

01:56:40.780 the, the drink called Kvatch, uh, which is a malt drink. Um, and this has origins,

01:56:47.800 back to the fermentation through mastication of certain things where the active yeast in the mouth

01:56:59.700 started the fermentation process. So this goes very far back. And just by lending to the

01:57:08.300 understanding of this, this is, and so his name, the first storyteller being Kwasir,

01:57:14.260 This kind of brew started from the mouths of the gods themselves is really more of the important part of this.

01:57:25.440 And as they, the mouth is so important, the speech so important, that when they give forth together, they create this, the drink that is formed into Kvasir.

01:57:42.640 And he then descends from the heavenly realms and walks among the folk and he clears their

01:57:51.580 disputes.

01:57:53.360 And I am always of the belief that he is the first storyteller, that the first words that

01:58:03.360 come from the gods to the folk after the unification of the gods of natural order and the gods

01:58:10.960 natural law and cosmic order is from the mouth of Kvasir. And that wisdom reflects in that.

01:58:19.600 And eventually, since he is now in the middle world, he is down from the heavenly mountains,

01:58:27.240 he is seduced by Svart Alvar, or swarthy elves. And we spoke about elves. Alvar is a broad

01:58:40.140 title just like the word in English like monster that they're not correlated but what I mean is is

01:58:46.260 that to say monster does not specify anything and the word Alvar is very much the same way

01:58:54.400 but that the first word is always the most important so Svar Alvar is it's a being that is

01:59:01.740 synthesized with swarthiness or grit or the earth, the dirt. And they are beings of the earth and of

01:59:12.880 energy and of the land. And they are very connected in that sense. They're very connected to the

01:59:22.780 physical realm. And they are always seen as being very, very capricious. They do bring forth great

01:59:30.680 creations but they are never of a character that is elevated so they are worldly in their way

01:59:41.000 they are not like folk who are able to know and uh attain and try to seek the horizon and the

01:59:52.360 upward and they're not of the gods who are of the the spiritual nature of the universe they're very

02:00:00.200 very material. And I am also of the belief that they do show up still today in many people's

02:00:06.340 houses. We just call them poltergeists or, you know, noisy or active ghosts, but anything that

02:00:13.620 moves physical objects, it's generally them and they are malicious. They've always been seen as

02:00:19.920 malicious um and so in this case you know the he gets called to them and in his naivety he goes

02:00:30.900 there and they of course say oh yeah he came to our feast and he choked on his his own grandiose

02:00:39.820 wisdom so that's clearly a biting insult again another sign of just that maliciousness that

02:00:46.320 comes from these beings that are so innately physical, they cannot escape into higher realms

02:00:55.220 of thinking and being. So it's just, it fits the bill completely. So they send word and

02:01:05.900 But the dwarves have the vats of poetry and inspiration. His blood is mixed with honey.

02:01:19.700 And again, because you see the Kvatch or the, there is the, the evolution of a, I would say like a Stone Age alcohol into a Bronze Age and Iron Age alcohol.

02:01:37.840 So there's kind of an evolution that, that is there. 0.89

02:01:41.700 um but they now have this and it comes from the mouths of the gods so it's not just meat it's not

02:01:52.780 just this malted liquor it it's it's beyond that's far more magical and uh and they they

02:02:00.640 hoard this treasure but they begin to make mistakes and let the word out so these dwarves

02:02:08.120 then invited the Jotuns, a Jotun who is called Gillinger, to visit them and his wife with him.

02:02:19.220 So, or the golden one, or the shining kind of goldish one. Next, the dwarves invited Gillinger 0.75

02:02:30.120 to row out upon the sea with them, but when they had gone out from the land, the dwarves rowed

02:02:37.060 into the breakers and purposely capsized the boat. Gilingr was unable to swim, and he perished.

02:02:45.760 But the dwarves then righted the boat and rowed to land. They reported the accident to his wife,

02:02:52.760 but she took it grievously and wept aloud. Then Fjallar, one of the Svartalves, asked her whether

02:03:01.520 it would ease her heart if she could look upon the sea at the spot upon where he perished and

02:03:07.760 she did desire to do this and then he spoke softly to galar his brother beating him to go over the

02:03:14.720 doorway and that when she would go out take a millstone and fall it upon her head so now we

02:03:21.460 have these these murderous conniving uh figures that the the smart elf are always seen in this

02:03:30.140 light as a kind of malicious and um obviously with the you hammerization there's a deep connection

02:03:40.160 and kind of a darker side to looking at this story is that a lot of these um formats uh you know this

02:03:49.300 is seen as nefarious this is seen as bad you go and you fight someone uh and they're defending

02:03:58.000 their village you go to fight they fight and die this is honorable but ambushing people purposely

02:04:05.040 capsizing doing up this is nefarious and this is unseemly or uh you know unseemly and germanic

02:04:13.360 would be kind of the same as was like seeing as like sinful or just evil and um

02:04:21.200 as she goes out to see him they drop the stone upon her head

02:04:28.000 saying that her weeping grew so wearisome to them, and even so he did.

02:04:35.480 Now when the giant Suttunger, who is Gillinger's son, learned of this,

02:04:43.020 he went over and took the dwarves and carried them out to sea,

02:04:47.180 and set them on a reef which was covered at high tide.

02:04:51.440 They besought Suttunger to grant them respite for their lives,

02:04:55.580 and as a price of the reconciliation, offered him the precious mead in satisfaction for his father's death.

02:05:03.460 And that became a means of reconciliation between them.

02:05:07.940 Sotongar carried the mead home, and he placed it in a secret place called Nitpyark,

02:05:15.440 placing his daughter Gunnloth, her name means battle song, there to watch over the mead. 0.60

02:05:27.120 Because of this, we call posy or poetry Kvasir's blood or the dwarves drink or fill the filling

02:05:38.920 or any kind of liquid of odrior or boden or son or the fairy boat of the dwarves since this mead 0.81

02:05:49.020 brought them life ransom from the wreath of suttingur's mead or the liquor of mithbyark.

02:05:57.400 So that last part in particular is in essence telling the poet who's reading the stories.

02:06:05.040 If you ever use Kennings for poetry, you can say, you know, that he was, his beard was drenched in the dwarves drink as he spit his fill of the, the, the dwarves fairy.

02:06:27.900 all of that is just re-emphasizing that he is speaking poetry of high renown it's the blood

02:06:35.260 of classir um and that's ultimately to another layer of what this what's being said in the story

02:06:42.300 in this poem and the final part then ayur asked or then ayur said these seem to me dark sayings

02:06:52.540 to call posy by these names but how did ye isir come to attaining back sutungur's mead

02:07:04.220 and now we go into the dynamic lord and his ability to attain and there are so many deep

02:07:13.660 deep Indo-European, Aryan points of the attainment of the sacred mead. And

02:07:21.960 this story just goes back so far. And the idea of the gods and of mortals in the stories of our

02:07:37.040 ancient ancestors, tricking and attaining knowledge has been with us, you know, even to

02:07:45.720 the, to, to today with the, uh, the, the blues or the Irish, uh, songs about tricking the devil.

02:07:54.260 These are some of the oldest, um, paradigms that go back farther than Christianity. It's,

02:08:03.700 it's deeply um part of the folk so it begins the the processes of gaining the mead of poetry or

02:08:13.180 posy or poetry in and of itself the word rhyming uh magic from battle song so the the names have

02:08:23.520 meaning it's it's this is all just where does poetry come from and if you are a poet and you

02:08:30.760 are reading these then and you are inspired by the blood of classier these are all the names you can

02:08:37.960 use to reinforce your word magic upon the world through poetry so we have a um we have an outpouring

02:08:59.160 of questions uh now to go and work our way through i think the proper word is buttload

02:09:10.600 perhaps um

02:09:14.920 so i'll try to find where we were at with before we had this uh hyper hyper abundance

02:09:22.200 i've already talked about that one um

02:09:24.680 appreciate that getting handy with the little highlight the question deal i like that you can

02:09:34.100 do that nick if you can do that when i read the questions that would be awesome

02:09:38.180 we used to do it all the time and then i quit and you know i yes i can

02:09:46.180 the only problem the only problem is if it's a question from outside youtube

02:09:52.240 like the email or whatever,

02:09:54.460 then I will be able to.

02:09:56.680 But for YouTube ones, I can.

02:09:58.720 We'll make it work. I'm trying to figure out

02:10:00.520 the picture of this anime woman

02:10:02.660 and what she's up to in the picture.

02:10:05.000 Anyways.

02:10:09.840 Question for the folk.

02:10:11.080 What exactly are the elves?

02:10:13.320 I've heard the Celtic gods

02:10:14.720 be described as they were

02:10:16.720 elves. So what

02:10:18.300 is an elf then?

