Asatru Folk Assembly - 7⧸9⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 157 - The Loyal Goths

00:00:00.000 Thank you very much.

00:00:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

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 Thank you.

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

00:03:13.140 So I mentioned a couple of times, this is an episode that we wanted to do with you guys

00:03:18.600 a month ago, but for the very best of reasons, we were not able to, due to the Savages' family's

00:03:28.080 increase by their first child. So I'm joined today by folk builder Chris Savage. He is our

00:03:36.940 folk builder for Michigan, and he is also our research extraordinaire and, I don't know,

00:03:50.960 all around great sources to talk about on this topic and a lot of our historical topics.

00:03:58.080 And as mentioned, I don't know, earlier in the, I guess, lead up to tonight's episode, and I was thinking about this.

00:04:11.620 our our audience and other Alcitru are in general are very often most familiar with the viking age

00:04:23.540 and you'll notice that the viking period and the conversion of scandinavian countries is where

00:04:32.340 many of our celebrated heroes come from and i'd say well and so a point about Alcitru that i

00:04:40.500 mention a lot i think a lot of people may be just joining us associated with the vikings and that's

00:04:46.260 when the sagas and much of our lore came to us it's the language and the imagery that a lot of

00:04:53.860 that lore is presented in and so i think it makes sense that that's a starting point and something

00:04:58.820 that a lot of folks are familiar with but our faith is as old as our race is and which makes it

00:05:06.740 you know thousands of years older than the viking period and it encompasses a lot more than just that

00:05:13.940 so i would say followed by the viking age you know practitioners of alsatru are most familiar with

00:05:22.820 somewhere in the second or third position anglo-saxon england and continental germanic

00:05:29.540 tribes a era in our history that i think our people are woefully unfamiliar with is the

00:05:42.020 lifetime expansion of the goths and the goths are a fascinating group of people their struggle

00:05:51.380 struggle against Christianity comes at a earlier stage than many of our other brothers and sisters

00:05:59.440 struggles. And we're going to talk a little bit about heroes in that struggle, that struggle in

00:06:08.460 general, and a little bit about the Goths and familiarize our folk a little bit with that this

00:06:14.760 evening. So I'm excited for that. Before we get started on all of that, I want to mention that

00:06:21.160 we have coming up here in a couple of weeks, Sigur Bloat at Sigur Hame in Jackson County,

00:06:27.120 Tennessee. Very excited for that. I will be there. Producer Nick will be there.

00:06:34.900 Chris is invited to be there and welcome to be there, but I do not think he will be there

00:06:38.680 this year. Yeah, we'd love to see you guys there if you can make it.

00:06:44.220 it is a really beautiful piece of property it's where we currently have these statues to our

00:06:52.960 founder Steve McNallan and his lovely wife Githya Sheila McNallan very proud of those

00:06:59.300 it's going to be the site for the AFA's capital and great hall there for events and AFA administration

00:07:09.360 And it's also going to be the site for Tearshoff.

00:07:13.620 So we invite you guys to come out for that.

00:07:15.480 It's going to be awesome.

00:07:16.420 We'd love to see you guys there.

00:07:19.640 As the flames in the picture might indicate, it will be hot.

00:07:23.400 It is the south in July.

00:07:25.140 I get it, but it's worth it.

00:07:26.800 It'll be great.

00:07:27.520 I will sweat with you.

00:07:28.680 It'll be fantastic.

00:07:31.080 And if you can make it, or if you can't, take advantage of going to Baldershoff the very

00:07:38.460 next month for Frayfaxi. That's at Baldershof in Murdoch, Minnesota, August the 22nd through the

00:07:45.900 24th. It's going to be a great weekend. I will be there. Other amazing AFA people will be there.

00:07:53.320 Hopefully you will be there and I look forward to meeting you guys or to connecting with folks that

00:07:57.980 maybe I haven't seen in a while. So it's going to be a great event. Get your tickets now. Talk to

00:08:04.440 any of our folk builders and they can get you all squared away. But yeah, go ahead and do that.

00:08:12.840 Another thing, like, share, subscribe anywhere you are currently looking at us or hearing the

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00:08:56.380 As always, tonight's show and all of our shows are largely question and answer driven.

00:09:03.800 So if you have questions about any topic, especially related to the topic of the evening, but also about anything else you want,

00:09:12.660 please feel free to ask questions in any of our chats when you're watching this.

00:09:17.220 But also, if you have a question at any time, vns at runestone.org.

00:09:22.660 send us your question we'll make sure it gets on the next program and gets answered

00:09:27.940 we answer all questions so if you ask a question and we're talking about something else it may

00:09:35.680 take a little while to get to it but we'll get to it during the program um other I don't know

00:09:44.340 other news and points of interest keeping you guys abreast of how things are going as promised

00:09:52.580 as soon as we got New York's Hoff all paid off, we were going to start immediately getting things

00:09:59.800 set up for Frey's Hoff. So I was on the phone with Witten Erickson today about this. A lot of

00:10:07.280 moving on the back end. The Erickson's have looked at three properties to consider for what we're

00:10:16.040 doing. We've got some very promising things in the works. Currently looking for funding

00:10:23.220 and look at a number of different options. Looking at people who can make substantial

00:10:37.180 loans that we would pay off in case anybody listening is interested in such. Please let

00:10:45.260 us know. But yeah, that's what we're looking at. If you are a person who would like to

00:10:51.380 do that, we can get that figured out. We pay off our Hoffs very quickly. And folks that

00:10:57.860 are interested in loaning us money for that, we do, you know, pay a competitive interest

00:11:02.500 rate to make that happen. Something to think about. Also, in the meantime, we are building

00:11:08.220 up a war chest as far as having down payment money. We've been working on that. People

00:11:13.920 have been very generous. It's currently sitting at $3,184. We'd like to see that increase as much

00:11:22.020 as we can get by the time we're fixing to make an offer on something. So yeah, those are multiple

00:11:30.060 ways you guys can help. Everybody has been amazingly generous so far. We really appreciate

00:11:34.720 it. You guys are awesome. And thank you to the folks that have donated and helped make stuff

00:11:41.900 happen but i'm very excited we got some really cool things in the works and we're we're moving

00:11:47.500 at a at a quick and very nice pace um also angela in new hampshire donated fifty dollars to folk

00:11:57.100 services thank you very much for that we appreciate you gw farnsworth donated 25

00:12:06.060 dollars towards our phrase phrasehoff war chest and another 25 to the victory never sleeps

00:12:12.620 funds we appreciate that we've got awesome donors we appreciate you guys everyone has

00:12:18.140 been very very generous to us um all right with that

00:12:33.180 so

00:12:37.740 chris if assuming that our audience has never heard of the goths before and you tell them

00:12:47.100 a little bit about who the goths are, where the goths come from, what the goths are in a historic

00:12:55.900 sense, not a hot topic sense. So before I go into that, just to plug, I am hosting a moot

00:13:03.740 in Michigan this Saturday. Email me at csavich at runestone.org. That's C-S-A-V-A-R-U-N-E-S-T-O-N-E.org.

00:13:13.500 if you are interested. There's still time. All right, Goths. So the Goths were, and it's

00:13:22.440 important, were, the Goths were a Germanic people that originated in southern Sweden

00:13:29.320 and moved out from there into Eastern Europe, southeastern Europe, modern-day Romania, before

00:13:39.080 moving from the west into europe properly i say they were because unlike most european peoples

00:13:48.680 today or just in general there's no one who identifies as a modern descendant of a goth

00:13:56.280 like if you are a german you can probably trace your ancestry back to the churiski

00:14:01.720 or the haruli or any number of germanic tribes not really so with the goths so their name goth

00:14:13.320 is cognate with the words god go the go far um it ultimately comes from a proto-indo-european word uh

00:14:22.520 to invoke from

00:14:26.520 I'm not making this up, meaning to pour, like to pour out.

00:14:33.520 You can find a lot of academic nonsense about what that means.

00:14:36.520 It means that they are the people who pour things out more properly.

00:14:40.520 They are the people who pour out libations.

00:14:43.520 When we perform bloat with a horn, when we pour out the horn at the tree, we are performing a libation.

00:14:50.520 So they were a people who named themselves in terms of their piety and religiosity, which is an important place to start.

00:14:59.520 If you look up what they were referred to as in the past, you get geets, glutones, goots, goths, goths, a whole bunch of terms that might have had small-scale meaning, but they're referring to wrong people, right?

00:15:17.520 In modern Sweden off the coast, the east coast, there is an island of Gotland. It is named

00:15:27.020 after these people, right? So there's an interesting question of why they called themselves the

00:15:34.300 people who pull libations. If you look at a lot of other Germanic tribes or groups,

00:15:41.100 tend to call themselves things like the sword people or the fierce one saxton comes from a term

00:15:48.700 meaning the people with this axis sax being a kind of court sword frank probably ultimately comes

00:15:55.580 from the term meaning the fierce one right so like the tough guys the sword guys so why are these

00:16:01.980 people calling themselves the ones who perform religion that's a good question there isn't a

00:16:07.260 good answer to it the goths held a place of prestige among other early germanic peoples

00:16:16.060 my theory is that perhaps they were and this is just my personal theory perhaps they held some

00:16:21.900 kind of position akin to like the levites with the jews like a subgroup that is just kind of priestly

00:16:30.780 in the eyes of other people in any event they were not uh unfond of war despite any kind of

00:16:38.140 priestly disposition that they may have had so around 100 a.d they start moving out of southern

00:16:47.820 sweden heading southeast they presumably you know go through gotland although gotland had been

00:16:55.660 continuously inhabited for 7 000 years by that point mark five by that point anyways

00:17:03.020 so they move out of southern sweden going across the the ocean there the sea into

00:17:10.700 the baltic states what is today latvia lithuania kaliningrad oblast and there's a lot of

00:17:19.740 um road and causeway that is archaeologically found dating to this time around 180.

00:17:28.780 a causeway is a kind of lifted up wooden road they kind of like on like wooden beams like this

00:17:36.540 and then in the like the little cross there's like wood to walk on it's how um the celts move 0.72

00:17:43.420 through swampy areas in britain for example they made these raised roads so these goths come from

00:17:51.660 southern sweden and they land in the baltic states and they immediately start developing

00:17:58.460 so i'm gonna run through gothic history really quick because as the ulceri gothi said they're

00:18:05.500 not really commonly known about people um before you do i want to make a note a little bit about

00:18:13.020 the naming so the same language tree that brings us goths from the proto-indo-european to pour out

00:18:27.980 libation in worship is the same root as um as our gothar use it's the same root as the word god

00:18:39.100 a lot of people just because maybe they hadn't you know given it much thought um the jewish god

00:18:47.500 whatever and i'm not sure what jews call like i don't know the hebrew word for a god

00:18:54.700 or gods generally but it's not god and their particular deity in specific is not named god

00:19:03.020 it's always funny when you say like oh my god and someone you know chastises you don't take

00:19:07.580 the lord's name in vain that's not that's not a thing his name is yahweh some folks would pronounce

00:19:15.500 it jehovah but uh that's a that's a hebrew thing the word god itself is a germanic and ultimately

00:19:23.100 an arian word and these roots all go back to the same source so these are a

00:19:29.980 people who chose to be identified for their holiness and their relation to our gods

00:19:40.060 so uh yes the word god itself actually means the one who is libated to and it's it's sort

00:19:48.220 of a a very general term in that sense because you can libate to an ancestor so i want to point

00:19:55.660 this out too and this is a this is the consequence of this show we go on these little rabbit trails

00:20:01.340 but i think they're really interesting in some of you may be familiar uh i have been really trying to

00:20:09.980 learn old norse and work towards that through the lens of learning icelandic but in the process

00:20:18.220 a lot of little seemingly very subtle things make a big difference.

00:20:23.140 When I was reading, I don't know, just early on in Ausatru,

00:20:27.240 there is the assumption that bloat comes from the word blood.

00:20:32.200 And it means like the blood of sacrifice.

00:20:35.780 And I can't say there's no etymological relation,

00:20:38.640 but the more direct root of bloat,

00:20:42.920 and it all depends on the, whatever you call it,

00:20:47.040 the little apostrophe over top of the O. Bloat without that does come from blood, and that's

00:20:54.800 what it means. That's literally blood. But bloat with the apostrophe on it comes from that idea of

00:21:01.640 a poured out libation. So the archaic, you know, the most fundamental of a bloat wasn't the taking

00:21:10.640 of life it was the pouring out of libation in worship of a deity a lot of people you know

00:21:18.560 thought that if someone wasn't performing an animal sacrifice like it wasn't a real bloat

00:21:24.560 and the research shows different which is really interesting that the act of bloat is much more

00:21:30.800 similar to our modern pouring out of mead than we had originally thought it was and it goes back to

00:21:36.880 to that, making a libatory, if you will, offering to the gods. Yes, so then god means the one who

00:21:50.620 is libated to. Gothar, gothi, githya, means the one who performs the libation in a certain sense,

00:21:59.360 but that word very quickly became to mean something like priest. It is actually attested,

00:22:05.040 a cognate is attested in gothic it's not just an old norse word right so there's a question of how

00:22:13.460 can we tell when these people were leaving um scandinavia and the one answer is archaeology

00:22:20.260 we can just look at when germanic culture starts showing up in the baltic states or what becomes

00:22:25.420 the baltic states but we can also look at the linguistics so scandinavian languages old norse

00:22:33.340 undergoes this thing called palatization where sorry front vowels get palatized

00:22:41.200 so like e becomes yep so as an example there's a word that I'm going to use

00:22:47.960 quite a bit coming up here the modern English pronunciation would be feed

00:22:52.160 alliterates with think rhymes with feed means race ethnos tribe etc in modern

00:22:59.660 English, this would be theed. In Old English, it was theodha. In Gothic, it was theodha. In Old

00:23:07.620 Norse, it's theodha, right? Theo, as opposed to theo, or theu, right? The fact that Gothic doesn't

00:23:17.360 display that palatization lets us date when Gothic splits off as a meaningful community from Old

00:23:25.660 norse because they literally start pronouncing words differently right and consistently differently

00:23:30.420 too so the goths move out of scandinavia about 100 ad-ish probably a little bit earlier but

00:23:39.580 around 200 ad they start showing up in eastern roman armies and just roman armies in general

00:23:48.160 So that demonstrates how quickly they moved from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe, to Greece, to Italy, if just as individuals.

00:24:01.180 So during this time, we are told that they were in conflict with the Allens, the Scythians, and the Sarmatians,

00:24:07.640 who are all Indo-Iranic peoples that lived in Eastern Europe.

00:24:14.340 the Ossetians in the Caucasus are the modern descendants of the Scythians.

00:24:23.700 So the Slavs do not show up here for about 500 years.

00:24:31.840 Slavs enter the majority of Eastern Europe starting in the 700s.