02:10:21.140 i know they exist in celtic mythology and norse mythology spawn touched on this a bit in

02:10:27.300 explaining something in the last piece what i will say is their etymology goes back to the word

02:10:34.500 white or goes back to the word albos in proto-indo-european pn meaning white so it's funny

02:10:45.620 when you have uh lios alfar and doc alfar and svard alvar when it's describing like brightness

02:10:58.420 or intensity of that white color which touches on something that chris talked about last week

02:11:03.720 in the arian understanding of color it was in term of its vibrancy because they lacked some

02:11:14.340 the color words that we use so uh spawn take it away tell the tell the people about the alvar

02:11:21.700 and what all that means well and the the connection of of color the synthesis of color to ideal now

02:11:35.620 for most people they and i use this as an example just because i think most people will be very

02:11:40.820 familiar so in uh lord of the rings there is gandalf gandalf is a name utilized from the

02:11:51.460 the naming of the dwarves it is actually not one of the names of lord oden um that somewhere that

02:11:57.700 got kind of uh put out there and it became kind of a a league though i certainly think the kenning

02:12:06.740 could apply um but what it really means is the title of alvar being like being or um

02:12:18.740 spirit or soul or entity and that whatever's in front of it so a gandalf is a being synthesized

02:12:29.460 with the wand or with magic uh vikings uh vikinger bay men or men of the bay were sailors but they

02:12:38.820 were also uh referred to as skip alvar or beings of the ship so once you look at it in the the

02:12:49.460 mundane sense you begin to see that these connections go that there is the the beings of

02:12:56.500 light and there is the beings of the swarthy or the sooty and then there are the beings of darkness

02:13:06.260 and what we then begin to understand is that these beings are not all the same that uh i think over

02:13:15.220 time our brains and perhaps fantasy fiction and things like that have kind of correlated everything

02:13:21.300 to be the same but no they're not the leo salvar are beings of light and so what i've always kind

02:13:28.660 of taken them to is is looking at that first word and breaking that down sooty and in connection to

02:13:36.900 forges anvils uh that that which is taken out of the earth and that obviously correlates very well

02:13:46.020 with the understanding of how they're spoken about in lore about being connected to uh

02:13:53.540 knowing how to forge and create things and we go a little bit further and it's just oh well

02:14:00.660 that is really matter and energy and the uh refinement of these things that utilizing heat

02:14:09.780 to refine the earth and so the smart elf are beings of of the earth of material and dock

02:14:20.580 of our darkness um walking the the path of death the walking hell's road as we we say going through

02:14:31.940 the processes but then being placed in vanguard over blades burial mounds battle sites as vigilant

02:14:40.980 protectors of ancient sites sacred to our folk but they have walked the path of death i would say

02:14:49.860 that doc alvar and disir are more akin than say leos alvar and doc alvar leos are clearly seen

02:14:58.340 in relation to the gods being not mortals,

02:15:03.540 but beings of light that are in.

02:15:06.800 And that is, again, another,

02:15:08.840 our ancestors seeing the gods living atop a mountain range

02:15:14.820 in the center of the world

02:15:16.320 and are surrounded by the clouds and the light.

02:15:20.560 But we go further into, like, I would say,

02:15:24.260 the evolution of our modern understanding

02:15:26.040 is that the heavenly realm is above and beyond.

02:15:30.480 It's not just a mountain range, obviously.

02:15:33.220 That's poetic.

02:15:35.540 But the Alvar, the Leos Alvar,

02:15:38.920 who are often just called Alvar in many of the stories,

02:15:42.640 which adds to more of the confusion,

02:15:45.360 are beings that are versed in relation with the gods.

02:15:52.000 They are components of light,

02:15:56.040 and often doing things in the world, the processes of life, perhaps photosynthesis, etc.

02:16:07.940 And that would then correlate as to why Lord Frey, the fruitful Lord, is the Lord of the light elves

02:16:14.220 and that his return and coming into the world hearkens life and fruitfulness.

02:16:21.220 fruitfulness. And we can kind of see these patterns as we look at them. But Alvar is

02:16:27.440 a broad titled term. And I bring up the word monsters because it's the first thing that I

02:16:34.960 think of in relation to like, if a foreigner from Japan came here and asked, what is a monster?

02:16:45.000 It's like, well, it could be a lot of things. And that was the same usage of the word Alvar.

02:16:50.620 What is an Alvar? Well, there can be a lot of things. It's just a broad kind of term for not quite a god and not quite a human. It's a thing of great power, but it's in between. Or it was once a human, but now is beyond that.

02:17:13.820 Yeah, it's poetically, alf often means spirit, like generally, you know, Santa Claus is,

02:17:36.160 you know you will elf they've got stuff things are described

02:17:45.340 with elf often when they're just spirits of a thing the intensity of the brightness though

02:17:54.800 i think is very interesting and i think there are radiant spiritual beings that get conflated

02:18:04.980 in medieval Christianity with angels

02:18:07.760 in the sense that they're these beings of light

02:18:11.180 that are instances of the ancestors.

02:18:16.660 But I guess in a potent way,

02:18:19.040 the Alvar exists beyond the veil.

02:18:22.580 And all manner of ghosts and land spirits

02:18:29.740 and ancestors interacting with us in a physical way misuses language,

02:18:42.040 but in a in-your-presence kind of way.

02:18:48.200 There's like talking to the ancestors on the phone, praying at your altar,

02:18:53.760 and then there's interacting with them in your presence in the sense of a ghostly manifestation.

02:19:03.420 But these spirits display a number of different things, certainly of the land spirits,

02:19:10.420 the land writer

02:19:16.300 specifically oftentimes they're heavily associated with place but they don't have to be

02:19:28.220 I think some of the brightness or lack thereof is indicative of their

02:19:35.060 hierarchy in the scale of agency that they have the ability to do i think one of the things that's

02:19:44.960 fascinating um and i really hope is when we find ourselves beyond the veil that we

02:19:50.240 will all of a sudden know the answer to some of these mysteries and how some of this shakes down

02:19:54.920 um but yeah the the alvar consists of a host of

02:20:01.760 entities existing beyond the veil that can interact with the physical world and

02:20:08.900 the intensity of that light I think affects the ability of perception

02:20:16.580 amongst people who have second sight and the ability to perceive those things better

02:20:24.920 Um, but yeah, I mean, we see a elevated role or an elevated position for the, the, the

02:20:34.060 Leos Alvar or the Light Elves.

02:20:37.420 Um, I don't think we see the same in the sense of the other, um, Alvar, but I also don't

02:20:43.740 think we see like, just cause something is lower does not make it closer to

02:20:54.900 evil and i think that's one of the things that the christian duality has an up and down scale

02:21:01.940 and the higher up stuff is good and the lower down stuff is evil there is a different directional

02:21:11.460 polarity in aussitrew there is certainly a and i don't think it's directional but there's a

02:21:20.580 polarity between order and chaos that is much more akin to good but i think the the upward

02:21:26.500 and the downward there's chthonic elements that are more primal that are often more

02:21:33.940 rooted in deep history or in primal urges in fecundity in

02:21:44.420 the more physical plane of things and then they're higher more astral more

02:21:51.860 closer to the heavens kind of expression that's not a good or a bad it's a

02:22:03.440 aligning towards the the the primal or towards the the astral and i don't think that either of

02:22:10.880 those things are bad things but again it's a complicated question i don't think we gave you

02:22:16.180 a clear enough answer because i don't think the answer is is crystal clear to us the idea of the

02:22:21.860 the alvar themselves be them bright be them dull or be them dark all talk about our ability to

02:22:32.240 perceive something that is not very clear to us on this side of the veil um

02:22:38.000 specking or spawn what weight do you put into the phrase the eyes are the portal to the soul

02:22:48.080 please answer in pounds and ounces

02:22:53.380 wait is that part of the question is that at the end there no that i added that last

02:23:00.840 well i i know i know that that term i believe comes from one of the uh shakespearean plays but

02:23:13.880 this kind of uh is an interesting point there there's some synthesization of christianity and

02:23:21.320 um the hellenics here that we see we were talking about where these things are kind of

02:23:27.160 um coming from there's the um uh i forgot his name and he said that the face or the visage

02:23:39.440 is the picture of the soul and um i know this because there's a gentleman that i i look into

02:23:47.380 he talks about how the personality is in the structure of the face um really interesting

02:23:53.040 stuff i don't know if i fully believe it but i just find it interesting um and there's also

02:23:58.000 a biblical quote somewhere about the eyes being kind of uh if they're full of light or

02:24:05.760 light then your soul is full of light and if they're darkened then your soul is darkened

02:24:11.200 but the usage of this is built around the eye the loss of the eye the gaining uh obviously lord

02:24:21.760 Odin removing his eye. And I've heard a lot of people talk about the right eye, the left eye,

02:24:29.540 and what those might mean, solar, lunar, masculine, feminine. And I think all of that

02:24:35.940 is really fascinating. And I'm not actually shooting any of it down. But what it does show

02:24:43.760 is a deep and powerful truth towards our ancestors and the usage or understanding of the eyes and 0.88

02:24:57.580 even down to the evil eye, which is across the world, but heavily concentrated in the Middle

02:25:09.060 East and in Europe as a concept of, you know, if someone was to give you the evil eye, I mean,

02:25:14.480 it has potency just as much as word and poetry. I think it's a generationally developed concept

02:25:26.140 that comes from magic that is built on

02:25:31.580 uh building blocks there is magic built on the building blocks of sound and speech

02:25:39.120 there is magic on the uh building blocks of deed and action and there is magic built on the

02:25:46.280 building blocks of sight and attainment and or cursing of the things that your visage

02:25:53.220 sometimes it was seen as bad if uh if someone was uh being uh wrongfully killed and they're

02:26:01.440 and their eyes uh were cast upon you it would it would somehow curse you um this is all just again

02:26:10.080 in correlation to more of a part of the soul that we call mayan or might megan sometimes it's referred

02:26:19.600 to uh might it is might so the projection of might into the world the speech might through poetry

02:26:28.400 and word the deed might through uh physical prowess and the ability to affect the world

02:26:35.680 around you and implement your will and then there is the much more subtle and uh kind of

02:26:43.200 fear inducing because it's so subtle is the projection of might through the eyes and we

02:26:50.000 see this in the statues with lord thor lord thor is often seen with the large eyes of rage and the

02:26:58.400 the, the roaring mouth. And so I think ultimately all of that boils down to a projection of,

02:27:07.360 of Mayan, uh, into the world and that our ancestors did see many different modes with

02:27:17.960 different forms of power, um, that they could ultimately affect the world around them.

02:27:26.160 And these are focal points of will that every day when we wake up, we have the ability to do deed, to speak word, and to ultimately look out and see the horizon, see our future destination.

02:27:42.720 It's something that most scientists believe is completely unique to humans, is that we can project ourselves in a third-person format into a world that we've never, or a situation that we've never been in, and that most animals, obviously, because we don't understand the communication model, it is generally seen by their actions that they work through instinct of the blood and

02:28:12.720 repetition, the things that they are taught by their forebears. So I find that these three modes

02:28:21.920 of implication are a manifestation of might and will, which is deeply connected in the Germanic

02:28:28.420 soul and is why in our language we have past and present, but everything in the future is will.

02:28:35.780 You know, we ran, run, and then we will run. There's always the key component. And there is no mistake that the third facet and brother of Lord Ovin, who is the Lord of dynamic, the dynamic tripartite within the tripartite is willy, will, willpower, the manifestation of will.

02:29:03.160 And all of weird or all of Orla in its greatest sense is a culmination of all of that will moving forward like a wave.

02:29:16.000 And we can implement our will into the world, but there are things that we are going to have to weather.

02:29:22.860 And that is a buildup of all of the will of individual people and also to the gods.

02:29:31.180 If the gods are making ripples in the well and they are influencing things beyond our scope of understanding, if Lord Thor is implementing his will into the well of earth and that manifests as a storm, obviously we have to weather that.

02:29:50.100 And the gods don't promise us this falsehood that we are going to avoid. Instead, it is this conflict of will, of all things, all these forces that makes our faith so potent and glorious.

02:30:10.940 Yes. I hope that was a good answer. I mean, I hope that was a good answer for covering all of that, I guess.

02:30:22.600 I started tangenting real quick.

02:30:26.920 It's all good. Is the Sanatana Dharma concept of Svarga or Swarga close to the concept of heaven in Ausatru?

02:30:40.940 to my understanding yes aside from the um aside from the reincarnation bit like the trend like the

02:30:51.580 it being a holding area until a reincarnation period aside from that i think that it's

02:30:58.780 um very similar in my understanding but i don't claim to be an expert and when you deal with

02:31:05.820 hindu and buddhist terms different schools of those things interpret them really differently

02:31:12.220 i'm not sure what unique take uh sanata that dharma might have on that swan do you have stuff

02:31:23.140 to add yeah uh the pathway of light um and i'm kind of go gonna go off in a weird excuse me

02:31:32.380 actually no not that's correct a very weird full direction um so one of the things i found

02:31:40.860 interesting is that the pathway of light or is is a heaven amongst heavens we see this also

02:31:47.740 in our faith with the speaking of say like gimle um there are the and then there is the the wind

02:31:55.180 outer heaven. This concept of the upper realm being compartmentalized in usage and position

02:32:04.620 and time, I think is very Aryan throughout and that the Araya of India are no different. 0.99

02:32:15.400 I also think that when we look at our faith, we don't often see these patterns, but I encourage 0.89

02:32:23.400 people too. I don't think that it is a mistake that the Lord that stands at the threshold between

02:32:30.800 heaven and the earth, who can see and mark time in an earthly fashion, is also the source of

02:32:38.900 the prismatic beam, the shimmering bridge that allows access into heaven.

02:32:46.980 knowing now as what we do know about prisms and about light and the connectivity between light

02:32:56.600 and the holy gods doesn't just stay singularly all of the Isir have deep connections to light

02:33:06.680 even Lord Odin who is generally seen as dark and foreboding and again filled with doom

02:33:15.260 And that would happen considering that a lot of the functionality that we culturally view him as is as a psychopomp or a traverser between the realms of that, which we don't know.

02:33:28.780 But glad time and the shining nature of of of drop near and gold.

02:33:36.080 And then there's Holy Freyr and his connection to life.

02:33:41.640 And Lord Baldur and all of the gods, Idun and the apples, the golden apples, the golden hair of Freyja.

02:33:52.360 Life is a heavy focus on the holy gods.

02:33:57.440 And I, again, just don't find it to be simply coincidence that the threshold between heaven and the earth shines forth a prismatic beam of this heavenly light being formulated into the world.

02:34:15.240 Now, a lot of people could say, oh, well, that's not in the lore, Svan.

02:34:18.700 That's not written down explicitly.

02:34:21.400 But again, mythos is painting a picture with words.

02:34:25.560 And if your soul is stirred to see these patterns, you begin to see another level of these stories that speak deeply to you, and you can see this cross-comparison in all of the Indo-European branches or the Aryan branches of faith.

02:34:51.240 And some of them, like Al Saragodi said, some of them lay over each other very, very well. Others do not. And that could be foreign influence. That could also be just deeply intrinsic influence that's connected to the value of the culture, whether it's Slavic or Gaelic or Gaulish or Germanic or what have you.

02:35:12.000 And it's not a matter of trying to denounce one or the other. I'm clearly just more familiar with the Germanic and Nordic. But you can see these comparisons.

02:35:25.240 And I don't think that there is far off when it comes to the early scriptures of the like the Rig Veda or the Vedas in general, as they do come from the Araya and we do see that there are cross parallels that we can clearly tie to.

02:35:48.800 One of the ones that comes to mind immediately, too, is the reference of Lord or Agni of the early Vedas.

02:36:01.440 He's part of the tripartite of theirs, and he is the Lord of sacrifices.

02:36:06.700 And again, in our faith, some of the gods are called like Lord of the temple, Lord of the sacrifices.

02:36:14.100 And again, these are not saying that the gods are somehow worshiping some other god, or who are the gods worshiping? The gods and us are correlated together. We see their faith is our faith. Our faith is their faith.

02:36:35.420 They don't say worship me. They say a strong soul gives gift. And so we are, in essence, copying through as they lead by example in a way.

02:36:54.220 And again, it's just, you can see in these ancient writings that this is the way that our ancestors saw functionary. They didn't see the gods as separate and sitting up there. It was that they too were like us and we are like them and we should strive to be like them.

02:37:15.380 And that we are a reflection of their divinity.

02:37:21.820 So that correlates to they, you know, build, they have anvils, they fashion tools because that's what menfolk should do is fashion tools, create governance, build buildings, create order and society.

02:37:38.160 And even though now, obviously, we don't see the gods as, like, living literally in a house, it is the purpose of the house.

02:37:47.140 It's the purpose of construction.

02:37:48.720 It's the purpose of order that is the true point of these stories.

02:37:59.100 All right.

02:38:03.180 All right, so Ron says, getting the Hoffs on Google Maps was important.

02:38:11.040 What do you each think of trying to legally name the ridge at Sigerheim something like

02:38:16.660 Tears Ridge?

02:38:18.860 I'm really curious about that process.

02:38:22.420 I've looked around, and there's bajillions of these little ridges, and none of them have

02:38:28.820 names.

02:38:29.820 know how you would petition to have something like that name what is interesting is that particular

02:38:37.980 ridge that forms like a sea around like a backwards sea around property is entirely we own the entirety

02:38:48.940 of the ridge line so i don't think it would be inappropriate for us to want to officially name

02:38:57.100 that and i don't think we would have other people contesting with us but i'm not sure um

02:39:07.340 i think there's a lot of cool things we can do that or we could do as far as that naming goes

02:39:15.660 i think you know the thing that pops to my mind is the most

02:39:19.900 i don't know fortuitous is perhaps uh tiers rampart um for that ridge but i'm not sure

02:39:29.140 but yeah i think it'd be really cool i'm just not sure what that process is

02:39:33.940 swan what are your thoughts uh i'm i just started kind of looking in uh one of the things i noticed

02:39:40.780 is that ridges and and hillocks and things are kind of more locally um utilized and then become

02:39:48.240 but there is actually a naming authority for summits and hills, landforms, and high points

02:39:57.460 throughout the United States. It's called the Geographic Name Information System,

02:40:02.320 and it's maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey for the U.S. Board of Geographic Names.

02:40:08.780 So there is a body in our government that does keep this data. So the source of trying to figure out how something becomes of that. And again, I think it actually lends to our favor if it is unnamed.