00:24:36.880 So there's a lot of ethnic groups in this area that are inhabiting places where we don't really expect them to be,

00:24:43.340 like illyria becomes croatia right so the first major conflict between the goths and the roman 0.60

00:24:53.280 empire is when the town of histria on the east coast of romania a greek colony gets attacked by

00:24:59.380 the goths in 283 it's around this time that the romans start doing this the romans had this fun

00:25:07.500 little dichotomy where they would break things up, like east-west kind of thing, and everything

00:25:13.920 that's on the east is just one thing. So they would say, oh yeah, there's Gauls and there's

00:25:18.280 Germanics. Scythians are Germanics there, right? And then they would say, oh yeah, there's Gauls

00:25:24.320 and there's Scythians. Well, Germanics get cloven down the middle. Oh, there's Germanics and 0.98

00:25:28.720 there's Scythians. Gauls are Germanics. If you look on a map, you'll see like Germania inferior 0.82

00:25:35.040 and Germania Superior.

00:25:38.160 Ex-inferior on a Roman map

00:25:40.260 means the Roman conquered whoever's. 0.74

00:25:44.220 Ex-superior means the unconquered whoever's, right?

00:25:49.600 So around the 240s, 1.00

00:25:52.640 the Goths start being recruited heavily

00:25:54.740 for the Romano-Persian Wars.

00:25:58.220 They gained honor in the Battle of Misichi.

00:26:01.280 That's how I presume this place is named.

00:26:03.440 so in 250 the gothic king cneva would conquer portions of central romania that were held by

00:26:12.720 the romans at the time he would then kill emperor decius in 251 and later be killed by auralian in

00:26:19.360 271 it's assuming cneva and cano vaugues are the same guy but it doesn't really matter

00:26:24.680 shortly after this they take to seaborne piracy in 253 they sack a number of cities including

00:26:30.860 byzantium like constantinople itself in the 270s they get involved in even more piracy they sack

00:26:37.740 byzantium again so then marcus claudius tacitus goes and he puts down the pirates in 276

00:26:46.220 so by 380 there starts to be this distinction between the thurvings and the groythungs

00:26:53.980 they're typically called west and east but it's really more like north and south

00:26:57.500 the Groifungs in the north the east and then the Thurvings in the south the west so what starts

00:27:08.520 this conflict between the Goths and the Romans and at this time there isn't a meaningful east-west

00:27:14.440 distinction in the empire which I'll get to later but what starts this conflict because

00:27:21.300 the Romans are hiring them but they're also engaging in piracy so what's going on here

00:27:26.340 so the romans had these two provinces illyria and dasha a lot of illyrians joined the roman army

00:27:35.440 and sort of just self-promoted as a clique culminating in constantine i don't know if

00:27:43.020 we have a fun epithet i'm going to call him constantine the traitor for whatever um constantine

00:27:49.480 is the kind of example of this as he is an illyrian ultimately an illyrian warlord who

00:27:54.120 takes control of the empire. There was another province called Dasha. Dasha was inhabited by

00:28:00.200 the Dachians. The Dachians fought back against the Romans. So the Goths are pushing into these

00:28:06.320 barbarian provinces that are providing a lot of manpower for the Roman Empire,

00:28:13.020 and that leaves those areas very open to colonization by the Greeks and Romans.

00:28:17.780 So when the Dachian soldiers leave Dasha, Greeks go in to farm that land. 0.75

00:28:22.580 so the goths are pushing into land that they want to settle that the greeks and romans also want to 0.92

00:28:30.920 settle in so at some point the romans and the goths enter into a tributary relationship where

00:28:37.240 basically the romans pay them to not invade you know eastern the eastern roman empire

00:28:43.840 philip the arab cuts that tribute as part of a general budget tightening in the roman empire

00:28:50.400 and so the roman friendly gothic tribes start being unfriendly then a funny thing happens

00:29:02.020 where a big roman army goes to put down the goths and then they all defect and join the goths

00:29:06.740 so then this guy decius as already mentioned he leaves illyria to go fight um philip the arab

00:29:13.440 elsewhere which leads to kniva the already mentioned gothic king filling this power vacuum

00:29:19.840 in Dasha. Like, all right, the Romans pulled out. This is our territory now. We're going to settle 0.63

00:29:24.340 this. The Romans don't think that just because they abandoned the land that it's not theirs

00:29:30.000 anymore. They send an army back. Some fighting happens. There's tribute. And the tribute goes

00:29:37.400 unpaid. In violation of a treaty, the Goths had been sending manpower to Rome to help fight. They

00:29:43.720 weren't getting paid for their men. So now they're back to being violent. The Romans fight back.

00:29:48.940 it's after that that we start seeing seaborne piracy presumably because the gothic leaders at 0.79

00:29:54.360 this point just say all right we're done we're not playing friendly anymore this is a hostile state

00:29:58.660 so it's here where the tale of the night kind of begins so in 306 constantine takes over 0.59

00:30:09.040 he has a bridge built across the danube in 328 and for clarity at a lot of it the danube is a mile

00:30:18.480 wide so he builds a bridge at like the one spot that's easy to cross constantine dies in 337

00:30:26.320 a year after his bridge or a year before his bridge was completed in 332 he has his son

00:30:33.280 constantine ii march into gothia gothia is a term used for this general gothic state in eastern

00:30:39.520 europe and constantine ii kills 100 000 gothic civilians in i mean i guess you could technically

00:30:47.360 call it genocide, he's attacking civilians to destroy a population. So the Goths end up swearing 0.68

00:30:56.520 a treaty of loyalty to the Romans, which becomes important in a little bit, but we're still going

00:31:01.100 through just a rundown of the Goths. So in 361, I'm just going to call him Julian the Pious because

00:31:08.140 I don't think we have a better epithet. Julian the Pious takes over. In 363, he marches for Persia, 0.93

00:31:14.140 with a large contingent of Gothic soldiers.

00:31:17.580 On June 26th of that year, he is betrayed by Christians in his army and assassinated. 0.55

00:31:23.200 And a guy by the name of Valens ends up taking power in the East. 0.74

00:31:26.560 The Huns show up in 375. 0.51

00:31:29.600 If you tuned in for the Volsunga Saga episode, the Huns show up there.

00:31:35.120 The Huns had actually been kind of moving into Eastern Europe for a while now,

00:31:39.160 but 375 is when they start showing up as like a military force.

00:31:44.140 In 395, Alaric leads a horde from Byzantium to Italy to gain fame and power by sacking Rome and then bringing all of the loot with him back to the Eastern Empire.

00:31:57.140 In 406, Attila the Hun is born. He takes power in 434. 0.53

00:32:02.140 So there's a big 30-50 year gap between the introduction of the Huns to Europe and Attila himself.

00:32:12.140 Attila dies in 453 of a nosebleed, which might have been a head wound.

00:32:17.660 It might have been a misunderstanding of internal bleeding of the throat caused by consuming huge quantities of alcohol, like vomit-inducing alcohol.

00:32:29.060 In 476, Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus, which is a fun name that means like the little Romulus Augustus, or like the little August one from Rome.

00:32:42.760 This officially ends any kind of Western Roman Empire that was left at that point.

00:32:49.860 within a century from this all goths with the exception of the visigoths in north africa

00:32:57.240 would be subsumed into a broader germanic identity like lombard or frank right so by 900 the goths

00:33:07.740 are referred to as a they used to be here people by western europeans they apparently continue to

00:33:16.300 exist in the crimea peninsula for quite a while afterwards there is actually crimean gothic

00:33:23.620 attested it's very poorly attested but it apparently existed um in the 1700s the russian

00:33:30.560 nobility were noting that the goths used to live in crimea but when they went on vacation to crimea

00:33:36.740 they could find no more goths which is kind of like that's one of those like very cute russian

00:33:42.260 things like the nobles are like trying to find this lost ethnicity while on vacation

00:33:47.220 how do you lose an ethnicity it's your empire right but so by 900 these people are gone

00:33:55.780 right so this is a tale that takes place over about 800 years and you know when you when you

00:34:05.140 make the cut off of when the goths become mostly christian it's only about three to four hundred

00:34:10.260 years that these people are kind of in Europe as historically active Asatru people. But while they

00:34:16.180 are there, they had a number of very interesting individuals. Do you want to introduce these

00:34:21.620 individuals, Ulceri Gauthier, sir, or do you want me to keep going? You're muted, sir.

00:34:32.940 All right. So that's a good place to pause for a second. I want to acknowledge a couple of

00:34:40.000 people here. Ronald Blake donated $100 to Folk Services. Thank

00:34:48.440 you so much. We appreciate you. Ronald Blake also bought us

00:34:53.620 five coffees. That's an additional $25 donation. Thank

00:34:57.240 you for that. Austin in Wisconsin donated $15 to Frasehoff

00:35:03.440 and $15 to the Baldershoff Steeple. So thank you for that,

00:35:09.400 austin and hello good to see you here and that's what we've got on that if you could

00:35:20.520 so

00:35:23.160 the proceeding was to give you guys a understanding of who the goths are where in the world this took

00:35:32.840 place and when this this took place before we get to the future we did have a question

00:35:39.320 about one of the people we've already mentioned so if it might be good to just clear that one up

00:35:44.840 at the least if this is owl of omens i'll answer that after the ulcerative he's done this is a

00:35:49.560 good place to start actually so yeah so what i want to tighten up on is the specific period

00:35:58.840 from the beginning of so you guys may notice and this is kind of a uh chris will get more

00:36:04.600 into this later but for a number of years now we've celebrated as one of our heroes

00:36:10.120 king athanaric and he is you know probably the biggest named celebrant in tonight's

00:36:20.280 discussions there's a number of other people surrounding him that were important and

00:36:25.480 instrumental in this struggle and uh if we could kind of i don't know go through i guess ending

00:36:35.800 at the end of his life and starting at the beginning of um

00:36:42.680 his father and i guess that ruling dynasty and kind of how leadership structure worked

00:36:48.840 worked in Gafia in the day. Can I answer Owl of Omen's question first before we get into

00:36:57.860 the Aorik, Ariarik, Athanarik lineage? Absolutely not. Of course you can. Help yourself. Go for it.

00:37:06.200 Okay, so real quick here. It's important to, since we're doing history from a Germanic perspective,

00:37:13.460 it's important to kind of back up and explain what the Roman Empire is because a lot of this

00:37:19.220 is taking place on the surface of the Roman Empire, right? So there was the city-state of

00:37:25.640 Rome and it would go out and bully other city-states and basically assume a position 0.55

00:37:32.720 of superiority of them that would amount to placing Romans and Roman clients in positions 0.61

00:37:39.140 of power backing them up with money but also the threat of roman military invasion and this was

00:37:46.900 more or less how the ancient mediterranean world worked you can see this in greece carthage also

00:37:51.620 did this the celts ironically did this the celts had city states with written constitutions circa

00:37:57.380 200 bc so what eventually happens is the city of rome and its economic power base gains so much

00:38:06.020 power that it just balloons out of proportion conquering carthage conquering greece these

00:38:13.060 places that have their own economic client patron networks and it gets this huge economic zone

00:38:20.260 and it's really unstable so what ends up happening is a big man by the name of uh gaius julius kaiser

00:38:27.060 he ends up assuming power his nephew uh who's also his heir augustus um octavian he takes power and

00:38:38.500 this creates the position of the roman emperor so up until diocletian what the roman emperor really

00:38:47.260 is is basically to give an american example imagine the u.s there's no federal government

00:38:54.400 There's just 50 states and all of their cities kind of trying to make things work. New York is the biggest city and the richest city, and we're going to pay a real estate magnate to go force Kentucky to pay taxes to New York by, like, threat of military might, personal military might.

00:39:15.460 so the roman emperor had to actually of his own money pay soldiers based in in simple terms right

00:39:25.440 so there was never much of a bureaucratic apparatus behind the emperor and if you look

00:39:30.560 at the list of roman emperors you see a lot of these ones like marcus aurelius um diocletian

00:39:38.060 philip the arab augustus tiberius nero um uh what's the the crazy one um claudius not that's

00:39:48.700 not the crazy one um you get the idea here it isn't until constantine where there's really an

00:39:56.620 imperial government to speak of as opposed to what amounts to a rich warlord stomping around

00:40:02.700 and paying local leaders to support me so when Constantine shows up what he does is he iterates

00:40:11.180 upon Diocletian's idea Diocletian had this theory of like okay what if we just take the economy

00:40:17.820 we get a bunch of nerds and we have them just grab it just hold it in place we can tinker with

00:40:23.660 things Constantine takes that idea and iterates upon it with a what we would now refer to as

00:40:30.700 ideology of economic central planning like what if we just made bread cost five dollars a loaf

00:40:36.560 it's illegal to sell it for more what if we just make it so if your dad was a fisherman you are

00:40:42.660 too it's illegal for you to be a blacksmith and he comes up with this big um imperial bureaucracy

00:40:51.160 the christian church and they the the diocese break up europe there's nowhere in europe that

00:41:00.280 doesn't have a christian diocese when constantine takes power because it is a government bureaucracy

00:41:06.580 christian clerics reported back to the emperor through a chain of command about a variety of

00:41:14.480 things right so when the goths show up what eventually happens is men like odoiker and

00:41:23.680 theodoric were jockeying for the position of general if not emperor in the eastern empire so

00:41:31.780 people can occasionally like the suggestion that odoiker was

00:41:37.940 asatru leaning i think that depends on what you mean by asatru he he would odoiker was an arian

00:41:46.600 but so is so is theodoric there are several like turnings of the wheel of cultural revolution

00:41:53.320 that happen. The Aryans were arbitrarily more similar in their social ideals to their

00:42:03.540 Asichu predecessors, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they had any particular

00:42:10.000 regarding like worshipping Thor or secret or in something. Now, as I mentioned, there was this

00:42:18.600 clique of Illyrian soldiers who had gained power in the east, culminating in Constantine.

00:42:26.140 The Arian Goths, and I'm skipping ahead greatly, but this sets the stage, because when we talk

00:42:31.320 about Ioric, Ariaric, and Ithanaric, they are in opposition to this. The Arian Goths basically

00:42:39.360 said, well, wait a minute, why are we letting these Greek dudes and whatever ethnicity Theodosius 1.00

00:42:45.880 is claiming to be, tell us what to do, why don't we just take over, right? The Byzantine elite 1.00

00:42:52.720 don't want that to happen, but they still want to use the Gothic soldiers to enforce their will, 0.55

00:42:58.540 hence why you get men like Odoiker, Theodoric, Alaric, who are ostensibly Christians invading 0.86

00:43:05.460 the city of Rome and looting it, and then going back to the Eastern Empire to do what they just

00:43:12.160 who have looted a Byzantine city.

00:43:14.160 What they're really doing is they are extracting wealth

00:43:17.160 from a city that is not under the control

00:43:20.180 of the Eastern emperor.

00:43:22.040 And it's important to remember that,

00:43:23.980 you know, we talk about like Byzantine

00:43:25.380 and Roman emperors at this point as like a,

00:43:27.520 it's almost like a holdover of terminology.

00:43:30.280 The Eastern empire should,

00:43:32.400 the empire west and east should almost be thought of

00:43:35.100 as a separate political institution

00:43:36.700 from the actual Roman Republic.

00:43:39.080 I know this is kind of rambly here,

00:43:41.140 But I think that Odoiker and Theodoric's conflict was just simple, pay your minions to fight each other so they don't fight you, right? 0.66

00:43:51.380 Which puts into position, what do the Byzantines want to do with the Goths? 0.68

00:43:54.900 They want to use them to fight their enemies and then butt them up against each other so that they don't fight the Byzantine Empire, right?