02:40:29.120 um this is really interesting i am absolutely down for this but i think that that's a brilliant idea

02:40:40.020 oh yeah there's uh the proposal and then there's a review and then an approval and then there's

02:40:46.820 public access as it's listed on maps um this is uh you know really really interesting uh i did a

02:40:56.680 a wedding in washington's uh state for two lovely members of our church and they had a wedding

02:41:03.560 at a place um the interesting was the usage of the word uh b-u-t-t-e and it's a french word

02:41:16.380 uh kind of very similar to the germanic word bjorg or or berg uh for a a mountain or a hillock

02:41:24.920 and i was just like oh wow that's kind of cool that that etymology there um and you know maybe

02:41:30.720 who named it was it a you know somebody of french canadian origin or was it just uh you know i i

02:41:37.060 don't i don't know was it a decision made to kind of uh seem different from other places

02:41:44.060 but that you see a good bit in the american west right yeah it was was it something maybe started

02:41:51.040 by like uh the lewis and clark expedition i you know because you have mesas in the southwest and

02:41:59.440 that's obviously it's connection to latin and uh the hispania you know hybridization so

02:42:06.960 the fact that it's not named though that would be very cool to uh get that into review or proposal

02:42:16.800 and review and then have that on google maps is like that that's what this this hill formation

02:42:23.760 is called that's a great idea i'm a little upset i never thought of it

02:42:33.200 i think that's really cool idea as well um question for you gentlemen what are your thoughts

02:42:39.200 on the bettas swan what are your thoughts oh we kind of talked a little bit about that i think

02:42:44.640 that the uh initial vedas um and i don't have a ton of knowledge i can't speak with

02:42:52.960 authority on this and and agency of um sincerity which i can speak about my own faith so that's

02:43:02.160 just the honest truth um but i do see the comparisons and i i believe a long long time

02:43:09.360 ago al sir godi and i were talking about comparisons like blueprints and looking at

02:43:16.800 things and kind of overlaying hellenic ideas over the blueprint of of the germanic or or

02:43:25.840 what have you and all of this culminating to the origin of our of our people and our gods and

02:43:33.920 i don't think that we're meant to go back and try to replicate or create um you know uh

02:43:41.520 this is what it probably is i think that the the the point is to go forward and and unify

02:43:50.560 under uh the the larger concept of that which has survived but going back you see a lot of that and

02:43:58.560 one of the big ones for me was the tripartite um it was instrumental in my studying of how there is

02:44:08.560 always a sky father and an earth mother and then when they are transformed moved

02:44:18.960 they change in their positioning there is always the tripartite of heaven that is established

02:44:24.640 and the vedas were the first part on that journey of my studying that in in relation to um indra

02:44:35.040 agni and varuna um where that suddenly the the tripartite of lightning fire and water and then

02:44:46.080 looking at other arian branches and seeing that the the hellenics had numbered their tripartite with

02:44:52.880 Zeus having the lightning bolt and Hades having a bident and Poseidon having a trident.

02:45:00.340 They literally numbered it. And you just begin to see these patterns throughout all of the

02:45:05.460 Arian branches. And it started with the Vedas. However, again, because of my lack of like just

02:45:13.860 deep knowledge. I would like to go in and look into a lot of it, but there is, I think, a great

02:45:23.360 change that happened over time as the Araya of India are very much, they fall into the same 0.65

02:45:36.620 furrows that befell other Aryan groups, if they encountered very large non-folk

02:45:46.460 peoples, the, the Iranians, the Persians, and they're being, you know, influenced greatly

02:45:55.960 or running into in the South, the, the, the Shemites or the, the people of, of the Middle

02:46:03.200 east um or in india with with the araya kind of running into the dravidians and then even with

02:46:11.840 the hellenics at a certain point though it was a softer impact they did encounter canaanite phoenician

02:46:20.160 you know levantine sea peoples um and the the north africans but as you kind of drift more

02:46:27.840 northward there's less you kind of find this kind of concentrated sense with the gaulish or gaelic

02:46:35.120 people uh the slobs and the germanic folk and you see that there's uh less of a a stranger or

02:46:44.080 outsider influence it's less outlandish in a way um and so and i don't mean to that in in demeaning 0.93

02:46:53.200 it but what i am saying is is that we have to be very very careful when we research that we are

02:46:59.280 going in there specifically like investigators looking for the true source uh the the comparative

02:47:07.920 points and that's where um there's a lot of help that the hit the uh indian or the vedas can help

02:47:16.400 us understand there's also things i think that our sources can help folks who are specifically

02:47:24.160 looking in that perspective in relation to um ancient hindu texts and uh i mean i find that

02:47:34.320 all very very fascinating i think that uh it's it's clear to see but at some point when our folk

02:47:42.080 ended up kind of overtaking a different peoples it wasn't but for so long where things began to

02:47:52.240 kind of merge and shift and the araya telling the dravidians that they can't eat the cattle

02:47:59.280 and and now the cattle are just sacred and nobody eats them we can see these evolutions so we have 0.95

02:48:06.960 to be careful and we have to kind of have a judicious mind looking at these things

02:48:15.200 yeah i don't know what to do with this um i have tried really hard i'm just keeping it real i've

02:48:21.920 tried yeah i know you're being real real they seem completely nonsensical to me there's no

02:48:28.320 point of familiarity there's no point of commonality that like it is very hard because

02:48:36.960 I lack the context or whatever, and it all feels very, very foreign and very, very strange and very something I don't know how to connect with easily.

02:48:52.860 um that's not a slam against them that's as much on me but it

02:48:58.320 you don't start out getting a lot of the context in in my understanding so i think it's

02:49:06.900 challenging in that sense um so i have not made great progress in reading um

02:49:15.980 the rig veda uh the times that i've tried because it's just i can't follow it

02:49:22.520 But that's on me, and again, that's not on the Vedas, that's on me.

02:49:30.520 Soan, can you comment some on the broad Germanic folklore related to spirits and why we call

02:49:38.520 fermented beverages spirits in relation to kvassar and fermentation, as in wine and spirits shop?

02:49:50.520 yeah the infusement the changing uh the processes was not fully understood um i believe and i can't

02:50:00.760 remember which book but uh dr stephen flowers suggested that there might be say uh like there's

02:50:08.440 a north south east and west of the elements in the western tradition and then there is the northeast

02:50:16.120 the uh you know the southeast and and this would be venom yeast and other elements that uh lend to

02:50:26.040 uh life creation and things that we our ancestors and in particular just the truth of

02:50:34.200 uh things that move and grow um and so what you end up getting is yeah the the soul of

02:50:41.080 the the wheat the soul of the barley this uh the songs of john barleycorn and how he's threshed

02:50:49.720 and killed and and um of that soul creates you know the spirit and i think it it traversed

02:50:57.080 into the utilization of like copper to create whiskey and things it was more or less a verbiage

02:51:04.960 that was carried on but i do believe it does go back to the origins and understandings of

02:51:13.440 the transmutation between uh in an essence it's ancient alchemy before medieval alchemy it's

02:51:22.480 it is the transformation of um and that is magical in an in its own right you kind of see that in

02:51:32.720 what i would call the three um forms of uh magical component and we again uh whether

02:51:40.720 it's the apples of our gods of the soma of uh the vedas uh the ambrosia um different

02:51:51.520 things but we we find these modes of of uh religious and spiritual connotations always

02:51:59.520 associated with what i would call the three big pillars of um ancient the ancient world being

02:52:08.160 alcohol um mycelium and and mushrooms and um uh cannabis but a lot of people will go and run with

02:52:20.480 that and say oh what are you trying to say that like religion is only created by these things no

02:52:25.520 what i'm saying is is that the facilitation of thinking outside of the borders of our own mind

02:52:33.120 was clearly noted when these items were involved and so they clearly have

02:52:40.720 a religious connotation sometimes cultural the scythians and their usage of um indica style

02:52:49.120 cannabis um obviously alcohol in relation to the germanic folk and um the the shifting when the

02:52:58.160 the indians or when the araya when they go into india there's a clear shift between the upper land

02:53:04.880 um aminata muskara the the the red capped mushroom with the white dots to a psilocybic

02:53:12.960 cattle-based one. And it was because the heat that produced those mushrooms may not have been

02:53:21.720 encountered before until they entered that biome. But it's, again, the reflection of the natural

02:53:31.380 world is an echo of divinity. And just like there can be things that can open up and expand our

02:53:40.980 understanding sometimes, it's not to be abused because all things can have detriment. The gods

02:53:49.900 are capable of taking on this knowledge. Lord Odin sacrifices himself and this sets him above

02:53:59.580 the gods that have not sacrificed themselves because he has the strength or he had the strength

02:54:06.440 to do it. And again, Lord Oden speaks about how, you know, when you do go and traverse and look

02:54:14.500 into shadows and want to seek knowledge, sometimes what you find is far more than you can handle.

02:54:20.600 And that reflects just in nature as well with our understanding of, you know, you go and you

02:54:25.800 experiment with things and a plant which has no moral compunction with ending you ends you

02:54:34.140 because of your lack of knowledge and understanding so the exploration of the boundaries beyond our

02:54:41.020 mind is just as dangerous as say like living in the natural world and trying to go further out

02:54:47.180 and it gets even more complicated when we start constructing and making things the the chemical

02:54:53.260 based laboratory based things now we're doing things that we're creating our own hemlock out

02:55:00.540 in the world if you will um you know fentanyl would probably be a good example of that um

02:55:07.260 and so we need to have the moral guidance of saying you know this is bad this is not good and

02:55:13.580 we you know should not explore in these uh realms with reckless abandon so um

02:55:21.420 Um, yeah, I just, I, I, I think ultimately that all correlates, um, to the expansion

02:55:29.460 of spirituality, the expression of the mind going beyond the borders of ourselves.

02:55:34.740 But it's just, uh, me basically stating a processes through observation that I have

02:55:42.840 seen and um they all have significance uh culturally um and we can see it happen in real time

02:55:51.880 perfect example two would be like the appalachian mountains with um moonshine and that correlation

02:56:01.180 it's far beyond just simply a liquor it is a kind of spirit of rebellion it is a connection to

02:56:10.280 ancestral ties there's so much involved in these sacred elixirs and substances but far too often

02:56:22.460 the people that proclaim that the gods are just archetypes are the same people that will proclaim

02:56:30.020 that these substances are the reason for religion and i think it's the opposite the archetypes are

02:56:37.680 reflections of the gods. There's just another way for us to kind of map out our relationship.

02:56:44.220 And these substances are like, I want to travel, but the car isn't the reason why I travel. The

02:56:56.700 car is a product of my desire to expand and to grow. But the gods, again, teach us over and

02:57:05.460 over and over again, that things cannot be done with reckless abandon, and that we must have this

02:57:12.220 discipline to press forward slowly. And sometimes these things are left to people who better

02:57:21.320 facilitate this. In our culture, the magicians, the priest classes, etc. But even they too can

02:57:31.500 have great folly in, in exploring and reckless abandon. So I think that's where all of that

02:57:39.520 comes from. I just drug in the mushroom and cannabis part as well, but I think it all has

02:57:46.900 that relevance. Yeah, my understanding of

02:57:51.780 the spirits is that it is the distillation process it is reducing something to its most

02:58:04.620 essential element to its the spirit of it to the thing that's fundamental and i think that that is

02:58:11.840 why there's the overlap um but yeah all the things swan said just that little linguistic bit

02:58:19.620 Svon

02:58:22.840 what does

02:58:24.180 Nithya mean

02:58:27.240 specifically in reference

02:58:29.120 to Frigg

02:58:30.060 Nithya 1.00

02:58:32.840 do we have that spelled out

02:58:35.380 yes

02:58:36.680 N-I

02:58:37.800 N-I 1.00

02:58:39.660 N-J-A 1.00

02:58:41.980 so alright

02:58:43.600 it means relative

02:58:46.960 of or

02:58:48.620 descended from so I think it says Nidhya Frigya in the text means like kin of Frigg or children

02:59:01.580 of Frigg descendants of Frigg um I say that not because I'm super genius I say it because I've

02:59:10.340 seen this in the queue for a while and looked at it on the side and looked at the etymology on the

02:59:14.740 side

02:59:15.060 and we we see this with uh uh even lady seaf and her connection to the word uh uh sib or sibling

02:59:27.020 and it it's no i don't i don't think it's a mystery the the goddesses are deeply connected to

02:59:34.020 whole culture and the family and so the connectivity of the goddesses in relation to

02:59:41.400 well, relation is often used in the verbiage to emphasize their heavy placement within family

02:59:52.440 culture. So something else that I've neglected for overly long on this, I apologize, I saw it

03:00:00.500 earlier, but we got lost in some of the discussion. GW Farnsworth, you are awesome and we appreciate

03:00:08.600 you and your generosity is amazing. It continues to impress. Thank you so much. He donated $25

03:00:16.120 each to the pavilion and towards paying off Sigurheim itself. So thank you so much. Much

03:00:24.180 appreciated. I'm sorry it took me so long to acknowledge it. Our next question question.

03:00:32.480 Speckinger Svahn, how important do you think the blood of Kvassar is for a musician?

03:00:38.600 uh indispensable i think that the inspiration so i'm not a musician uh i've done more like

03:00:49.700 speaking and uh poetry and things like that but when i see uh the construction of music and you

03:00:58.840 can just that that outpouring of emotion uh whether through a tool or whether through oratory

03:01:08.460 I think it all is correlative, but I think it's worth understanding that Lord Clossier is in a different form. He's no longer bound in shape, but he permeates. He permeates through, and he was disseminated into the world by Lord Odin.

03:01:34.580 And I don't think that's accidental in the story either, that his inspiration is measured out by one of the gods of cosmic order.

03:01:43.860 So, again, it's heavily emphasizing the power of word and inspiration and ecstatic magics that pervade in our culture.

03:01:59.480 And I think that that applies just as much to music.

03:02:02.720 But I also think that Lord Bragi is a culmination of that power, being the son of Lord Ovin.

03:02:14.740 And the fact that the blood of Kvasir is won from Gunlov, who her name means the battle song, all of this correlation.

03:02:30.960 I don't think that there is any separation, that they're all like muscles in the body, interconnected.

03:02:40.460 So looking to Lord Bragi for inspiration or access to inspiration, and to Lord Odin for access to inspiration,

03:02:51.660 And that Kvasir himself is in this state that pervades beyond, and he is attainable because of the gods and because of Lord Odin's sacrifice and will to take that which they had formulated and now is spread apart and layered.

03:03:17.860 I think our ancestors too, they didn't see it as like, oh, this happened once. And now the guys who are awesome poets just happen to be walking along and they got one of the drops from the meat of poetry. I don't think they looked at it that way in a literal sense. No, they were talking about transformation. 0.54

03:03:36.120 Just like as Al-Syreguly was talking about spirits and distillation, this process is all metaphorical for the processes of what I would say is divine inspiration towards both expressing your soul and perhaps calling out to the folk to return to the gods or to give worthship to the gods.

03:04:02.480 But that's not it alone. Obviously, you know, we don't have these rules like in Judaism and or in Christianity where it's like you can't sing or dance except in praising this one particular God.

03:04:18.100 But instead, I think the gods revel in us exploring our emotions. I think they revel in us expressing and presenting our emotions. The very gifts that they gave us and the very breath, the on in singing is a celebration of those gifts that the gods gave us.

03:04:45.880 And it would be an insult for us to not express them and explore them.

03:04:51.600 But again, we must do all things with a seemly mind and we must consider honor and we must consider nobility in what we do.

03:05:01.340 But I think they're deeply, deeply connected.

03:05:03.740 so next up is it our duty to talk about the folkish faith to those who are christian or

03:05:18.640 is it something that is more personal and should be left alone yes it is absolutely our duty to

03:05:25.780 advocate for

03:05:27.480 excuse me for our people's returns

03:05:31.980 in the faith of our

03:05:33.040 blood

03:05:34.280 that said

03:05:37.960 I don't think it is our duty to

03:05:39.800 be obnoxious or to put them

03:05:41.900 to the sword if they don't like

03:05:43.720 do that right now that's just not

03:05:45.840 where we're at

03:05:46.680 but too often

03:05:49.340 because your question is juxtaposed

03:05:52.220 to or is it more personal

03:05:54.120 and should be left alone

03:05:55.780 No. It's not more personal. It should be left away. If people express that, like, okay, whatever, shut up, I'm not interested, then fine. Leave it be. You don't need to press it, but we should never be at a place where we're...

03:06:13.660 sorry guys we should never be at a place where we're uncomfortable

03:06:25.240 sharing something that we're excited about

03:06:29.320 I'm sorry uh or something that we're proud of um

03:06:35.080 and we should absolutely as a duty to our gods mention this to other people especially people

03:06:45.840 we care about but mention this to other members of our folk that haven't found their way home

03:06:52.520 it's a really important thing to do and one of the problems is so many of our people

03:07:02.400 don't know about it. So there's a difference between you making yourself a jerk by constantly 0.98

03:07:08.220 being obnoxious about it and mentioning it and celebrating it, being proud of it, being, 0.99

03:07:15.000 you know, mentioning it to those that might want to know. We have to do that. That's how people

03:07:24.600 find out about this. I wish that someone had told me much sooner than I found out.

03:07:29.260 um i've mentioned time and again the biggest uh impediment of us growing faster than we are

03:07:39.820 is that so many of our folk have no idea we exist so yeah go out tell people um

03:07:48.220 and it's not just a nice thing to do i do think that's our duty to make those opportunities to

03:07:55.240 create that opening and to share what we know that's so important and invite our folk to come

03:08:03.080 home. Absolutely. Svon, you have thoughts on it? I mean, nothing beyond what you said. I think that

03:08:14.420 the biggest thing, and I was speaking to one of my clients about it today. He is folk, but he is

03:08:22.260 not ours true and i said that i have no uh proclamation from my holy gods to somehow convert

03:08:31.480 you or uh you know put you under boot because you are of a different mind but it is good for me to

03:08:42.880 tell you the things that you have forgotten our folk have forgotten so just as the gods want to

03:08:51.620 see us govern ourselves, create societies, they also, too, want us to remind those who have

03:09:01.300 forgotten. And I think that that's important, that we should. We should through story, we should

03:09:07.080 through by example, by deed. We're doing it in many different ways. But at the end of the day,

03:09:13.840 expressing that they remember is important now if they reject that's fine you know we are of

03:09:24.780 a faith of wisdom and we know that sometimes people reject that which they most intimately

03:09:32.220 are are battling with and you know if they are looking at the faiths like say the the faiths of

03:09:39.560 middle east in in uh christianity and they're battling with these concepts but they can't quite

03:09:46.120 wrap their head around the concept of the multiplicity of the gods um the ecosystem of

03:09:53.400 heaven and the middle world and and the processes and the circulatory system of yggdrasil that's a

03:10:00.120 lot of stuff to kind of get it starts with just little seeds and you should always move towards

03:10:08.680 that now the bigger thing too is bearing in mind folk who are not ausitru are in the utgard but

03:10:17.880 the utgard is not always bad it is there are those who are neutral and those who are antagonistic

03:10:24.920 anything that tries to destroy the order of our faith we must defend it it is our duty to maintain

03:10:33.400 our order, and that which comes from the outside. But if there is neutral, then speaking to them

03:10:42.860 and affording them the civility that they deserve, that's totally within our faith and our spectrum.