00:44:02.840 So there was a group of people who disagreed with that idea as the future of the Goths.

00:44:08.320 so as i said in what was it 332 uh yeah in 332 constantine has his son constantine ii march into

00:44:19.160 gothia and kill 100 000 gothic civilians what results is the i'm going to call him a king for

00:44:27.360 now the king of the goths or at least the thurving tribe a man by the name of aoric 0.93

00:44:33.500 agrees to a treaty of foeditas and that basically means that in return for special treatment the

00:44:44.080 goths would send a army to the byzantine empire to serve their needs the degree to which the foed

00:44:54.160 rati were actually under imperial control varies depending on when you are talking about

00:45:03.680 as time goes on they lose increasing control but what this really means is um okay constantine you

00:45:10.800 win we're your allies now the foederratas army that would be sent out was under gothic control

00:45:18.480 it would receive broad marching orders from the imperial government but it wouldn't actually be

00:45:25.640 managed by like a byzantine general so constantine would be like we're going to go invade persia

00:45:32.860 and so a bunch of goths would just have to show up as this separate army with their separate

00:45:38.360 baggage train to go invade persia right um so part of that treaty was also that the goths had

00:45:47.500 again, at least the Thurvings, had to send their sons, the elite sons, to Byzantium as hostages.

00:45:55.560 This is a very ancient practice. It's mentioned in the sagas. It's what Olaf, the Olaf Tryggvason,

00:46:03.880 I don't know if we have a fun epithet for him, he did that a lot. The Romans did that a lot. 0.95

00:46:09.200 You basically force your enemy to be your friend by kidnapping their children and then educating

00:46:15.860 them in your ways right so just to be to be fair on that that is a

00:46:24.980 amongst europeans the tradition of

00:46:31.460 family relationship being the building blocks of lasting peace and of governmental alliance

00:46:40.420 is a very ancient one so you would often find leaders find chieftains or kings making political

00:46:48.340 marriages they would marry the daughter of neighboring kings to cement alliance another

00:46:54.740 way of doing that and again i'm giving you the best case like the optimistic scenario

00:47:02.340 we'll bond by exchanging our children so that they can get raised in the noble court of a

00:47:07.780 neighboring people and learn you know the wonderful stories and traditions of that people so that when

00:47:14.100 they go home and rule their country they will have a insider's perspective on their friendly neighbors

00:47:25.220 as you can see and as is presented here and as is probably more often than not the case 1.00

00:47:30.580 cool I have your sons so if you break the peace with us I'm going to kill your children and 0.95

00:47:37.780 What was, and this goes to a question in the chat too, but something else was very important is up until, you know, up until the Napoleonic era, so much of government was basically the king's family writ large and his family's personal situations. 0.98

00:48:03.200 You could very easily go to war or not go to war based on, you know, positives or negatives towards the king's children or the king's relatives.

00:48:16.060 The family structure was what bound society, not just in a theoretical sense, but in a very, very tangible sense.

00:48:24.700 And so this is a part of that that we certainly see in the empire is these hostages very often are raised very well. It's very much a gilded cage. They have servants. They have the best tutors. They have all the finer things.

00:48:41.920 they can't come and go as they please but they get to feel as close like they can and often this

00:48:50.480 can end up with them having you know positions of authority in the neighboring nation that they're

00:48:55.360 entering the empire and to be clear here like yes this is a bit of a a hostile friendship if you

00:49:04.720 you will given how big the power differential between constantine and aoric is but this is a

00:49:11.940 very old very very old like proto-european step herder old tradition of when a boy comes of age

00:49:20.420 he either gets kicked out of the house or his dad sends him with his uncle to go learn like the ways

00:49:26.660 of being a man because the uncle will beat the snot out of him if he's if he gets uppity in a 0.83

00:49:32.060 way that the father won't right and sending your and then like in the roman republic sending your

00:49:39.160 child off to be raised by your brothers if you are the father right was just a thing you did

00:49:45.500 right it gets him meeting other people it gets him out of the house it gets him educated it

00:49:50.880 creates a relationship that is a bit uh like he's now friends with his uncle who is helping him

00:49:59.660 as opposed to his father who has like other rights and duties to his child you get the idea here

00:50:05.480 so it's not as if this is entirely like the word kidnapping i used that's not correct that has like

00:50:12.820 modern connotations that's a little much but this isn't necessarily something that the goths

00:50:18.520 themselves would have been unfamiliar with it's just you know like we should be buddies says the

00:50:23.680 guy holding his sword to your throat you know so aoric is the leader of the

00:50:32.980 serving tribe that word tribe has a lot of anthropological baggage attached to

00:50:41.020 it it comes from the Latin tribus which is different from a trip us very much

00:50:47.540 so um the 3b were the three ethnic groups that made up the original city-state of rome so they

00:50:57.140 were the was it like the romans the latins and the sabines or something like that and romulus is like

00:51:03.540 all right y'all don't want to hang out with each other pick a guy from amongst your own number

00:51:08.980 who's going to report on your ethnic groups not issues and then he's going to report back to me

00:51:13.380 with them. So these institutions developed into sort of ethnic sub-states in the Roman Republic,

00:51:23.140 the tribes, and if you look at them they actually had a lot of internal organization.

00:51:28.580 The comparison to a sub-state is really quite apt, like they had their own militaries and foreign

00:51:34.820 policy. This term ends up at some point coming to mean primitive and inferior political institution

00:51:43.600 probably around the time of colonialism, and that's not really apt here. The gothic

00:51:51.840 sedate at this time, at least the Thurving one, seems to have been a relatively sophisticated

00:51:58.320 institution simplistic compared to the byzantine empire but it's not like these people were

00:52:05.940 ooga booga savages living in the woods now granted they don't appear to have had a road

00:52:11.940 a word for paved road but at the same time why do you need a paved road if you have a wood road

00:52:18.460 right or you have like tracks cut through the forest right so there is a degree of technical

00:52:25.800 lack of sophistication coming from the goths at this time but you also have to remember that at

00:52:32.420 the same time that aristotle was writing about how in accordance with their nature and demeanor 1.00

00:52:37.920 as given to them by heavenly zeus the germanics are too cold and as such are quite stupid 0.99

00:52:43.740 the greeks were importing surgical tools from the germanics like if he wanted to perform surgery in 0.99

00:52:50.180 athens you did so with a scalpel made by a germanic blacksmith right chain mail i don't know if it's

00:52:56.440 fair to say the germanics invented it but by the time we're getting here you know chain mail is

00:53:01.060 something that the romans got from the germanics and the celts so to kind of skip ahead of a lot

00:53:10.800 of historical reconstruction of this aoric was the leader of a gothic state that predicated itself

00:53:21.960 on essentially a big ethnic network right he was the leader of the gothic the gothic ethnos

00:53:30.460 um the romans referred to him as the eudex this position as eudex the greeks used the term

00:53:39.400 Dicastes. This is important because in Latin and Greek, those are not the terms that are meaning

00:53:48.180 judge. Judge literally comes from iudex, but that's not what a judge in ancient Rome was. A judge

00:53:55.220 was actually a magistratus. A iudex and a dicastes were private, elite, aristocratic individuals who

00:54:05.180 were called in to act as mediators between disputes of among other important people

00:54:12.540 um the ancient greeks didn't really have judges as we have them today like technical specialists who

00:54:19.340 are like professors of the law that can bang the gavel and say order that's not how i define the

00:54:26.120 law that they didn't really have that position in ancient greece so forgive me for throwing in a

00:54:31.820 Hebrewism here, but when you come to the Greek translations of the Bible, it's why we have the

00:54:40.220 book of Judges. It's not that these people's job was to, you know, preside over legal proceedings.

00:54:46.700 It was very much this idea of before the official Davidic, you know, monarchy in Judea,

00:55:00.140 And there were these important tribal leaders that were, you know, the daddies of the house of Israel to like, make sure they were on the straight and narrow. And it was written, again, in the Greek through a Greek lens. And that's why you come with a very similar term in a very similar way to a very dissimilar people.

00:55:20.620 yes and we actually very interestingly have a statement from the big man

00:55:28.060 himself athanaric yes nick you were correct i was thinking of caligula from athanaric as to

00:55:33.560 what the position of eudex or dicastes actually means and that is because athanaric is actually

00:55:43.860 the first quoted goth here um in the historical narrative i'll get to him here but athanaric's

00:55:50.140 um a thaneric ends up getting into a fight with the byzantine emperor valens and valens was a very

00:55:57.620 duplicitous and treacherous man and so when a thaneric did diplomacy with him he actually

00:56:04.160 did it on a boat in the danube um the official reason we're told is that he had sworn an oath

00:56:11.140 of enmity against rome refused to set foot on its soil which doesn't really make much sense

00:56:16.720 because he literally just left thrace to get to anyways but um at one point he is referred to as

00:56:23.880 the rex of gathia and he actually says that is not correct that is not what he is he is the

00:56:30.640 dicastes or iudex yes this event here a thaneric is presumably the chap with the winged helmet in

00:56:38.860 front on the left there he refuses to be referred to as a rex because he is a iudex or the

00:56:46.640 castes, because these are positions that are granted because of wisdom and not power.

00:56:52.740 Now, this is a quote of his through Greek, right, or Latin, but it's very interesting

00:56:57.020 that he is saying his authority to lead comes from his wisdom and not his power, right?

00:57:03.860 I'm looking something up here real quick.

00:57:06.220 Man, where is it in this?

00:57:08.700 The specific words used for judge in the Gospels.

00:57:13.060 So you guys will know that we celebrate the Remembrance Day for King Nithaneric, and a lot of the times with these early Germanic leaders, we honorifically give them a title from a later period,

00:57:34.880 because the gothic understanding of kingship is different from their neighbors and a little bit ambiguous.

00:57:46.720 There's different kinds of leaders, some that lead in perpetuity, some that lead for a specific period of time.

00:57:55.120 And a lot of the information we get comes through foreign sources that don't really have the right nomenclature for it.

00:58:04.880 it's like a greek might think of a king in terms of a tyrant or a or a dictator in a roman sense

00:58:17.440 certainly they wouldn't extend the title of you know imperator to him uh so it's it's a strange

00:58:26.400 it's a strange thing but something that i want to point out here amongst

00:58:30.000 the goths or the people who pour out to the gods there was always a sacral element to kingship

00:58:38.780 your position as king made you de facto high priest because there was no distinction between

00:58:49.540 church and state in a authentic you know the way it was supposed to be for our folk

00:58:58.480 the king and the high priest were always one thing and the responsibility of that was doubly

00:59:05.680 important but sometimes the king was hereditary sometimes the king was elective in depending on

00:59:12.500 where it was at but very often elective out of a choice of a very elite nobility of people that had

00:59:18.700 held the position or been in in that stratosphere their family had a tested approval by the gods

00:59:27.600 the importance is saying i think in a way and i don't think there's a perfect answer to this

00:59:36.280 question but in my understanding he's not a rex in the sense of he's a strong man that took power

00:59:46.440 because he is a military you know a military strong man he is in a more dignified position

00:59:55.980 as being entrusted by his people with spiritual gravitas,

01:00:03.220 that he has the right of divine blessing, of erudition, and of might

01:00:10.380 to lead the nation or to lead his people, his tribe, his folk. 0.64

01:00:16.720 So the Altair Eugothi brings up a very good comparison there

01:00:22.840 of the judges of ancient Israel.

01:00:24.580 and you might be tempted to think oh well spoiler warning athanaric uh was a punisher of apostasy

01:00:34.500 and was consciously compared to the the pharaoh of egypt from the exodus narrative

01:00:39.660 okay he's a judge all right so they're doing like a bible thing that is not correct the greek word

01:00:47.140 for judge as in the judges of the bible is kratos which refers to like laws because the judges of

01:00:57.040 ancient israel were basically shoring up deficiencies in adherence to halakha jewish

01:01:03.460 holy law right um yudex and dikastes are more like mediators in their proper judicial sense

01:01:12.420 than enforcers of all law so the point about the rex is worth visiting here because there is

01:01:25.760 actually a gothic cognate of the latin rex in the earliest period of roman governance the roman

01:01:34.000 kingdom the rex was the supreme leader of all walks of life of rome he was the roman and while

01:01:44.060 his position was not democratically chosen but rather the body assented to or more so accepted

01:01:54.840 rulership by him with him on the one hand having divine backing but also the acceptance of his

01:02:04.820 divine backing so like romulus and after him numa numa pompilius were the military spiritual

01:02:13.560 political and economic leaders of the world there is a similar position in um ancient ireland

01:02:21.800 In ancient Ireland, with the Gaelic Rhi, who was the spiritual, military, economic, and political leader of the Tuatha, which is cognate with that word Theed.

01:02:36.660 In ancient Greece, this position was the Wanax.

01:02:40.600 This word only survives into classical Greece in the Anax names, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, etc.

01:02:49.240 It is mentioned in Linear B attestations, the very oldest Greek we have.

01:02:56.040 But more importantly, it's mentioned in Homer in the first three individuals.

01:03:01.540 Agamemnon, the Wanax of the Greeks, Priam, the Wanax of Troy, and Zeus, the Wanax of the Olympians.

01:03:10.600 So you can see the gravitas that this term had in ancient Greece, that it's Zeus, the guy, the big man.

01:03:16.180 he is the leader of an ethnos and you'll notice that in the trojan war agamemnon calls up all of 0.64

01:03:24.020 the greeks like from all over greece even his enemies they have to come help this is a greek

01:03:29.360 issue and then priam calls up all of the trojans including memnon the prince of ethiopia whose

01:03:37.180 grandparents had sailed off and conquered ethiopia memnon himself was not ethnically ethiopian he was

01:03:42.400 An Anatolian that was the descendant of conquerors who conquered Ethiopia, he was required to come fight in the war because he was ethnically Anatolian, right?

01:03:57.460 The Wanax, we are told from actual economic documents from this period, was the center of society.

01:04:05.380 The only thing I can honestly compare this position to in modern political times would be Führer.

01:04:12.400 like the center this guy is chosen by the divine to lead and as the total backing of the people

01:04:20.400 so as imagine and again there's not a we have to work with analogy and it's never going to be

01:04:28.240 perfect but the pope could call all of christendom to go on crusade and if you're you know philip

01:04:39.280 Philip and you're, you know, Richard and you're at war, you can let bygones be bygones figured out

01:04:47.120 and go crusade together because your faith unites you. In this sense, your ethnicity unites you,

01:04:53.720 but also your faith. I want to point out no distinction between Alcetru and being a goth.

01:05:00.200 The two are up until literally this period, and this is where this is decided and why this is so

01:05:08.500 important. No, the one equals the other. That's why we're named goths. So, and I'd like to say

01:05:17.660 apostasy equals treason. Treason equals apostasy. Political treason is an apostasy.