03:10:53.020 so i just want to say this there's squabbling in the chat about cannabis and other stuff i will

03:11:05.920 answer the question when we get to it please hold on and don't let whatever the passions of

03:11:12.140 the discussion are in the way until we can actually talk about it because i do want to

03:11:15.760 get your question when it comes up were the fey fairy folk demonized by Christians as evil demons

03:11:30.840 I think that the fey and then wild gods like I think of the fey and then wild gods like pan 0.94

03:11:39.840 Yeah, absolutely. Any entity that is external to Judaism was demonized by the early Christians and Christians today. 0.94

03:11:57.780 That's how that works. 1.00

03:11:59.280 So that would certainly include the fae. It would include, you know, any and all other gods besides Yahweh. And, you know, it would include your ancestors in the form of Alvar or Desir.

03:12:18.100 It would include, you know, any ghosts, any literally anything that's not angels or saints or Yahweh or Jesus, I guess.

03:12:32.980 Anything other than that is necessarily demonic in their in their expression.

03:12:39.740 anything worldly because the the fae or or the lanvetier um pan in particular in relation to

03:12:56.020 like herds and the flock and anything that is worldly is so rejected that it is immediately

03:13:04.540 demonized. There is such a rejection to the vitality of procreation. It's socially acceptable

03:13:18.600 in Christianity at certain purviews, but it is not acceptable in others. And then I think

03:13:26.980 every religion including ours has you take it too far if you let it rule you if you let it

03:13:36.080 consume you that's bad and that can apply to all things not just worldly things but it is it's

03:13:43.560 particularly visceral for christianity and that's why they you know they have their demons uh or

03:13:50.520 the shadim is actually what they're called but they use the latin uh word in the greek word

03:13:56.940 daemon um you know they're they have horns they have hooves they have uh earthly animalistic um

03:14:08.460 appearances and uh they i think in the northern realm so that was predominantly around the

03:14:15.340 mediterranean but in the northern realm it started off with a demonization but that eventually led

03:14:20.620 to what i would call like a minusculization of the spiritual world uh where the tomta and the

03:14:28.780 the uh the bogey or bogart um yeah they became seen as small and little and you know just because

03:14:36.300 they can't get rid of it so they're gonna just turn it into something whimsical and um same with

03:14:43.100 the troll the troll is probably the closest linguistic title we have for uh what would

03:14:49.660 be comparative to like a demon in a christian sense of like a a monster or beast that can do

03:14:57.820 these kind of same or has these same malicious intentions um but everyone thinks of like a naked

03:15:04.940 little being with a gemstone in its belly button and that's that info infantilization the idea is

03:15:12.540 to make everything that is of the old religion seem childlike and an infantile while um

03:15:22.380 theirs is is intelligent and uh correct and true so um i i have to take one moment

03:15:34.780 okay

03:15:35.100 Okay, so do Alvar include fairies, Tompton, gnomes, sprites, fae, veiter, leprechauns, et cetera?

03:15:54.660 Yes, absolutely they do.

03:15:56.260 what is the afa's stance on cannabis consumption i've heard of ritualistic drinking is there any

03:16:08.560 aspect to cannabis too so the pot question i realize we have an international audience

03:16:19.420 so realize that we're based in the united states and i'm sure the rules are different

03:16:25.460 for different stuff different places no inherently the afa has no anti-cannabis stance or really a

03:16:35.220 pro-cannabis stance um our stance on drug use is the afa is not going to encourage anybody to do

03:16:47.860 anything illegal wherever they're at that is strange in the united states when it comes to

03:16:53.540 cannabis because many many states now it's legal and perfectly fine but federally is a different

03:16:59.540 story and that creates a lot of strange hurdles but fundamentally no the afa doesn't have a big

03:17:06.340 um stance on cannabis particularly uh other than you know if you're going to do something that's

03:17:15.140 legal where you're at fine uh don't if you're at afa events and whatnot don't you know blow pot

03:17:24.420 smoke in people's face that don't like it because it's still kind of a something a lot of folks

03:17:30.020 aren't necessarily comfortable with but you know you if you're grown and it's legal where you're at

03:17:35.860 we don't have a big stance on that um and also true we push a lot more personal responsibility

03:17:41.700 and whatever the argumentation on the side and i caught a little bit of the discussion

03:17:46.980 no i i don't think that we have any case to be made that it's dangerous or whatever else that

03:17:55.540 way uh i think that what is important is it's kind of an emergent issue you have some people

03:18:02.900 who are in their 60s 70s 80s that it's the worst thing in the world because they've been told their

03:18:08.580 entire life that was this horrible thing have a little bit of grace to understand where those

03:18:14.340 people are coming from there's younger people that have never really had that message to find

03:18:19.140 themselves in their 20s that don't get what the rest of us are talking about he is a man in my

03:18:23.940 40s you know all growing up it was the worst thing ever it was gonna yes gateway drug gonna do horrible

03:18:29.700 things to you and then all of a sudden no never mind just kidding guys we just made all that up

03:18:36.100 well it's kind of hard to reshuffle some of people's programming on it so let's have a

03:18:40.420 little bit of grace with each other on knowing that people come from different places with that

03:18:45.940 but no we don't have a big stance on cannabis so we don't have a lot of evidence of cannabis use

03:18:53.380 in our lore in our history we do a little bit more when it comes to psychedelics

03:18:58.420 and again psychedelics are largely illegal most places so we're not encouraging you to do that

03:19:05.860 but conceptually there's a case to be made for their spiritual use um

03:19:14.340 in what you're saying with the cannabis as far as like comparing it to drinking rituals

03:19:19.540 some of the same things might apply one of the fundamentals to um drinking ritual in an

03:19:27.300 house true context that it socially lubricates i mean we all know that alcohol does that but it

03:19:34.220 breaks down walls that would prevent proud men from interacting with one another in a way that

03:19:43.880 leaves them vulnerable. It allows for a situation of shared vulnerability and shared susceptibility

03:19:52.040 to a deeper and different level of thought on some stuff. And I think, and I say this

03:19:59.600 to somebody who's never, not that I've never tried cannabis, but I've never had, I've never

03:20:05.920 had i've never had much of an experience with it um growing up in alaska it was like you know this

03:20:15.360 big thing oh they've grown this awesome weed up there or whatever that never did much for me it

03:20:21.760 made me hungry one time um and then uh you know a few years ago a friend of mine had a vape pen with

03:20:30.720 like very distilled from a dispensary cannabis and that again i didn't get a spiritual experience

03:20:37.920 out of it but i couldn't move like my entire body would not respond to my brain signals to it it was

03:20:45.680 a very strange experience but i've never had any like that in the middle where you're more

03:20:52.480 contemplative that's just not been my experience but i don't you know suggest that couldn't be the

03:20:58.000 case but no the afa has no particular the afa certainly doesn't have a ritual position for

03:21:06.240 cannabis use in the same way that it does alcohol but it also doesn't have a particular stance one 0.99

03:21:12.560 way or another other than don't be the stereotypical pothead that's dumb and lazy and 0.91

03:21:21.280 slovenly and whatever but i don't think most people who use cannabis are that guy i think 0.99

03:21:26.480 that guy is a caricature of the very worst scenario of that um so you know you're an adult make

03:21:33.360 responsible choices i think is the afa stance on most of those things swan i skipped a question

03:21:40.400 because you were gone that requires a little bit of nuance from matt and swan today my daughter

03:21:48.640 attended an interfaith church service at her scout's summer camp primarily to spend time with

03:21:54.960 her friends while i understand the social pull at her age i wonder that such blending blended

03:22:01.120 gatherings may blur the reverence for our ancestors gods and folkways how would you advise a mother

03:22:09.360 in approaching this with a teenager additionally how might i gently encourage more recognition of

03:22:15.920 ancestral faiths within future scout church services. Svon, as the father of a teenager,

03:22:27.200 what say you on this subject? I think the biggest point is identity. I think that a lot of folks,

03:22:36.000 maybe boomers gen x um early gen y millennials can think back or look at information of

03:22:47.440 um say the native americans and go oh wow so nice or it's amazing or or whatever

03:22:55.280 that the these people have this identity they have this connection to their ancestors and they're

03:23:02.240 celebrating. The same would go for us. I would implore you to tell your children this is our

03:23:13.740 identity. This is who we are. This is what makes us different from other people. And it goes all

03:23:21.360 the way back. It's not about necessarily the comparison, the correlation, whether it's

03:23:34.160 ancient songs for a certain group of people or ancient dances. It is the same for us that these

03:23:41.440 sacred rites, these communions with the gods holding the horns make us uniquely us and

03:23:51.340 I think that in an age where identity, especially amongst folk children, is demonized, we should go the opposite direction and encourage our children to embrace their identity, the identity that is handed down to them by their ancestors and that they in turn will hand down to their descendants.

03:24:18.220 I think the biggest thing that I have encountered is not so much the influence of others, but modernity in and of itself.

03:24:29.100 And the fact that many young children who are kind of getting spread out into the monoculture of modernity, they're the ones that are also fighting for identity.

03:24:48.520 And there is also just a certain sense that your children are going to try to do their own thing and find themselves, but maintain that beacon that this is our identity.

03:25:04.720 This is our people's faith.

03:25:08.240 This is our people's way.

03:25:11.100 No matter what level, whether it's rebellion or if it's just a simple sense of I'm going

03:25:16.940 to do things differently, which is a trait that our people have, I think eventually they

03:25:23.360 do run back to an understanding that no, no, I am of these people and this is my people's

03:25:31.660 way.

03:25:35.680 yeah um a couple of thoughts i think you know putting your foot down and forbidding it is

03:25:42.400 probably not the best way that's probably going to create a resistance and a um it's going to

03:25:51.120 probably have the opposite effect of what you want and i think it creates and makes something

03:25:55.040 a big deal that doesn't happen i also wonder and i feel like an interfaith and it depends on where

03:26:06.640 you're at and what part of the country and what the situation is but an interfaith thing is lame 0.64

03:26:13.760 and it's kind of the worst of all the worlds because it's not wholehearted um so i don't 1.00

03:26:20.720 really think inclusive religious services like that are good in general i think they're the worst

03:26:26.880 for everybody um i remember when uh i was with this this black guy that was bouncing with me named 0.90

03:26:36.000 Ahmad and uh Nelly was teaming up with Florida Georgia Line and making country rap and we both

03:26:44.720 just looked at each other and like no when nelly's singing country music we all lose

03:26:50.160 like you don't have to blend the two things like it just makes it the worst of both worlds so um

03:27:03.520 i wouldn't push that other than

03:27:07.040 if asked and when it comes up you know i would what i would avoid it there's a fine line between

03:27:19.920 forbidding something and refusing to approve something i don't think it's okay and i would

03:27:27.360 not say it's okay under any circumstances but me not endorsing it is not the same as

03:27:34.880 forbidding it or making it a huge deal like hey what do you think about this well i'd prefer you

03:27:40.960 didn't um i know you got time with your friends in other situations but i think as as a matter

03:27:48.640 of loyalty to the icer i wouldn't want to attend a a church service not devoted to their worship

03:27:57.200 and i think that that's probably what i would suggest on that front on your second one about

03:28:02.880 more recognition of ancestral faiths

03:28:08.320 i would make sure that your children have the option not to do the religious stuff that the

03:28:17.360 others are doing but what i wouldn't do is try to ruin something for everybody else and that's

03:28:23.920 what i think we need to be really cautious of you've got a scout troop and 99 of them are christians

03:28:30.000 let them have their christian service and do your own thing when you have time to do that um trying to

03:28:42.960 trying to facilitate something where everyone gets what they want what they want is good

03:28:48.960 but sometimes when people can't get that they try to facilitate so nobody gets what they want

03:28:55.760 and i don't think that's good um i don't think stopping everyone else from a sincere petition

03:29:03.840 participation participation in their faith is beneficial what i think is important and

03:29:11.680 i have no i haven't interacted in the scouting system since sixth grade so i don't know um

03:29:19.280 Um, but if it comes up, I would be very open that you and your family are out so true and

03:29:27.240 explain what that means.

03:29:29.300 I would never shy away from that.

03:29:31.340 And if there are projects or merit badges or things relating to faith, I would enthusiastically

03:29:39.980 do those under an, an out so true, um, interpretation of them and, you know, proudly participate

03:29:48.340 in that. And I think that that might go a long way. I would only really worry about advocating

03:29:55.120 for stuff if in some way your child was being pressured or made to do something against our

03:30:01.980 faith. But again, those are my thoughts from a great distance and not really knowing some

03:30:08.040 of the specifics. So that might vary depending on your circumstances. And the last question for

03:30:16.220 night. If I had religious feelings, I would want them to be for Alcetree. I don't think my feelings

03:30:23.280 are unique. How did our ancestors deal with a lack of any religious faith? Svan, what would be your

03:30:31.540 response to that? So one of the big points, and I think Hilda Davidson talks about this, is

03:30:42.800 the negotiation of the place in the world was left up to the the person who is the being of will

03:30:54.600 and we spoke about that earlier so you are a being of will your your soul is being projected

03:31:01.620 into the world through your will and uh so there's that sense of freedom now i don't mean it in the

03:31:09.900 just nobody can tell you what to do or you know that's not the point of that is once you lock

03:31:16.140 your will to something it is incumbent upon you by honor to uh continue to do it it's so uh it's

03:31:25.260 not about just i'm not going to do what people want me to do no it's it's your will and this

03:31:30.700 applies culturally across the board our ancestors saw that if someone had an even momentarily

03:31:42.540 an ill look there are many times in the sagas where um a warrior who loses family

03:31:51.740 or loses a loved one and can't understand why the gods would do this to them

03:32:00.700 um and they had a sour perhaps a sour look at the at the divine um it was generally seen

03:32:10.400 that our ancestors would say well you know that's the path they must walk um in negotiation with

03:32:18.420 the divine now i think it would be far more ludicrous to them if they were to say oh there

03:32:24.560 is no divine but you know it's much easier for people to say that now because they look at the

03:32:31.200 minutia of science as some sort of defense and that's because christianity is unique in its

03:32:40.000 deism where it creates this uh system nameless faceless un unapproachable everywhere all the

03:32:51.280 time everything judgmental you know deity without being able to look at any of the details as to

03:33:00.960 where and what and again or it's selective oh no no it's all love because we're focusing specifically

03:33:09.760 on this rabbi who's uh yeshua but no no he's not yeshua he's jesus and he's not a rabbi he's

03:33:16.640 that amorphous, it becomes very confusing. So I think that a lot of monotheism and modern day

03:33:27.080 Western Christianity has led our folk into a disillusionment and on top of that science and

03:33:35.980 has become kind of like this back and forth stick against. Whereas I think in Ausatru when we look

03:33:42.560 at science and we look at the majesty of the way the world is built, we see the gods there

03:33:50.700 and the intricacies. And we know that nothing in the universe works in its singularity and that

03:33:58.200 nothing is just simply sourced only from the masculine. There is masculine, the feminine,

03:34:03.260 there's push, there's pull, there's interaction. We see it in the gods, we see it in nature,

03:34:08.460 And it makes sense to us and we don't reject and we don't, um, toil with this conflict. But if you are a person who feels wronged by the divine, that their will has somehow overridden yours, you know, in our culture, the idea would be for you to rise up.

03:34:34.840 Not in a sense of, oh, I'm going to beat the gods.

03:34:39.640 But no, it's like, despite all hardship, I will arise.

03:34:45.940 Gods and ancestors be, you know, snubbed by this.

03:34:51.320 I'm going to rise.

03:34:52.680 And in truth, I think the gods do that sometimes.

03:34:55.120 They expect that in us to rise.

03:34:58.620 Because sometimes some of us are so hard-headed that we can't listen to the gods.

03:35:03.120 we have to experience things far outside of our comfort zone. But, you know, from a historical

03:35:11.700 sense, most of the time it was this person has a, does not have, it's like the opposite of

03:35:18.640 troth with the gods. They have a bad relationship. The gods have not sent them a good lot in their

03:35:26.600 life. And that is, you know, it's best not to talk about the gods around them. They are very,

03:35:32.500 very touchy about it um etc and it was seen as again it was just part of the ecosystem

03:35:41.460 of the way that they dealt with spiritual issues um but as we have gone you know a lot of people

03:35:49.780 say like oh you can't get into politics and be in an house of true house isn't about politics or

03:35:55.460 you know it's like that concept is like okay so our ancestors only did mono i mean uh monarchies

03:36:02.500 so we should all be monarchists no governance is the point and as our folk have encountered

03:36:12.020 a bigger understanding of the world that the gods knew we would they're watching to see us and how we

03:36:19.620 negotiate and act it's always a frontier it's not just a frontier physically that we go into

03:36:29.620 conquering and create the internal frontier as well as we move into the unknown about ourselves

03:36:38.820 and they're watching us and they want us to be honorable and that doesn't always indicate

03:36:48.980 that they need to complicitly be part of it but now is a unique time back then

03:36:57.540 everyone was also true the the the the uh conversion of of olaf tryggerson and all them

03:37:05.140 coming in and doing these things that was seen more as like a political thing it wasn't like the

03:37:09.540 power of uh jesus riding in on the poke surfboard uh shooting laser beams they didn't have that

03:37:19.140 like oh no no this was a political entity that was buying land taxing people utilizing marriage

03:37:27.940 it was causing issues and then on top of that it's like these people are abandoning the gods

03:37:32.980 of our ancestors the gods that we've known and and what does that mean what are the gods doing

03:37:40.020 and that's a natural thing i think that they were asking was why were the gods you know let this

03:37:45.860 happened but as we have in our understanding now the gods saw this happening and again the frontier

03:37:53.700 must be crossed these things must be learned i don't think that we are i know we don't have a

03:38:02.180 book that states that the gods are demanding of us to react or act or do these particular things

03:38:11.940 like in other religions so we are not bound by the strictures of um you have to act this

03:38:19.220 certain way but the gods want to they want to see us act they want to see us do that which

03:38:27.380 really guides our heart and that ultimately is is the same thing that a parent wants i know that

03:38:34.180 they use parentage as a an example all the time but they really don't it's it's it's an instruction

03:38:39.940 manual with parenting. But we know in reality, there are times when you're not going to be there

03:38:46.940 to instruct your child. And so you want your child to, that moment is scary, but they're going

03:38:54.200 to have to react. They're going to have to engage and they're going to have to utilize the gifts

03:39:00.940 that you gave them, even though you're not there to press the button or flick the switch or give

03:39:06.920 them the script and that's the make or break moment. And, uh, and, and they can come back

03:39:13.980 from it and all of those things. But, um, I think ultimately if you are battling or struggling with

03:39:23.020 faith, um, the world and the world around you, it can be very confusing. I think that you should