01:05:27.380 Religious apostasy is political treason. They're the same thing. 0.93

01:05:32.060 and to bring this back to the story we have this guy aoric an atrocity is committed by the byzantine

01:05:39.780 empire so he sends his son ariaric yes this is a running theme with these names to byzantium as a

01:05:46.640 hostage ariaric may have been given a statue of himself behind the senate house in byzantium that

01:05:54.820 he was apparently quite fond of we're told looking at the that that's what academics assume that this

01:06:01.180 ariaric guy got a statue of himself because he was the son of the the den i will explain that

01:06:07.200 term in a minute aoric looking at the the original text it could just be that it was like a fun

01:06:13.980 statue and this guy's like wow what a cool statue i love these guys it doesn't really matter

01:06:18.480 he is a hostage of the byzantines for until i would imagine until constantine dies and then he

01:06:27.060 He goes home. He gets home and he immediately starts shoring up his people's native state. 0.99

01:06:34.060 Ariaric and Athanaric are mostly attested to us by their fight with Valens and by punishing apostates.

01:06:42.060 And this is actually pretty interesting, much in the way that it was a mistake to try and refute and debunk Julian's against the Galileans because it gives some of the arguments to us.

01:06:54.060 We actually can tell a bit about Athanaric and Ariaric's ideology based on how it is treated by Christian texts.

01:07:03.460 So, in simple terms, as the Alzheimer Gothi said, apostasy was treason.

01:07:11.160 Athanaric punished, Athanaric and Ariaric punished people for, as we are told by Christians, abandoning the faith of their fathers.

01:07:20.040 That term there, faith of their fathers, is incredibly important because that is not a Christian term.

01:07:25.400 And it's not really a Gothic term.

01:07:27.140 That is a Greco-Roman term.

01:07:28.920 That is a term that the Greco-Romans used to refer to the traditional ethnic religion of the Greeks and the Romans.

01:07:36.020 So Christian authors are directly comparing Asatru to the worship of Zeus and Jupiter. 0.59

01:07:43.140 And they are directly setting it up as an ethno-religion. 0.67

01:07:47.140 It is related to society because it's fathers, not just family, it's fathers. 0.58

01:07:55.700 And it's also about abandoning it.

01:07:59.220 We see in a number of these victim narratives that what Athanaric and his men, 1.00

01:08:06.400 namely Wingaric and Atherid, two men who were reyxes, I do believe, 0.59

01:08:12.780 these men put to death apostates.

01:08:16.120 but it's worth noting that when they did this we are told that they do this

01:08:21.260 to people who refuse to participate in ositru not necessarily you're muted you're muted sir

01:08:28.820 go on okay so so you guys may know i am trying a new thing tonight by muting myself when i'm

01:08:37.680 not talking to make the back end a little bit cleaner and to uh spare you all my

01:08:43.180 and whatever else but i'm new to the habit so bear with me i'm doing that a little bit tonight

01:08:51.220 anyways what i was going to say is not people goths and another point i want to make

01:08:59.480 the fundamentals and we'll get to the details of this as we go on aren't doctrinal

01:09:08.380 there you're participating in the communion of all of your kin and all of your kin that have

01:09:18.340 come before you and your gods or you're not that's part of our bloat practice that's so very

01:09:27.620 important when we share a meal which we do at all of our hafs at all of our events

01:09:33.180 The idea of sharing in a sacred feast and a communion unites you when done ritually with our gods in Ausgarther, with our ancestors who have bloated in the past, and with our children who will bloat in the future. 0.63

01:09:51.040 A lot of this, as you will see, revolves around removing yourself from that sacred bond that makes an ethnos or a nation.

01:10:03.180 so we're talking a lot about a thaneric a thaneric is in a lot of ways the protagonist

01:10:10.940 or antagonist from the christian perspective of this period because he is the one who takes

01:10:17.000 this idea of an asatru gothic state the farthest we don't know much about ariaric and aoric

01:10:23.440 a thaneric's father and grandfather respectively but we are told a bit about a thaneric so

01:10:30.720 So, I believe that a Thanaric's proper title in Gothic would have been Theodans, which in today's English would be Thedon.

01:10:40.320 Thed means ethnos, Thedon, the leader of the ethnos.

01:10:46.360 A Thanaric came to blows with both the Byzantine Empire, but also the Huns.

01:10:51.660 And he is noted for actually having done a number of military public works projects reinforcing the northern border with the Huns.

01:11:04.300 there is a wall a thaneric's wall that appears to have actually been it appear i haven't done

01:11:12.960 as much research on this as i'd like but it appears to have been an originally roman wall

01:11:17.900 that was built by the romans to to keep out like scythians then the goths moved in and a thaneric

01:11:25.520 took over and he starts fixing up this wall because there's two strata of it there's the 0.98

01:11:30.480 original brick one and then there's like earthworks right we're also told that a thaneric

01:11:36.520 constructed a series of fortifications like fortresses fortified lodgings along the northern

01:11:42.960 border of his territory and housed soldiers mounted cavalrymen there and if you go looking

01:11:48.880 for academics talking about this they get kind of butthurt like how can horsemen but the goths 0.76

01:11:55.700 aren't horse people how are they allowed to ride horses they're tribals they can't do this as if

01:12:01.900 the fact that they've been defined as like living in tribes means they can't use the horses that

01:12:07.900 they've been having since their ancestors literally rode into europe from i mean they were always in

01:12:13.160 europe but you know what i mean rode further west into europe on from the steppe so in a certain

01:12:18.640 sense uh thaneric as far as i'm aware is kind of like the guy who invented the idea of a castle

01:12:24.620 where you like stash your knights and they hide in the castle and then ride out to go fight um

01:12:31.060 so a thaneric's title was theden i do believe right and i'll use that in a little bit so we

01:12:40.620 have two other interesting guys by the name of names of atherid and wingeric um there's a lot

01:12:48.000 of kind of silly names in this period so Wingerick is best described to us by a

01:12:59.320 victim narrative given to us by the Christians he is described as an Archon 0.89

01:13:04.000 and a Megistanes. Megistanes means mighty one, it's literally cognate with

01:13:09.780 mighty archontes means ruler but that's not really what it is and archon archontes in greek

01:13:20.260 is really more like a bureaucrat they have power because they occupy a position so like when you

01:13:27.700 become drain commissioner of a city you have power because you basically sit in a cockpit

01:13:34.100 you can like pull the levers that makes you an archon right as opposed to like donald trump has

01:13:41.860 power because he's really rich he does not have to pull levers he pays people to do what he wants

01:13:47.780 i i know that's more it's more complicated you know what i mean so what's interesting here is

01:13:53.060 that we have this supreme leader of the goths nick nick can you go ahead and put up a picture of

01:13:59.460 uh athanaric and of wingaric so we have this supreme leader of the goths theedon

01:14:06.580 athanaric and then we have his uh i want to use the term thane but that's not correct for

01:14:14.340 reasons we'll see coming up we have his um employee if you will wingaric wingaric was

01:14:23.140 also one of the Thurvings, a.k.a. the Thurvingi, a.k.a. the Turvings, a.k.a. the Turvingi,

01:14:29.620 which appears to be some kind of distinction in Gothic society that is continuously opposed

01:14:35.680 with the Groithungs. The Groithungs probably mean like the people from the Pebley area

01:14:43.780 because they came from a Pebley beach. The Turvings probably mean like the people from the trees

01:14:50.080 because they lived in a wooded area we don't quite know what those terms mean interestingly we are

01:14:56.960 told that er ermanrikas aka in the norse tradition aka was a groythung as opposed to a turving

01:15:10.960 ermanrik has the distinction of being one of the longest lived monarchs he apparently lived to be

01:15:16.000 110 years old ruling for 81 years and dying in battle against the huns or as part of a seedy

01:15:23.520 and tragic love affair if you believe uh salacious sagas it doesn't really matter

01:15:30.000 so there might have been a degree of internal um diversity among the goths we're not quite sure

01:15:39.760 Because we aren't given an opponent to a Thanaric or Aoric or Ariaric for the position of supreme leader of the Goths, right?

01:15:49.220 The Romans and Byzantines just continuously refer to these three as eudex, dicastes, and treat them as if they're the top Goth, right? 0.66

01:15:58.000 So Wengerich is a, I believe he is a reiks, reiks in Latin is R-E-X in Gothic, reiks is R-E-I-K-S.

01:16:14.560 I believe that he was a reiks, which is a position of independently wealthy and powerful, but nonetheless government officials.

01:16:25.020 so he works for a thaneric presumably because he is independently wealthy and powerful

01:16:30.060 but he's not challenging a thaneric for the position of leadership of gothia in any way

01:16:35.020 right um he is a vassal of a thaneric if you will so something i i like to think of in terms

01:16:42.380 of this is you know these these different um divisions of like kinds of goths

01:16:54.220 especially their leadership seems to be like noble houses that are eligible for leading things.

01:17:03.480 There's other Gothic supreme leaders that aren't of the, what is it, the Amals that are, or the Balti.

01:17:14.820 The Balti, we're coming to the Balti.

01:17:16.380 so there's different houses that all seem to be thought worthy of of leadership of like high

01:17:23.980 nobility and that seems to be the case with with some of this and also the terms are kind of

01:17:32.960 we either want to liken them to roman civic positions or to later medieval feudal positions

01:17:40.500 and neither fits perfectly but um understanding here the way i understand it is wengeric and

01:17:48.180 atherit are both of of noble houses but not really in contention for you know the high seat so it's

01:17:58.180 like they're notable nobles that are are of significance and respected houses respected

01:18:08.580 lineage respected leadership amongst folk and bear a certain amount of responsibility with that

01:18:14.080 position and they're you know at the service of whoever is sitting in the uh the leadership spot

01:18:22.460 or the you know supreme the supreme position which at this time is a thaneric

01:18:27.420 okay so it is interesting because athanaric and his men under him are ossature partisans

01:18:39.020 they put people to death for treason to the gothic state and apostasy from ossature and

01:18:44.740 it's worth noting here refusal to participate in ossature as a goth not necessarily just

01:18:51.740 practicing christianity or being chummy with a roman we'll come to that in a minute but

01:18:56.520 so there is an attempt by later christian germanics visigoths to chart a glorious dynasty

01:19:06.540 through a number of these gothic rulers including the aoric ariaric and thaneric lineage but also

01:19:14.840 like alaric atalf walia theodoric etc going back into ancient times the balti we are told by

01:19:23.340 jordanes were the ancient kings who led the goths to the baltics they retook their name because it

01:19:32.540 means bold they ruled the baltics and it seems there was an attempt to splice that idea into

01:19:40.640 the um the thedan ship of aoric ariaric and athanaric we don't know if that's 100 true or

01:19:51.500 not but it's interesting that later christians are attempting to co-opt a thaneric a man who

01:19:58.660 on his watch had christians put to death for apostasy in order to create this glorious past

01:20:04.640 going backwards now modern academics think that the term balt as in the baltic countries the

01:20:10.180 baltic sea the baltic states actually means something like um straits referring to like

01:20:17.200 the baltic strait possibly meaning like the land across the strait because they came from sweden

01:20:24.380 they landed in the baltic states right that would be interesting because the terms etymology is

01:20:30.400 unknown it just kind of shows up probably from a proto-germanic route in any event

01:20:35.480 there appears to have been some kind of noble lineage at minimum because we have aoric ariaric

01:20:43.020 athanaric three generations and then they have these lesser noble houses around them such as

01:20:48.380 that of winderic and atherid as a point of fact i believe it goes ariaric aoric athanaric

01:20:57.580 and i mentioned that because we're celebrating one and leaving out one yes uh let me confirm that

01:21:05.100 here um right i'm sorry yeah it's ariaric aoric athanaric yes you're correct i have it i'm

01:21:13.500 talking my notes um chris you are killing it you're i am blown away we're an hour and 18

01:21:21.820 in we haven't even gotten to the main subject because i haven't even i haven't even talked

01:21:25.980 our analysis is wonderful and in-depth and this is awesome this is a master class you're giving

01:21:31.980 us. Thank you. So Wengerich comes to us mostly from the Menelogian of Basil II and the Synaxarion

01:21:42.220 of Constantinople. These are Christian hagiographical texts written well after Wengerich

01:21:48.620 died, but they are interesting because they are conveying a number of things that demonstrate

01:21:53.980 this is an original this is that they're conveying something wingerick is we are told

01:22:00.780 put an idol of a god or some kind of divine ancestor perhaps there's some there's some

01:22:05.500 debate amongst academics in a cart and wheeled it around his territory and anyone who refused to

01:22:13.100 show it deference notice show it deference was rounded up and put to death we are told that he

01:22:21.340 burnt 308 apostates to death in a tent and then some gothic guy showed up and saw this and he was

01:22:29.660 so moved by seeing them die that he became a christian on the spot and got chucked in the

01:22:34.640 burning tent this is a common feature of christian hagiographical literature like

01:22:39.520 random people seeing christians die and deciding oh i want to be one too and then dying um

01:22:46.100 what's interesting is that there is other tradition attached to this we are

01:22:52.180 told about a gothic noblewoman oh what's her name um gotha who is described as a

01:22:59.180 basileia of the goths that is very interesting because remember I talked

01:23:05.660 about the wanax what if you got rich in that society you were a basileus you 0.59

01:23:12.500 You were independently powerful and wealthy and were theoretically subject to the Wanax,

01:23:18.240 but in practice could do your own thing. 0.93

01:23:20.160 If the Wanax called you up on ethnic business, you were a bad Greek, and other Greeks saw

01:23:26.280 you as free game.

01:23:28.880 This term basileos is interesting because it is frequently used to translate rex in

01:23:34.680 the very oldest Latin literature.

01:23:37.800 That is important because at an early strata, basileos still has an ethnic connotation.

01:23:44.060 Much later it becomes the Greek word for emperor in reference to the Byzantine emperor and

01:23:50.140 other co-equals, like the emperor of Ethiopia was referred to as a basileos circa like 1280.

01:23:58.100 At this early stage, though, it still has a very ethnic character.

01:24:01.060 So she is an Aryan Christian, but she holds a degree of importance amongst the Goths,

01:24:07.120 at least from the Christian author's perspective.

01:24:10.320 She's only able to get 26 of the bodies, 21 of which are named.

01:24:14.900 Now, this might be because the numbers are fudged by the guy

01:24:18.120 who originally came up with the story to make Wengerich seem eviler.

01:24:21.680 We don't really know.

01:24:23.420 Of those 26, a great number are actually not Goths, right?

01:24:30.300 They are named, they have Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew names.

01:24:37.120 Right. Which is very interesting because they're refusing to show deference to a statue of a divine ancestor or a god who might be a divine ancestor.

01:24:47.060 I don't know. Some kind of religious figure of importance.

01:24:51.100 So I want to make a kind of a side note here on a couple of things that I think we need to lay a little bit of foundation for.

01:24:59.880 And Nick, if you could take down Wimmerick and put up Aorick for me, please.

01:25:05.280 So something happened during this period to where a wise man ruling his people recognized something.

01:25:19.280 something so rome was very adept politically at manipulating border peoples or quote unquote

01:25:30.720 barbarians and playing them off each other and doing things but with the

01:25:39.040 state institution of christianity by by constantine the great

01:25:43.760 an extra and particularly potent tool was given to the empire whereas all these other things and

01:25:56.720 chris has brought us through the ethnic nature of religion just through word usage like

01:26:03.920 i don't think in the modern sense we appreciate enough

01:26:08.000 up until this time universal religion doesn't exist all religion is ethnic religion all

01:26:18.800 religion is intrinsically tied to the blood and the bone of the participant because that

01:26:26.000 is the religion of their fathers um but now we're in a really different time even judaism

01:26:35.200 which by the time it's called Judaism is a monotheism is still not universal it's universal

01:26:45.180 in its claims I suppose but not in its practice that is the ethnic religion of the Hebrews

01:26:51.700 within the empire that made sense but Christianity this new thing and specifically the Christianity

01:27:02.540 practiced under Paul was a universal religion that all the peoples of the earth needed to be

01:27:12.440 converted to and that's particularly advantageous if your leadership is Roman to have all of these 0.95

01:27:21.800 foreign entities convert to your faith and thus be under your control 0.97

01:27:27.680 so what was starting to happen is our people's hospitality was taken advantage of so we would let

01:27:38.140 in you know let in Greeks not in a military sense but hey we just want to come over and trade hey

01:27:46.620 we want to come over and I don't know hang out all right but part of that was preying upon 0.70

01:27:55.140 the women, the disaffected, the young 1.00

01:27:59.980 to get them to 0.98

01:28:01.800 as

01:28:04.520 how's the gospel of Matthew put it?

01:28:11.560 Son of man did not come to bring peace

01:28:13.920 but a sword 0.92

01:28:14.680 and to, you know, literally to cleave kinfolk

01:28:19.000 against one another. 1.00

01:28:21.720 True to their master's teaching

01:28:23.980 they started sowing the poison of dissent the slaver of Fenrir amongst our folk

01:28:32.360 to turn children against their parents to turn husbands and wives against one another to turn

01:28:40.060 you know to turn brother and sister against one another which again ripping apart the family as

01:28:49.840 laid down earlier the family was everything that's what society was built on and until

01:28:56.480 you know until communism that's what society was built on was family

01:29:05.040 and this was sought to tear that apart and it was very effective and it was taking root and 0.59

01:29:12.400 a generation previous a wise king in our sense a wise um ethnic supreme leader

01:29:25.280 was aware of this and started hey official gothia policy is we do not tolerate this 0.99

01:29:34.800 foreigners don't have to worship our gods they're foreigners why would they they should worship their 1.00

01:29:40.320 gods, but Goths will be Ausitru. And he realized this before anyone else. So much when we talk 1.00

01:29:51.340 about our heroes, we define great many of our heroes in terms of the struggle between 0.86

01:29:57.100 Ausitru and Christianity. Sadly, most of our heroes that we celebrate to this point 0.61

01:30:03.700 are on the losing end of that. They're individuals who took a stand after the social

01:30:10.180 current have long since gone against them, against our gods, but they stood for what was right

01:30:17.100 against overwhelming odds, very often paid for it with their lives, and we celebrate them for that.

01:30:22.320 That's beautiful and wonderful, but there's something important here about someone who had

01:30:28.400 the foresight to see this coming and to try with all his might to stave it off. Aorik was that king

01:30:37.180 that saw this threat when nobody else saw it coming and said, hey, we have to stop this 0.99

01:30:43.680 because this is a threat to our existence. And that's why we celebrate him with a day of

01:30:51.020 remembrance. And because we are just doing that right now, I have to consult my notes

01:30:59.260 on what his Day of Remembrance is going forward.

01:31:07.700 Give me one sec.

01:31:12.800 So October the 23rd,

01:31:16.940 we recognize King Aorik with his Day of Remembrance,

01:31:23.440 and Ausatruar will celebrate that with remembrance,

01:31:27.260 remembrance with feasting and with toasts to his name and to his reputation from here on out

01:31:35.740 hail king ayork hail now we can move back to the present but i want to make this other kind

01:31:42.060 of personal note of connection my first when i first came home to alistair true and i was

01:31:50.540 trying to read up on the lore and the history and the things and didn't know where to go

01:31:54.220 So I came upon a really cool, and I didn't prep this for tonight, so I can't tell you the author. I want to say the guy's first name is Charles. But there was a, I believe, late 1800s, early 1900s professor that did a series of lectures called the Roman and the Teuton.

01:32:15.220 and he talked about the struggle of the empire versus the various Germanics they came in contact

01:32:22.220 with. And this spoke to me really early. So one of the first things I did when I became

01:32:27.500 Osheriogothi was to acknowledge Athaneric as one of our heroes and celebrating with a day of

01:32:33.960 remembrance. Because during this period, they talked about that episode and in, you know,

01:32:39.960 flowery prose of that romantic period. But the idea that, you know, Athaneric had this cart

01:32:45.140 driven amongst the folk at this time, because this was a current thing. We started seeing

01:32:51.360 large sections of Gothia split between Alcetru and Arianism, and we started seeing moments that

01:33:02.160 would eventually be civil war between Vittergern and Athaneric, and I'm sure that Chris will talk 0.95

01:33:10.520 about that here in good time but it when we were seeing this going through a thaneric had this

01:33:16.260 cart brought around we see the procession of carts talked about in uh germania and we see

01:33:23.120 it talked about in the later sagas going on in sweden where you would have the image of one of

01:33:27.480 our gods um processed through the people for the people to to give worship and uh and celebrate as

01:33:37.920 they went through and you know renewed the fertility of the land and was was a big part

01:33:43.060 of their thing was the procession of our gods and carts and that's what we see going on

01:33:47.980 here and the way it was presented in this lecture which was a wonderful lecture um but

01:33:55.480 it's as if like a faneric was walking around this cart and he wasn't he is a high king

01:34:02.580 And so what was really cool about these other gentlemen we're talking about, somebody had to go through and get their hands dirty and do the heavy lifting for this.

01:34:14.220 And those people that were putting in the work and going through the difficulties and the turmoil of acting in the name of our gods and our folk deserve to have their place in the sun in the celebration.

01:34:30.500 And that brings us back to Wiengerich.

01:34:34.140 If you could put him back up on the screen and Chris, carry on.

01:34:39.160 Oh, I didn't realize I wasn't muted.

01:34:41.020 Okay, so one might be tempted to say, okay, that's all well and good.

01:34:50.040 But how do we know that these people weren't named whatever Aramaic nonsense they were named because they were actually like Semites who happened to live in Gothia, right?

01:35:00.500 And that is the interesting thing, because we are actually told that they weren't by other Christian victim tale narratives.

01:35:09.080 So one example of this is atherids.

01:35:12.420 I know you told me to keep talking about Wengeric, and I'll kind of move back to him, but atherid real quick.

01:35:17.460 Atherid is mostly, as we are told, involved with the martyr tale of Sabbos the Goth.

01:35:27.260 Sabbos is a goth.

01:35:28.200 He abandoned the faith of his, there's that phrase, there's that phrase, faith of his fathers. 0.80

01:35:35.520 Christians tell us that he abandoned the faith of his fathers.

01:35:39.480 We are told that Athanaric punished those who abandoned the faith of their fathers.

01:35:45.540 That phrase is actually used by a Roman emperor, I can't remember which one, it's before Diocletian,

01:35:53.340 when he is rescinding the orders to persecute Christians.

01:35:58.200 he says well this religion is false talking about christianity and they have abandoned 0.99

01:36:04.040 the faith of their fathers which is foolish but we're going to stop bullying them 0.90

01:36:10.920 that phrase is important because it is an admission by the christian authors of what 0.90

01:36:16.280 the thaneric is doing in sabbath the goth's narrative we are told about this fellow sabbath

01:36:22.760 He lived in what is today Wallachia.

01:36:24.760 Hervig Wulfram, who is the father of Gothicology, he wrote the History of the Goths, which is the seminal text in Gothicology.

01:36:35.760 If you are going to study the Goths in college, you are going to read that book.

01:36:40.760 He posits that Atherid was actually one of the reixes of Athaneric's original kuni.

01:36:49.760 i will explain what that word is in a minute it basically means province for lack of a better term

01:36:56.160 he was in northeastern romania so i'm going to sum up sabas's tale um he abandons asatru practices

01:37:05.200 christianity repeatedly gets in trouble is repeatedly given chances to change his ways

01:37:10.960 refuses culminating in his eventual death there's a few interesting uh bumps along the way to talk

01:37:17.680 about at one point he practices passover with a christian priest who is not a goth by the name

01:37:23.600 of sansalas sabbas and sansalas are tortured for their crime and then sansalas is let go he's not

01:37:31.920 a goth so interestingly he's let go despite not being a goth and despite actually in a certain

01:37:38.960 sense being the problem he's a facilitator of apostasy he's not killed sabbas at another time

01:37:46.880 is taken into his village um i can't the gothic word for this uh let me get it because it's fun

01:37:56.200 saying these old words because it's so um where was it i'm sorry i'm looking through all my notes

01:38:03.240 here like your tongue dancing i don't know how you do it in half the stuff i i really

01:38:08.300 am sad that my accent of english doesn't have a rolled r because i love rolling my r's

01:38:14.840 here we go so the village was called the heims which literally means like homes right so the

01:38:28.320 gothic society appears to have been stacked up like this at the top you had the theden who's

01:38:33.020 currently a thaneric and below him you had the reichs of the various kunya um these are basically

01:38:41.000 provinces although the gothic polity doesn't seem to be based on a division 0.89

01:38:45.320 of land like area but rather people so a cuny is less of a province in the sense 0.99

01:38:51.440 of like this patch of land and more like this group of people the cuny had 0.86

01:38:58.240 multiple reiches and that multiple reiches is kind of important here and

01:39:05.000 and they were then made up of villages these villages had their own for lack of a better term

01:39:12.920 like mayoral councils um these men that ran the mayoral councils were the uh there's a fun word

01:39:24.120 right there they were the ones who were charged with the basic agricultural production of let's

01:39:32.200 get enough food to run to last us through the winter right so they also interestingly it was

01:39:40.440 at that level that people practiced religion so you'll notice that we haven't talked a whole lot

01:39:47.000 about gothar at this point we know that they had them because wolfalas who is the if not the literal

01:39:54.760 individual that aoric met in byzantium was the spiritual individual that aoric met we'll talk

01:40:02.360 about wolf loss in a minute he is interestingly one of the few figures who is no one's hero currently

01:40:09.000 um he actually uses that term in a few interesting positions and we'll get to there in a minute

01:40:15.560 so sabbath went to his village and was sheltered by his family who cared for him despite his

01:40:24.660 apostasy and atherid came to the village we are told and just to be clear wingerik is the

01:40:32.380 statue in a cart tent guy atherid is the punishing sabbath guy i know this is a very

01:40:39.260 disrespectful way to put them but it just sums up because so much of we know about these men

01:40:44.040 only survives in these martyr tales right unmute sir caught it as i was saying it so we are done

01:40:53.240 a great service by christians of the time because we find out about these men and about their deeds

01:41:04.280 through christian you know moaning about about the results of their deeds but that's how we uh

01:41:14.040 That's what how we know about their existence. Again, it's really important. And one of the

01:41:19.920 reasons, and this is again, a kind of a random aside, but I think it's important to note.

01:41:25.720 Chris is helping us a great deal to record and save and document our history. Our folk

01:41:35.920 coming late to writing and record keeping and record preserving is very unfortunate it's one

01:41:45.600 of those things about history but we're really lucky when we have the information that we have

01:41:50.160 so we cherish it we hold on to it we need to preserve it we're fortunate in these instances

01:41:56.400 that um the enemy holds on to it they obviously portray our heroes as as villains and our gods

01:42:05.520 as demons but it's a place from for us to work from which i think is very important

01:42:14.640 so in line with modern ositru history real quick if you are an individual who is listening to this

01:42:23.680 that happens to have copies of the magazines iduna for true or the runestone physical copies

01:42:32.640 please get in contact with me my email my email is csavich at runestone.org c-s-a-v-i-c-h

01:42:40.400 c-s-c-s-a-v-i-c-h sorry at runestone.org

01:42:45.520 um that is an endeavor that i would like to speak with you about if you have copies of iduna

01:42:52.080 the runestone or vortra winding back the clock so atherid goes to the village of sabbas and he

01:43:04.400 arrives there and he says that he wants to hold bloat and he tasks the uh what are they so he tasks 0.93

01:43:12.700 the gamiths with putting on bloat which is very interesting there because he tasks them with

01:43:20.980 putting on the bloat. And we know they're the ones doing it because we're told, but also because 0.98

01:43:26.820 some of the villagers go to Sabbos and they say, look, you're in hot water with him already.

01:43:33.960 We will give you unconsecrated meat, so that way he doesn't know what you're doing.

01:43:40.680 He then refuses and goes and gets in Atharit's face.

01:43:44.920 that is very interesting because it means that the village is putting on the bloat

01:43:51.200 so when atherage shows up he can this is a strong word compel them to perform bloat

01:43:57.700 but only because bloat is something they already have the power to do

01:44:01.480 on their time frame and schedule that he is simply expediting because well the rakes is in town we

01:44:07.900 have to hold a bloat so sabbis finally gets in trouble when he gets drawn before atherid

01:44:18.220 and he refuses to bow or pay homage in some culturally traditional way to atherid 0.68

01:44:25.720 and he declares he refuses he's not going to pay homage to atherid for he has no frauya

01:44:32.900 but yahweh and that that enrages one of atherid's men so much that they either throw a spear at him

01:44:40.280 or a pestle the thing you grind up like a mortar and pestle the pestle is the grindy thing the

01:44:46.480 mortar is the bowl i think either way um that is very interesting because it describes what

01:44:54.980 the ideology of these Aryan Christians at the time was. Atherid is a reiks, a big man of the

01:45:04.340 tribe, a government official of the tribe, of the ethnos. He is also a frauja, that is cognate with

01:45:12.460 Old Norse freur, and distantly with Old English freya, and with a German frau, right? It means

01:45:22.500 lord nobleman frauja does not necessarily imply position in a government it means independently

01:45:31.220 wealthy um nobleman right doesn't necessarily have connotations of ethnicity so it's interesting that

01:45:41.140 atherid the rakes and wingerek by association are enforcing ethnic loyalty and ethno-religiosity

01:45:49.940 but they are also independent landowners for simplicity so we should make a distinction

01:45:57.860 and talk about what are we talking about when we say arianism because sabbath is not a trinitarian

01:46:06.860 which is an important point the 308 people that winger had burnt to death in a tent

01:46:14.140 were not Trinitarians, but they were Christians. That doesn't really make much sense, unless you

01:46:20.040 have a background with Jehovah's Witnessery, because almost all Christians, the supermajority

01:46:27.180 of Christians today, are Trinitarians. Trinitarians affirm that Yahweh, Yeshua, and Ruach HaKadosh

01:46:34.880 are three co-eternal, consubstantial persons in hypostatic union. Arians did not believe that.

01:46:43.180 arians arianism comes from the bishop the name of the bishop arreos which uh has nothing to do

01:46:51.200 with arian it actually is a greek a latinized version of a greek name which means he who is

01:46:56.840 of aries like how um dimitri comes from demetrios which means he who is of demeter right these uh

01:47:06.880 theophoric names it's kind of hard to tell given that we don't speak like greek and latin natively

01:47:12.920 but these theophoric names do not actually mean um the god's name they mean he who is of

01:47:20.680 there is a suffix added that means of right or it's part of a compound like hercules from heracleos

01:47:30.760 actually means something like harrah's glory right or harrah's fame so

01:47:37.560 So, Arians basically believed that there was one deity, Yahweh, and his son, Yeshua, was some kind of demigod, but was nonetheless separate from Yahweh.