03:39:31.340 seek out, and I'm not speaking about other religions because again, you're going to get

03:39:36.620 somebody who is explicitly built on trying to convince you and convert you because soul winning

03:39:45.380 i have these booklets um from when i was younger of these uh like soul winning suggestions where

03:39:52.900 you just like uh once you get them to a certain point break out your bible and show them this

03:39:58.360 cool stuff to kind of yeah you know and sparkles and smoke and all that that's ridiculous

03:40:06.420 what you should do is seek the wisdom of wise people and ask them these questions and those

03:40:12.940 wise people are not going to be afraid of your confusion and and they're not also going to they're

03:40:21.320 not going to hate you for it because wise people know sometimes life and things are confusing

03:40:27.400 so when you have these questions and you reach out and you say i don't understand why the gods

03:40:32.180 or if the gods or what the gods and wise folk will tell you that's okay. That's totally

03:40:39.800 understandable. And that you must start small. You must start with that very little waves of

03:40:46.640 implement of will in front of you. And maybe you go your whole life doing that. But if you have

03:40:56.260 the chance and do partake in an understanding of seeing the great web of all of that

03:41:02.500 interconnectedness that those are the steps leading towards seeing the divine seeing how

03:41:08.320 they interact with us seeing how our ancestors interact with us and over time you you become

03:41:15.720 aware and it's it's not about uh proselytization it's not about uh you know being the jew in egypt

03:41:24.640 screaming from the mountain and throwing the book at you. It's not the way our faith works. So I

03:41:31.060 would say, take into consideration the words that you are told and the genuine nature

03:41:38.460 of this wisdom. And you start small and don't come at it with a knee-jerk rejection because

03:41:47.720 Our faith and the gods do not work in this kind of political apparata that might be the church or the caveat of the church.

03:41:59.220 Instead, the world around you is divine and the folk around you, many of them have pathways to help you find a relationship with the powers that are outside of you.

03:42:14.460 the gods your ancestors the land spirits they're all there it just might take time for you to get

03:42:22.540 there all right so that was a lot um first the how did our ancestors deal with that

03:42:44.460 it would be preposterous for us to have a detailed thing on how they deal with it because that's not

03:42:50.300 something that was written about or documented a lot we don't do know what occurred uh i forget

03:42:56.860 which saga it was but we talked about there's mention of somebody who doesn't place faith in

03:43:03.100 god's the only place is faith in his own hands or whatever so it was a thing we had people but

03:43:10.540 but it wasn't a religious smorgasbord.

03:43:12.440 You didn't have, like, people choosing different faiths. 0.92

03:43:16.160 But I think you always had people who were more connected to Al-Satru 0.78

03:43:20.400 and people who were not.

03:43:23.340 One thing that was important is the basic rituals

03:43:28.580 that prompted you with those around you and with society.

03:43:34.260 And I think this is a similar thing to Christians

03:43:36.760 that go to church on Christmas and Easter

03:43:40.300 and they celebrate Christmas and Easter

03:43:42.640 and they, you know, show up at people's weddings and funerals

03:43:47.520 and say the right things,

03:43:49.100 but have a wide variety of different beliefs.

03:43:52.960 That existed amongst our ancestors as well.

03:43:55.860 We have stories of Athanarick and the Goths

03:43:59.620 during his time struggling with an insurgent Christianity 0.70

03:44:04.660 amongst their folk.

03:44:06.760 And the big thing was, no, we're going to bring around this wagon.

03:44:10.020 You're going to have the communal feast celebrating our gods.

03:44:13.880 Are you going to share in our, you know, in our bloat meal that we're having or not?

03:44:20.560 Doesn't mean you have to have some deep abiding relationship with the gods.

03:44:24.600 You have to have a willingness to participate in the folk way of your people.

03:44:29.240 And I think that part was enforced.

03:44:32.120 Like, hey, get over here.

03:44:33.740 We're doing bloat. 0.99

03:44:34.840 you know, stand here and shut up and be present. Okay. Good enough. I think that was kind of a 0.98

03:44:42.420 social standard, but what I want to, I mean, that answers the question, but I think there's

03:44:48.880 a deeper implication of the question I want to mention about. Our gods have never had the

03:44:57.700 proposition that the abrahamists have of a complete submission wholeheartedly to all of the 0.97

03:45:08.640 things or else you will die or be tortured eternally or whatever their punishment mechanism 0.91

03:45:18.220 might be that's not present in house there's no expectation that day one you weren't house

03:45:26.680 true yesterday but today you saw this podcast and now you know now you got to be asked true so

03:45:33.720 you have to be 100 devoted to all of our gods and all of our goddesses

03:45:39.000 starting tomorrow or else that's not fair our gods aren't good good beings

03:45:51.240 treat people a lot more reasonably than that

03:45:56.680 What is invited is for you to approach the gods with a degree of openness.

03:46:05.440 Not that you have to immediately have belief, but what's really important is wanting to believe.

03:46:12.360 And I think that if you reach out to the gods, if you go to your altar and you make offerings, don't do it under any false pretense that you have some deep abiding belief, but say, hey, here I am.

03:46:32.280 I don't know if you guys are there or not.

03:46:35.360 As you said in your question, you want to be also true, or if you were religious, you would want to be also true.

03:46:42.360 And I think deep down, we all want to be religious, even if there's arguments in our head that prevent us or that hamper our ability to wrap our minds around religiosity.

03:46:58.680 but a lot can be gained just going in front of your altar and saying,

03:47:04.940 Hey, here I am. I want to believe here's some me,

03:47:10.760 here's some incense, here's a cookie, here's whatever I'm here.

03:47:16.500 I'm listening, you know, pale open or whatever.

03:47:21.780 And, and see an openness of mind and an openness of heart go a long way.

03:47:29.320 facilitating that initial connection what i think often helps people but not in every case but

03:47:37.640 something that is often helpful is starting with your ancestors

03:47:45.560 starting with i think inherently in the human condition

03:47:50.840 people believe that their dead loved ones exist beyond fail

03:47:59.120 when asked no people scientifically don't want to sound silly they won't try to justify it they

03:48:09.020 can't quantify it they can't make an argument they can't they can't science it but in their

03:48:16.460 quiet moments they talk to their ancestors

03:48:23.020 and that's very common they walk by a picture on the wall and like i love you mama i wish you

03:48:28.700 were here with me i you know that is common to the human experience when asked to justify it

03:48:37.260 we can't science confounds us you like oh no of course that's silly of course whatever

03:48:46.460 But we all do that because part of us knows that's a thing.

03:48:52.060 Lean into that.

03:48:54.040 Reach out.

03:48:55.040 Say, hey, I hope that you hear me.

03:48:57.220 I hope that you're there.

03:48:59.080 Here's an offering.

03:49:00.220 I remember you.

03:49:01.900 My mind and my heart are open.

03:49:04.460 That openness really goes a long way to let it take hold of you and build over time.

03:49:12.520 We talk about the gift cycle that's kind of fundamental to our worship.

03:49:16.460 making an offering and then being open to receiving their gifts is the start of that

03:49:25.040 we over complicate a lot of things we think we need to scientifically justify these things

03:49:32.320 I can't scientifically prove to you that there's Asgard and you know Odin sits on a throne in

03:49:41.100 valhall and does this and the i don't need to what i know is fundamentally true is

03:49:49.740 when i pray to odin and give bloke to odin someone hears me and i feel that to my core

03:50:00.060 and they bless me for being part of that

03:50:03.500 that I know that a thousand percent my ability to quantify it in acceptable peer-reviewed scholarly

03:50:14.900 journal terms doesn't negate that or or justify it it doesn't need to be justified it just is

03:50:24.800 don't get caught up you know how to interact and build relationships we all do we do since

03:50:31.940 babies before we have language we know what a loving touch is versus a cruel touch we know what

03:50:42.500 a kind sound of a voice is versus an angry sound of a voice you know how to begin to reach out to

03:50:50.900 other living things and extend the kindness and then to receive and feel a kindness from them

03:50:58.740 start there it really is that simple it doesn't have to stay that simple

03:51:04.180 but the spirit or the distilled essence of it is that simple so get back to that and i would

03:51:12.660 encourage you to reach out and see if you would like to be religious then try if you wish that

03:51:21.540 you were also true with an open mind and an open heart try to be also true for a bit and see how

03:51:30.420 that goes and that's what i would encourage that you do or anybody else who's listening

03:51:35.280 that finds themselves with similar thoughts or similar you know questions

03:51:40.740 but yeah i appreciate you guys all for being with us on the show tonight i appreciate everybody's

03:51:49.860 great questions. Spawn, thank you for imparting your wisdom to us. And then Nick, appreciate all

03:51:58.020 that you do. Thank you for everybody that donated this evening. We've had some generous donors and

03:52:04.140 we appreciate that. Next week, I will be on with our law speaker talking about an adulting topic

03:52:13.660 of his choosing that we're waiting to hear about so no doubt that'll be good and uh yeah till then

03:52:22.540 hail the ice here the folk hail the afa hail alexander rudd mills and remember victory never

03:52:31.340 sleeps good night everyone

03:53:01.340 Thank you.

03:53:31.340 Thank you.

03:54:01.340 Thank you.

03:54:31.340 Thank you.

03:55:01.340 Thank you.

03:55:31.340 We'll be right back.

Asatru Folk Assembly - July 16, 2026

7⧸15⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 210 - Prose Edda： Skáldskaparmál, Part 1

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