01:47:53.800 Winding this forward a little bit, Gothic Aryan Goths, not Aryan Goths, Aryan Goths, basically believed that there was one deity, Yahweh. 0.76

01:48:06.360 Christians were atomized individuals in a personal relationship with that one deity 0.72

01:48:12.440 who viewed Yeshua as a religious prophetic figure 0.94

01:48:18.200 that they held some degree of loyalty to because he was their Lord's son.

01:48:25.000 We are told by wolf-lass that Yeshua was the theodans of the Jews.

01:48:32.560 we are told by um i can't was it jerome who wrote the vulgate that yeshua was the reiks

01:48:40.760 of the jews we are told by the gospel authors whoever they may be that yeshua was the basileus

01:48:48.760 of the jews these terms in their context mean ethnic leader so when we are told that the

01:48:55.720 And Jesus' cross had I-N-R-I on it, which is like Jesus Nazarenos Reix Judeorum or something, which means Jesus of Nazareth, supreme ethnic leader of the Jews.

01:49:12.920 And in the context of the Gospels, this is on the one hand, mockery from the Romans, as the Apostles' Creed tells us, Jesus was crucified by the Romans, not the Jews.

01:49:21.540 but it's also a kind of um middle finger thrown at the pharisees who refused these romans recognized

01:49:30.700 the messiah's position but the pharisees refused to right you see the bit there

01:49:35.120 so the arian goths see jesus as this kind of like betrayed son of their lord right so when

01:49:46.060 When Saba says he has no frauia but Yahweh, and as such is not subject to Atherid's rule, he is saying he is an atomized individual who has no need to follow the laws of Gathia.

01:50:00.880 So what Atherid and Wengeric were enforcers of was... Go on, sir.

01:50:06.980 Oh, no, I was letting you continue. I was just going to hit it if you didn't. Go ahead.

01:50:09.760 um atherid and wengeric were enforcers of sibya sib in sibya in gothic is directly cognate with

01:50:19.320 sib in sibling it's a fossilized word and with sif in um old morse and sip in german

01:50:27.680 this is a concept that basically means familial relations familial relationships in germanic

01:50:35.780 In German, specifically, culture, there is an idea of Sippenhaft, which basically means the punishment of relatives for the bad actions of a criminal.

01:50:44.080 Sippenhaft is something that shows up in ancient China where there's like a three-generation Sippenhaft set up by Qin Shi Huangdi.

01:50:53.420 He basically said, if you steal, we're going to punish your siblings, your brothers and sisters, and your parents, and your cousins, and your nieces and nephews.

01:51:04.840 we're going to punish your family three generations out if you break the law and what chinchy huangdi 0.98

01:51:10.600 was trying to do there was basically oh you're going to you hear that your brother is going to 1.00

01:51:14.680 go steal you're going to beat the snot out of them so you don't get in trouble too

01:51:18.840 right that was what chinchy huangdi was trying to do there you want to interject i kind of do so 0.92

01:51:25.160 So all of the things that you said, but as I mentioned earlier, the family and then, you know, tribe and nation, they're all built on the familial connection.

01:51:40.940 The bloat is, you know, the sacrifice, the pouring out, but it's also the sharing of that blessing and that worship amongst your kin group, your extended kin group.

01:51:54.200 When I do a meal blessing, I talk about our AFA family.

01:51:59.000 May our friends and our family around this table be blessed.

01:52:03.680 You're sharing that blessing amongst your kin group that makes up your community that you share with our gods.

01:52:13.700 by his statement and his refusal to eat the meat served in that communal meal

01:52:23.560 and being an active participant in that shared communion,

01:52:30.100 that shared reciprocity, that gift cycle with our gods and our folk,

01:52:34.360 he defined himself as like he self-defined as an outlaw.

01:52:43.700 not an outlaw in the cool motorcycle gang like modern understanding of the term no that was the

01:52:50.520 worst thing amongst our ancestors and we see it in the Norse context but it's a principle throughout

01:52:57.140 our folks since the very beginning you're either part of the family or you're not and if you don't

01:53:04.520 have bonds of kinship to protect you from that you are outside of the law not meaning you can

01:53:13.720 do whatever you want but meaning nobody owes you anything and you're fair game and you are choosing

01:53:20.840 to opt out of your relationship of your trough to the iser of your trough to your ancestors

01:53:31.320 of your trough to your living kin and your countrymen and you are breaking a fundamental link

01:53:37.880 in the chain it is absolutely treason it's absolutely criminal and all of the things

01:53:46.280 you know that's one of the things even in today's very very liberal time in the west

01:53:51.960 treason is still one of those death penalty crimes

01:53:55.080 this is treason politically spiritually 1.00

01:54:03.400 familially in all of those senses you are choosing to opt out of your birthright as a goth 0.94

01:54:13.160 and not just kind of to passively opt out but to ostentatiously in your face

01:54:19.800 reject and rail against and here's the important thing the fundamental of all christianity and

01:54:30.520 i was going to say evangelical christians to this day are very hard on this issue

01:54:36.280 but it's in the name evangelical christians your job as a christian is to spread the virus of

01:54:44.200 christianity if you are not doing that you are not doing what jesus told you to do go to all

01:54:52.040 corners of the earth and uh you know i forget how it was phrased in the scripture but yeah you're

01:54:59.400 supposed to preach the gospel in all corners of the earth and build be fishers of men to build

01:55:05.560 this christianity so he is not only is he opting out

01:55:09.000 in a very in-your-face way but he is vowing enmity with and i'm going to try to take people from you 0.99

01:55:19.080 i'm going to try to convince your family to turn on you and to come with me to prostitute themselves 0.88

01:55:28.900 to this foreign god so in supremely unacceptable on all levels and that's that's truly what we're 0.98

01:55:39.300 dealing with here if we're if we're telling it honestly and certainly if we're telling it from 0.98

01:55:43.860 a gothic point of view in in christian theology this is referred to as the great commission um

01:55:50.660 this is actually where the speaking in tongues comes from speaking in tongues um like the the

01:55:56.660 rolling your head dies in the back of the head and then that is a very modern phenomena as is

01:56:02.900 stigmata it it's a very relatively recent catholic phenomena for people to have like

01:56:08.940 holes appear in their hands that that never shows up in like russian orthodoxy or greek orthodoxy

01:56:15.260 the great commission is when jesus tells the apostles like go convert everyone yes even the

01:56:21.560 gentiles and they're like okay how are we gonna do this i don't speak greek i don't speak ethiopian

01:56:27.840 and so jesus gives them the ability to speak in the tongues because hebrew tongues the language

01:56:36.260 of gentiles as opposed to hebrew or aramaic you know what i mean he magically gives them the

01:56:41.800 ability to speak all languages because they are going to go to literally everyone and tell them

01:56:46.440 this stuff. Now it's worth keeping in mind we modern people are very squeamish

01:56:54.160 about violence. Violence against humans is something that we generally don't like

01:56:59.100 these days. Our ancestors did not have nearly as much of a problem with

01:57:03.780 violence as we did. There's an anecdote we're told about a gothic man living in

01:57:10.260 Byzantium and he had a wife who was a goth and he had a mistress who was Syrian

01:57:15.060 which probably means some kind of semite but whatever he didn't want his wife to find that

01:57:20.840 out not the mistress thing she was cool with that the syrian part because if she found out that he 0.98

01:57:27.280 had a mistress who wasn't a goth she was going to have her brothers go and torture that mistress to 0.89

01:57:32.700 death right we're talking about a time in which violence is very easy for people and that can 0.95

01:57:41.060 make people squeamish but it also heightens certain realities like you like violence is 0.70

01:57:49.960 enacted upon you very easily in both directions while i was talking about how like the goths are

01:57:57.280 engaging in piracy and raids circa 250 80 remember the romans and byzantines are doing the same thing

01:58:03.340 the roman empire was constantly making bandit incursions into everything around it

01:58:10.360 the persians basically their imperialism was in part justified on hey join us we'll keep the 0.99

01:58:18.580 romans from raiding you and enslaving your children the illurians and dashians were 0.99

01:58:23.880 basically stripped clean of their populace because they all went off to rome to either 1.00

01:58:29.220 be sold as slaves or soldiers or literal prostitutes of both men and women remember 0.84

01:58:34.440 So this is a time where life was simultaneously extremely dear and extremely cheap because they were very close to death all of the time. 0.98

01:58:52.420 you had death from banditry and lawlessness, you had death from the march of either foreign

01:59:05.340 or your own army on whether or not you're going to be involved in the battlefield situation

01:59:11.580 if you're a man, or if people were marching on your territory if you're a woman or a child,

01:59:16.800 and also you're at the whim of the seasons now in the empire they had granaries and things figured

01:59:26.080 out for you know hard times gothia not so much a lot of their struggle on the borders of the empire

01:59:34.300 was you're having a population that in any if a bad season happens is starving to death

01:59:42.140 while across the river you have a population that's well fed and protected and you're dealing

01:59:48.020 with survival a lot it's one of the principles behind outlawry if you are not willing to

01:59:54.740 contribute your effort to the survival of your kin then your existence costs with no reciprocity

02:00:04.620 you removed yourself from the gift cycle but you're going to take all of the benefit of your

02:00:10.500 folk without any commitment to give back or to share the burden and that's not something you can

02:00:18.740 do when you're one bad harvest away from death and famine and your children and your elderly dying

02:00:28.660 life was not the same and we rightly or wrongly and i think this is something worth contemplation

02:00:37.380 We celebrate warriors in an idealized, pretend sense as if there's no consequence.

02:00:48.800 But for a warrior to be celebrated, he's stacking a lot of bodies.

02:00:55.600 And this isn't me making a moral statement, this is me just keeping it real.

02:00:59.540 barring the crusades and like 20th century warfare

02:01:10.660 almost all of those times they are what you and i would call brother wars

02:01:16.540 um so it's a very rough time and a very difficult time what i think is interesting comparing

02:01:26.400 the heroes Wengeric and Atherid are Wengeric's, you know, steely determination to execute his

02:01:39.560 duty. And Atherid's attempts on multiple occasions, so in both of their instances,

02:01:47.960 Hey, I know you've been, you know, disloyal with your Christian Greek friends, but I'm giving you a chance.

02:01:58.900 How about you come back to the table with your brothers and sisters? 1.00

02:02:03.980 No, I rebuke you, Jesus.

02:02:06.080 All right, then. With Atherid, on several occasions, this lunatic Sabbas, who's going out of his way to make really bad life choices, Atherid's trying and giving him opportunities. 0.97

02:02:25.080 opportunities at one so the the soldiers that get tasked with actually bumping off sabbaths 0.56

02:02:31.780 executing him for apostasy they they take him aside after atherid says kill this guy and

02:02:38.900 they they turn to him and they say look we're willing to let you go if you just leave and he 0.98

02:02:44.720 demands to be killed he demands to die so he can become a martyr and then they drown him in a river

02:02:50.260 um there's another another I just think that's an important point that is an un 0.93

02:02:59.000 that is very askew for the time

02:03:02.860 in this day and age you choosing to do something so offensive and then like no I choose to die 0.99

02:03:13.460 because screw your gods screw our ancestors all this stuff 0.99

02:03:21.220 no come on man you're sound a little bit nutty how about you sober up and rethink it 0.98

02:03:27.300 and then doubling down that's a lot of restraint in the saga period that's the kind of thing you

02:03:34.980 say when everybody's drinking in the meat hall and you get cleaved in twain immediately

02:03:41.060 um this is a lot of like don't don't make me do this you you need to rethink your life choices

02:03:50.380 and then doubling down on uh

02:03:55.640 you know eventually if you ask hey please martyr me for jesus okay sold there's another um christian

02:04:07.640 martyr about a century or so prior named sabbas the stratophilite um his tale one of those

02:04:15.320 christian soldier the roman emperor does something zany and kills this guy for it kind of tales

02:04:20.280 in that one there's a i would there's no way this isn't fictional but there's a bit where sabbas

02:04:27.840 this other sabbas the earlier one who is um sabbas is a uh aramaic word that means like uncle or

02:04:35.020 something so sabbath the goth has literally taken a foreign name right the other sabbath is actually

02:04:42.660 of aramaic origin and this earlier sabbath was just named sas um when he gets martyred 70 soldiers

02:04:49.740 supposedly then step forward and immediately become christian on the spot and then are

02:04:54.040 immediately also themselves killed at some point the two narratives get spliced together

02:05:00.540 so like these two guys drown sabbath the goth and then 70 of athanarix or atherids whoever's

02:05:06.800 soldiers become christian and get drowned on the spot like just back it up for a minute about what

02:05:13.560 what is like assume okay let's take this literally what just happened here some guy broke the law

02:05:19.780 was given multiple attempts to back out of it like not not even necessarily like you

02:05:25.600 you don't necessarily have to worship odin you just have to not tell everyone you are a traitor

02:05:31.500 to literally everything well here's the thing and i made this point earlier it's not a doctrinal

02:05:38.820 thing you see at the same time christians killing one another in the thousands over you know do you

02:05:47.680 think that jesus is really three people or is he the son of god or he the son of god but at the

02:05:57.700 same time he is god but he's also this holy spirit thing that doesn't really make sense but just go

02:06:02.600 with it um was he really born of a virgin is the eucharist is it just symbolically the blood

02:06:13.000 in the flesh of Christ?

02:06:14.560 Or is it magically like literally

02:06:16.260 the bread becomes meat

02:06:19.100 and the wine becomes blood?

02:06:21.620 You know, I tasted it.

02:06:22.600 It doesn't taste like blood.

02:06:25.180 You're done.

02:06:26.200 You're done. 1.00

02:06:26.780 I'm going to kill you. 1.00

02:06:27.540 I'm going to kill everybody 1.00

02:06:28.340 who thinks like you. 1.00

02:06:30.640 This is just, hey,

02:06:33.320 everybody's got beliefs.

02:06:35.180 We just made a sacrifice to Odin.

02:06:37.240 We're all sitting around

02:06:38.000 sharing it together.

02:06:39.800 How about you share it

02:06:41.100 with the rest of your family?

02:06:43.000 us in the uh just i'm sorry this is a digression but just to kind of giggle about like uh whatever

02:06:51.540 the christological is is the host actually meet whatever that's called in the old norse period

02:06:57.140 there's actually a point where a dude by the name of botolf he's a christian and the priest he's

02:07:02.720 going up for communion the priest like grabs him by the shoulder and says hold on there first tell

02:07:07.920 me is the host wafer actually the blood of christ and botolph says well no it has to only spiritually

02:07:16.260 be if it's his meat then i'm a cannibal and he would be right to hate me this gets the guy put

02:07:23.960 to death he literally gets tortured to death for this like but but back to sabbath okay like this

02:07:31.340 guy is given multiple opportunities to back away from breaking the law from literally admitting to

02:07:37.880 supporting a regime that 50 years prior had committed genocide against his own people

02:07:42.880 like an army marched into gathia and murdered 100 000 people for no reason like there's no 0.99

02:07:49.060 inciting chasing the army into the village no like just all right son go kill a bunch of them 0.81

02:07:54.200 and then he demands to die as a martyr for this cause and then 70 people decide to die with him

02:08:02.080 for no reason like this is this is insane like if you take this narrative as literal

02:08:08.000 and you know i pointed out that the goths didn't have a word for paved road that's true

02:08:15.200 um they also didn't have a word for male prostitute gothic doesn't appear to have

02:08:23.280 a large number of words that were very common in ancient roman greek they don't appear to have a

02:08:28.380 word for slave at least in the sense that the romans did um the the goths do have a word um

02:08:35.600 scalks which patently comes from the latin calx which means chalk what the romans would do when

02:08:44.340 they would get slaves is they would that would be sent to market is they would coat them in chalk

02:08:49.120 dust so that way if the slave runs away you can tell they're a runaway slave because it's a guy

02:08:53.840 covered in chalk dust running that's a runaway slave right gods did not have a word for this

02:09:00.020 concept they did not have a word for the industrial literally industrial scale slavery that the romans

02:09:05.060 were doing they would round up like dozens of people at a time and ship them out to literally

02:09:09.500 be work to death in fields and that was if you were lucky if you were unlucky you went to a mercury

02:09:14.360 mine and you would die an agonizing death from mercury poisoning i'm not going to go into why

02:09:19.940 that happens, but don't, don't inhale mercury fumes. Um, so this, yeah, let's, let's put that

02:09:31.740 into a short, don't inhale mercury fumes. So I mentioned this guy, Wolfalos, a few times.

02:09:39.500 Wolfalos was a half Gothic, half Greek. I think his mother was a Cappadocian Greek. Um,

02:09:46.860 he was a very important fellow for christianity in gothia he supposedly translated the bible

02:09:57.300 into gothic except for the book of kings which he refused to translate because it would inflame

02:10:01.760 the warlike sensibilities of the goths which is kind of odd but whatever he could have written it

02:10:08.580 in the futhark he refused to because that was too pagan so he had to come up with this kind of

02:10:14.120 knock off greek alphabet if you see texts written if you see like gothic words and it looks like

02:10:20.040 goofy and oddly bold like the word skulks looks like s r two flavors of cyrillic l r s he used

02:10:30.120 a very a variant of greek and even then he had to add in what probably a few letters from the futhark

02:10:36.840 he wrote a bible translation there's some disagreement in academia

02:10:41.560 academics academics are weak of will and poor of hand and can't imagine someone translating the

02:10:49.320 bible themselves so they imagine a team did it it doesn't really matter um wolf alask is more of a

02:10:56.300 a class of person than an individual really he translated the bible into gothic and he uses a

02:11:03.560 relatively oblique translation of just one-to-one conveying concepts for

02:11:11.660 example I'm splicing together a few Bible verses here for effect but he says

02:11:15.260 that Jesus performed blotende in the als under the auspices of gudia als in this

02:11:24.780 context is equivalent to hof als is the word that Wolf Loss uses to translate

02:11:31.400 hieron and naos which are both greek words that mean temple the distinction in the gospels is

02:11:37.000 based on are they talking about the outer portion of the jewish temple in jerusalem or are they

02:11:41.940 talking about the sacred inner precinct it doesn't really matter he translates them both as os which

02:11:47.040 is indicative of the fact that the goths don't really have a complex set of terms for temples

02:11:54.920 temples are just kind of temples right so he basically says that jesus performs bloat in a

02:12:01.040 in a hof led by gothar it's just a very literal cultural translation right he says that jesus is

02:12:11.180 the the uh the few that's of the jews the only other individual he uses this word to describe

02:12:17.560 is herod when he's talking about um the the feast where john the baptist is killed or set up to be

02:12:24.420 whatever um wolf floss's gospel is the biggest source of gothic and the fact that he so one-to-one

02:12:35.560 translates greek terms into gothic within gothic nuance is very important to us i mentioned that

02:12:41.980 gothic doesn't have words for like male prostitute just a little bit of fun with words here um where

02:12:47.960 is it here okay so yeah uh why didn't you look that up which one the gothic word for male prostitute

02:12:56.680 i was curious about because okay i was curious because it's like okay our ancestors stamped

02:13:04.940 homosexuals into the bog because they didn't want to they didn't want to address that like at all

02:13:11.400 they didn't even want to have these people to have graves so what how is this treated in the 0.81

02:13:18.820 bible where they do you know like timothy and paul and stuff mentions homosexuality how is this

02:13:25.320 treated by wolfalos you know how does he translate this to a gothic audience if these people are

02:13:31.760 really so um so averse to homosexuality how do they refer to it i'm like a linguistics nerd

02:13:40.400 okay so how do they refer to me so unfortunately most of the passages that talk about it

02:13:47.680 are not surviving wolfalas's gospel only survives to us in large pieces but fortunately 1 timothy 1

02:13:54.400 through 9 10 does in it the writer uses the terms which basically means man layer

02:14:00.960 and um pornoes which basically means homosexual male um sorry a male yeah man layer and um

02:14:12.240 wolf last translates arseno kohites as mananskathwindam which literally means like

02:14:19.920 men who are enthralled to other men and then he translates um pornoes as horror which actually

02:14:29.200 means adulterer it doesn't mean male prostitute it means like cheater um so we've settled on man

02:14:37.060 got it basically which is an interesting it's interesting because like greek has had a very 0.79

02:14:43.960 complex set of terms to relay homosexuality and prostitution and wolfalas is not above

02:14:52.700 just calcing words into gothic um like he translates tetrarch as basically for ruler

02:15:00.700 um another term the other thing he does is he just transliterates like his term for

02:15:07.420 caesar is his word for apostle is apostolos right so like why not just convey these concepts well

02:15:16.960 because his audience will get upset if he puts such foul language in the mouth of the apostles. 0.93

02:15:23.760 Like, they won't want to be associated with this religion if there's homos in the holy book. 0.84

02:15:28.280 I'm sorry, that's just the blunt reality. 1.00

02:15:32.600 So you can see why Aorik comes back from Byzantium and he's like, 0.99

02:15:37.960 wow, they have a really powerful government and a very dangerous religion 0.99

02:15:42.140 and a society that's going to destroy us.

02:15:44.600 Because remember, the Goths would have been aware of the Celts, their word for them. 0.70

02:15:52.620 In English, we call the Welsh the Welsh, because that word Welsh is the well-ish,

02:15:59.220 coming from the Proto-Germanic Walhas, which actually comes from a Celtic tribe's name,

02:16:04.900 but it means Celt, foreigner to the southwest.

02:16:09.360 Gaul does not come from Gallia, meaning chicken, but also referring to the Gauls.

02:16:14.600 It actually comes from Walhaz.

02:16:17.400 Gaul is the land of the Welsh, not like the Welsh Welsh, but, you know, the Celtic Roman civilizational strata to the southwest.

02:16:26.240 What does Welsh mean?

02:16:27.860 I think it ultimately means something like eagle people.

02:16:33.740 But then it became a word just meaning Celts in general in Proto-Germanic.

02:16:38.680 and it kind of got because you have to remember when we start with the greco-roman view of history

02:16:44.340 we start from this idea that the romans are something very separate from the celts

02:16:47.880 but like caesar had to have messages written in like greek because a celt could read latin 0.88

02:16:57.280 and understand it right like where sing gethorix a latin speaker would hear that word and think

02:17:04.580 like oh like over leader king because the length the celts and the romans were actually not that

02:17:12.620 far apart right so from the germanic perspective it's kind of just like there's this civilization

02:17:18.260 to the southwest that just keeps going into the boot of the peninsula and then one of these city

02:17:23.520 states because remember the celtic world was full of city states with very complex political

02:17:28.580 institutions when caesar invaded some of these city-states the neighbors had democratic assemblies

02:17:35.300 to figure out what the heck they were going to do about this massive bandit invasion

02:17:40.340 so from the germanic perspective like this civilization gets taken over by this one polity

02:17:45.620 that like uses its power to enslave everyone and literally work them to death in fields so that the

02:17:50.580 romans can throw parties so aork would have come from like the height of decadence with this 0.91

02:17:56.180 massively powerful but also very dangerous religion and like wacky stuff like male prostitutes and 0.99

02:18:02.740 chariot races and all these other things that the goths probably would have found to be very 1.00

02:18:07.060 decadent and frankly disgusting yeah there's a joke there like chariot races are as gross as 0.95

02:18:13.060 homosexuality but anyways um so when when sabbath says he has no lord but yahweh and is not subject 0.96

02:18:24.020 to the laws that atherit is enforcing he's making a claim that is very hard to compare to the present

02:18:34.580 era um the best way i can describe it is imagine being a new yorker and someone tells you

02:18:43.140 i am a muslim i have no need to follow your laws i hate your culture after 9 11 right like like

02:18:51.940 they do that yeah i know but like this is what atherid was faced by the fact that one 0.92

02:18:58.500 of his men only threw a weapon at this guy knock knock chris where'd you go

02:19:13.140 uh oh you took a step too far um so we'll wait for chris to get back um this is awesome and i'm

02:19:28.580 really appreciative of chris's uh breaking this down for us in such detail i think it's really

02:19:36.500 important and i think this is a really good primer for people who don't know a lot about goths to

02:19:42.740 learn about goths and uh get that figured so kind of point of information while we're doing this

02:19:52.340 if you could throw up a picture of both um wingeric and atherid i don't know if you can do two at once

02:19:59.380 uh i want to mention their respective um days of remembrance we celebrate wingeric henceforth on

02:20:10.340 march the 26th and we celebrate atherid on april the 12th

02:20:22.820 and one may ask you know why these days we try to figure them out for a lot of our uh our heroes so

02:20:32.900 what we go with first is if we know somebody's birthday but a lot of these ancient um heroes

02:20:43.060 their birthday is lost to the sands of time and we may not ever recover that when we do

02:20:48.580 we'll fix it you may notice that over the past couple of years we've changed around a couple

02:20:53.060 of days of remembrance as we've uncovered people's birthdays we want to we want to honor that when

02:21:00.340 we don't have it we try to find significant significant dates to associate with these people

02:21:07.940 we mentioned earlier that uh you know the christian martyr texts are what reveal to us

02:21:16.900 these heroes and their lives in in some ways so uh specifically atherid in the

02:21:27.540 Okay, so they talk about St. Sabbath, because he was martyred by the evil, mean, goth, Atherid. 0.51

02:21:38.960 We are putting Atherid's Day of Remembrance on St. Sabbath's feast day. 0.99

02:21:46.820 um as far as wingerick in the eastern orthodox church there is a day of recognition or mourning

02:21:59.300 or celebration for the martyred christian goths that he put to flames in that tent

02:22:06.980 that is the day that we are honoring wingerickle so those days are chosen

02:22:14.420 importantly but uh on purpose and i think in a in a special way and i'm glad we have some dates there

02:22:24.820 um we're figuring out uh what's up with with chris to get him back for us we've got

02:22:31.620 a lot of other cool stuff we can talk about and we will when we get him back but until then um

02:22:43.540 So there's questions to ask or to answer, and I think it's something we can be doing in the meantime. I want to answer the most recent one I see in the chat first. Do you really think drowning homosexuals in bogs is noble?

02:22:59.220 Yes, absolutely. I think that there is a, obviously you have to look at things in a historical context. If we started drowning homosexuals in bogs today, that would be shocking and appalling to our modern sensibilities because it would be so out of, out of the norm of what makes any sense in 2025. 1.00

02:23:25.820 but at the time in which it was done in a time where execution of criminals of the cowardly 0.98

02:23:36.060 and of the perverse was a frequent thing to do because they were detrimental to society

02:23:41.540 absolutely and if we look in the modern day and age it is a very commonly held and easily

02:23:49.580 understood position to have humane execution of convicted pedophiles

02:23:59.260 often that is what homosexuality ends up becoming so i don't think it is that far 0.84

02:24:06.380 of a stretch to see a certain amount of nobility in punishing that particular perversion in that 0.95

02:24:13.340 kind of a way the principle in the ancient germanic tribes days when that was the practice 0.95

02:24:23.660 the death penalty occurred to a lot of people who transgressed significantly and there were a lot of

02:24:30.540 crimes and things that we could wrap our heads around and publicly acknowledge in the execution

02:24:38.860 of the death penalty by hanging at that time, but in particular, men who effeminized themselves 0.84

02:24:48.460 to be so perverse as to be homosexuals, as well as cowards who fled their obligations 0.98

02:24:56.560 on the battlefield, were so disgusting, and not in the sense of the sex act per se, but 0.99

02:25:06.720 just the overall abdication of their manhood that we didn't want to even be reminded of that

02:25:14.900 stain upon our folk and our society. And yes, I think that was absolutely a noble and appropriate

02:25:21.700 thing to do at the time. I think that trying to say, yeah, tomorrow we should pass that law

02:25:27.980 is kind of absurd because that's not the way the world works. But yes, at the time that that was

02:25:32.980 practice, not only do I think that was noble, but Tacitus, who wrote about it, thought that it was

02:25:38.280 a noble thing to do, as did all of the literal nobility of our folk at that time.

02:25:47.960 Chris says he is back, yet I do not see him on my screen.

02:25:51.940 There we go. Am I back? All right. I am back. I got you my tabs where I had them, so I'm not

02:26:00.780 looking off the side okay um so i presume the the you were talking about the the most recent

02:26:09.760 the falling in fast forward um yes because i think it needed to be addressed quickly and

02:26:16.620 and yeah i think comprehensibly just to add in my two cents on this here um

02:26:22.900 i've seen people make uh point out evidence towards make the argument regarding whatever

02:26:30.260 that some of the groups that Tacitus is describing are like war bands, right?

02:26:40.060 So just to say their actions are reflective of their culture,

02:26:48.320 but they might be acting with a degree of, shall we say, looseness of procedure

02:26:55.560 that might not have happened in other areas like you know uh stringing someone up for

02:27:04.100 committing something your people find heinous without a trial you'd be strung up with a trial

02:27:09.800 if you did it in a different context that's not to necessarily like defend homosexuality or

02:27:17.680 something but it is to say that like um there's a context that needs to be accounted for in how

02:27:24.920 things proceed like did people just kill their neighbors well not not no but you're going with

02:27:33.080 this well yeah and the thing that i want to kind of say is again in 2025 where almost no crime is

02:27:42.040 ever you have a death penalty for then yeah just us just all of a sudden tomorrow that's the law

02:27:48.920 is we bog stomp gays yes it's extremely jarring and i see the the great concern with that

02:27:59.000 but in a day and age where the death penalty was attributed to a number of 0.99

02:28:03.880 of points of criminality and this being one of them

02:28:09.320 and the point here being that it was just disgusting to the general consciousness

02:28:13.880 i don't think that's an inappropriate thing for us to point out up until very recently

02:28:23.240 in the historical record up until you know well into the 20th century the the hanging

02:28:30.120 of a horse thief was a completely appropriate thing to do so i don't know why that spares

02:28:37.800 that. And I think some of it comes with the assumption in today's world that we pretend

02:28:45.820 or delude ourselves to think that it's some kind of legitimate lifestyle or legitimate sexual

02:28:52.100 preference. No, it's a very dangerous mental illness that very, very disproportionately

02:29:00.000 predominantly predates upon children it is very destructive it is

02:29:08.880 if we

02:29:13.020 I think that if you look at the number of instances of child molestation 0.92

02:29:20.620 and you subtracted those perpetrated by homosexual men

02:29:25.780 you would see that number decrease in a shocking way it is a very very dangerous thing removing

02:29:35.700 danger from society is very much an obligation and i think very much a noble thing to do

02:29:42.980 at a day and age where you don't have prisons or institutions or things to put offenders of

02:29:49.760 those kind of things. This is how you removed dangerous predators from society. Yes, it

02:29:57.720 makes all the sense in the world to try to magically inflict it with the stroke of a

02:30:03.900 imaginary pen upon 21st century jurisprudence. I think that's not a fair, not a fair way

02:30:14.560 that makes any sense but yes looking at it in the context of its day certainly but just to say what

02:30:21.920 i was saying about about the context like you know horse the horse thieves hang because horse theft

02:30:28.160 is bad but if you kill your neighbor because he stole your horse without going to the authorities

02:30:34.000 that's a different kind of thing than going to the authorities and then they hang him that's all i'm

02:30:40.720 pointing out here is anyways back to back to the goths sorry um so there's a question of what what

02:30:52.320 is atherid and wingerick what are atherid and wingerick really enforcing here like loyalty to

02:31:01.040 asa true but under what framework so in wolf floss's bible he referred he translates a number

02:31:10.560 of words using the sib root this is as i mentioned related to english sibling related to german

02:31:19.600 sip and haft um it has some lovely uh other terms it's associated with like siblayer which means

02:31:29.440 siblair which is an old uh it's old english yeah all the old english word for incest is siblair

02:31:37.040 right but then there's um which means kinship cosanguinity sybrid the abstraction of sib

02:31:47.600 the red is the same in kindred kin dread right um literally siblove meaning familial love

02:31:55.200 um in beowulf sib is used in a lot of words meaning peace at one point when beowulf he's

02:32:03.260 told to maintain the peace maintain the sibya which is implicitly associated with a lack of

02:32:11.000 violence you can see that in that story i told about the gothic the guy the gothic guy with the

02:32:16.500 surian mistress she is outside of sibya she is not a sib is not characterized by sib therefore

02:32:23.660 violence comes with her. Both directions, remember, like there's a violence can be 0.75

02:32:30.920 inflicted upon outsiders, but be careful because violence is inflicted by

02:32:35.160 outsiders. In Old Norse, we have Sifya Spell, which means to commit incest, but

02:32:42.200 actually means to contaminate Sibya. In Lokasenna, when Illuna asks that Bragi

02:32:48.080 keep Sibyar between those born and adopted by not quarreling with Loki, she

02:32:53.400 mentions sibyar born and adopted right um there's a few there's a number of other words associated

02:33:02.900 with it i'll spare everyone that the point of this here is that uncibusiness that's a gothic

02:33:09.940 word it means uncibusiness is very bad we don't have a good translation of this word in modern

02:33:17.340 english the easy one would be un-american and like the communism is un-american what's next

02:33:24.220 men marrying dogs jaywalking kind of sense but an honestly good translation would be the hebrew

02:33:31.100 which literally means rebelliousness but like rebelliousness from halakha because

02:33:37.240 in judy in jewish thought if you reject jewish holy law you are rejecting the basic principles

02:33:43.060 of society. In gothic thought, if you reject the Sibya, unsibiousness, if you become unsibious, 0.82

02:33:50.840 you are rejecting the basic principles of literally not committing violence.

02:33:57.980 You can kind of see evangelical Christians try to do something similar where they'll be like,

02:34:03.760 well, gee willikers, how can you be against theft if you don't believe that we should not wear 0.75

02:34:08.540 mixed fabrics because they're trying to ground the bible as this like bottom level thing that

02:34:15.360 holds society and keeps it from just going right that was Sibya for the gods it was a holistic

02:34:22.460 sense of relationships between individuals

02:34:25.960 and Sabas is actually saved by Sibya a number of times he's saved from having to basically perform

02:34:35.560 bloat in some manner by the mayor let's just call him who said takes him aside and is like look we

02:34:42.080 don't approve what you're doing but if you shut up and play along we'll we'll humor you there's

02:34:48.040 also a part of the story um i don't know how i don't know how old it is um because these martyr

02:34:54.700 tales get stuff tacked onto them over time but apparently there's a there's an addition to the

02:34:59.560 story at some point where he actually like is given shelter by a lady in his village and he

02:35:06.880 uh basically leaves her shelter to go do something and he gets caught by atherid's men

02:35:13.540 so it's kind of it's kind of humorous that the sybia which is something that he explicitly 0.79

02:35:18.880 rejects in front of atherid is actually the same thing saving his bacon from atherid because the 0.81

02:35:26.160 The village was made up of a non-institutional power base where like the elders of the village were trying to keep everyone working together through their own personal charisma rather than like institutional power of do what I say or I pull the lever that sends you to jail or six the soldiers on you or whatever.

02:35:51.280 It was a situation of interpersonal relations at the bottom level, and as you went up, it became increasingly ideological until you get to a Thanarek's position, where he is essentially mediating the relationship between men and the gods.

02:36:09.620 sorry um so to to kind of explain the structure of the society at the top you've got a thaneric

02:36:22.300 who is mediating between man and the divine then below him you've got the reiches of presumably

02:36:29.060 multiple kunis just given the size of some of the numbers particularly soldiers that thaneric is able

02:36:34.380 to draw upon then within these kunis you've got the multiple villages and at the point of the

02:36:40.640 villages there's like a kind of gap between the lived reality of trying to survive and get enough

02:36:47.300 food and interact with the divine for very utilitarian purposes and above that you've got

02:36:54.200 these more these greater concerns of like how are we ordering society how are we keeping people

02:37:00.680 in line isn't the right term but like how are we keeping people working together

02:37:05.660 because remember sabbath does say he is an atomized individual who is not beholden to the law

02:37:13.580 saying that he outlaws himself is is very apt it's a very good way of putting what he's doing

02:37:21.920 now there is a question of how can he do that in a gothic context because 0.83

02:37:31.460 alaric and theodoric and odoiker were already mentioned how can you just blow up your culture

02:37:39.780 like this in light of the people trying to make wolfalos out to be this actual leader of the goths

02:37:47.520 As I said, there was a lot of effort to craft this amazing influence of Wulfolos by Byzantine Christians.

02:37:56.960 He was compared to Jesus, David, Elijah, Moses, Abraham, every important Jew in the Bible.

02:38:03.920 He was that guy for the Goths.

02:38:07.180 He got kicked out of Gothia by Aorik, by the way.

02:38:12.460 How does that work? 0.98

02:38:13.860 How can you have a real gothic identity with a religion that is predicated upon blowing up gothic identity?

02:38:23.520 So there's a book, Lady with a Mead Cup.

02:38:28.580 It's really good. It's incredibly dry.

02:38:31.300 Like you could start a fire with the stuff in there dry.

02:38:35.320 And this book goes into what I would call the warlord sociality.

02:38:41.680 So at this time in the Germanic world, there's these two social formats of the tribal sociality, which is this, as the Ulster Agotheus talked about, holistic relationship between individuals that encompasses the gods and links them all together in this big sort of family.

02:39:00.200 And the reason why you should work together is because you are a goth, you are family, you are working towards your mutual ends, right?

02:39:08.180 the warlord sociality comes out of the celtic world as this idea of basically hey you and 0.79

02:39:18.500 your friends can go off and get a bunch of money by raiding each other and the roman empire um

02:39:26.540 the warlord sociality gets imported into the gothic world into the germanic world from the

02:39:34.580 celtic world and the warlord sociality is what we see with the the descendants of the warlord

02:39:44.580 sociality are a lot of what we see in anglo-saxon and old norse stuff beowulf is extremely uh warlord

02:39:55.220 as opposed to tribal here and um there's a bunch of words i'm not going to play the word games if

02:40:02.760 the Altair Gothi's not on to fill dead air while I get the words out, but what Wolfalos and the

02:40:11.140 Aryan Goths were doing was leaning into that warlord sociality to craft an alternative Gothic 0.84

02:40:17.160 identity. And this is where the idea of like loyalty to Yahweh as your lord comes from. This 0.93

02:40:24.500 is very apparent in the Helian, which is a pretty cool, how much of what I've said have you heard,

02:40:31.600 sir uh i just got back in the room i went and tucked my daughter in so uh you've been you've

02:40:40.320 been without a net for this whole time all right fantastic i didn't fall i'm talking about um

02:40:45.440 the lady with a mean cup warlord versus tribe thing cool okay so as i said beowulf is very

02:40:53.600 warlord in its um society the heliand is this kind of famous poem about like retelling the

02:41:02.320 gospel story with jesus as like a germanic warlord and the apostles are his thanes and stuff

02:41:08.080 and that's a very interesting text because you know what word they never use to describe jews

02:41:14.240 feed or theudance or theuda or whatever the cognate is the heliand refers to jews as

02:41:20.800 iju das volke but never as like iju das zide the word feed had a kind of uh stacked concentric rings

02:41:33.120 set of definitions where the word feed was deeply related to the germanics themselves

02:41:39.680 dutch and deutsch both come from cognates of this word feed deutschland means feed land the race's

02:41:48.640 Wulff from the last uses this word theed to translate etnikoi, from which we get the modern ethnos, and helenos, helene, both of which basically mean non-Jew.

02:42:06.640 Helene, interestingly, is extended to encompass European ethno-religions and ethno-religiosity in general at this period.

02:42:16.640 There's an interesting fellow by the name of Fravitta who refers to him, despite being a Thor-worshipping goth, refers to himself as a Helene.

02:42:26.360 Interesting point.

02:42:28.300 Thyskaland is Icelandic for Germany. 0.99

02:42:33.320 For this exact reason.

02:42:35.100 The Theid root in Icelandic, their equivalent, Theod, it is used everywhere in English that we use natio and nation, you know, and ethno.

02:42:47.740 So like ethnonationalism in Icelandic, I looked it up earlier today, it's like Theodbuketh, it literally means like Theidmind, like ethnonationalism, like race mind, right?

02:43:00.940 um so there's a distinction in how ethnicities are referred to where like this word feed refers

02:43:10.460 to europeans namely goths but then greeks and romans and presumably celts but it doesn't extend

02:43:18.300 to semites like syrians not just jews um so the warlord sociality is immediately in contact with

02:43:31.100 the tribal sociality and again i'm citing lady with a mean cub here the warlord sociality is

02:43:37.020 based around this idea of like the warlord and his wife as the father and mother of the warband

02:43:42.540 in contradiction isn't the right word but it's modeling itself off of the tribal idea of like

02:43:49.660 the top males and the top women implicitly their wives but not necessarily right and by

02:43:57.040 and the warlord sociality mediates itself through bloat right the warlord and his wife are putting

02:44:04.280 on bloat and they give the gifts and they receive service i'm not trying to be critical of the

02:44:10.420 warlord sociality here, but you can see how this could be co-opted towards the ends of this Arian

02:44:17.100 Christian identity, and it's important to remember here, this is Arian Christian. The Trinitarians do

02:44:21.780 not have anything to do with this. They're not doing this, you know, Yahweh is your lord, you

02:44:26.780 have to be nice to his son Yeshua thing. No, that's different. What Trinitarians do is different

02:44:31.460 here. But you can see how this warlord sociality could be co-opted because, and this is a term that

02:44:41.380 the Lady with a Mead Cup author uses repeatedly, the warlord sociality is based around fictive

02:44:47.460 kinship. The warlord and his wife are putting on a bloat as a way of artificially binding

02:44:55.460 the warband together as a sort of little family in addition to existing familial relationships and

02:45:04.420 when this goes into the scandinavian and anglo-saxon contexts it does interface with

02:45:10.020 the tribal sociality quite a bit as it co-opts more and more of the tribal sociality

02:45:17.380 but the reason i'm pointing out this distinction here is both to explain

02:45:20.980 how can sabas and the the guys that wingeric punished even do what they're doing how can

02:45:28.700 wolflos construct this idea how can the helion have this like jesus as a war warlord kind of

02:45:34.980 thing but also it answers the question of what did aoric go home to right because i'm not going

02:45:45.400 to get into the specifics but basically all of the soldiers in aorix patch of homeland left to

02:45:53.040 go fight elsewhere when aorix came home or they they had already left when he arrived

02:45:58.420 so what is he the eudex of what is athanaric the eudex of what is ariaric the eudex of

02:46:06.000 because christian sources are very insistent that there is like a lineage here ariaric aorix athanaric

02:46:13.840 there's like a tradition being passed down what is it a tradition of well this is it it is of a

02:46:20.140 tribal sociality an older more archaic form of um germanic governance that aoric comes home from

02:46:31.020 byzantium to and says you know thor's beard guys we got to get to work we have a very powerful

02:46:38.460 enemy at our gates and we become the thanarix regime he actually has two he has the byzantines

02:46:44.620 and then the hunts so he's got to get his poop in a group for two separate enemies on literally two

02:46:50.380 fronts the goths the thanarix goths are literally being like pincered on two fronts do you want to

02:46:55.820 throw the map up now nick i i should have a pointer but i don't know how the heck we would do that

02:47:03.420 so i've kind of yeah bear with me okay bearing

02:47:19.180 and biting we'll find the link

02:47:27.340 i know

02:47:27.740 so i can kind of ramble about time to appreciate this map this is a thing of beauty

02:47:36.700 this is a really cool map that nick found for us we were fumbling around with some uh less than

02:47:43.820 maps and this is a really good one that captures where we're talking about specifically at the

02:47:51.420 time period we're talking about even with the uh thuringi in like designated on where we're

02:48:00.620 talking about so i think this is very valuable if nick can blow it up a little bit bigger it'd

02:48:04.380 be awesome if not we can work with what we got so just to kind of explain why are there two empires

02:48:13.660 so remember how i said that the roman empire basically worked on having like a single rich

02:48:19.980 guy lead the armies and personally lead the armies using his own money to get Budian slaves to give to

02:48:27.180 Latifundia plantations who would sell their products to the government that would then

02:48:31.660 distribute them to the cities in an early form of welfare that would then create goods that would be

02:48:37.260 bought by the Latifundia. Anyways, the empire got too big. And so there was this idea of, okay,

02:48:43.500 what if we had a kaiser who led the thing and then augustus who was his protege kind of like

02:48:51.840 the vice president but not like useless like you'd have like the general and then his lieutenant

02:48:57.260 right and then they needed then they realized oh the empire is still too big and they did that

02:49:04.000 again so they'd have an emperor in the west which is like you know however i'm gonna france spain

02:49:12.880 italy you get the idea the west plum yeah and then you have like the burgundy east right

02:49:20.260 so you have constantine constantine gets proceeded gets succeeded by constantine

02:49:28.840 the second right um he gets preceded by uh julian because um much like clovis uh constantine

02:49:41.460 converted and then immediately started murdering his entire family so julian takes over julian

02:49:48.820 restores the greco-roman religiosity to its rightful place julian dies then he is succeeded

02:49:56.980 by a guy named jovian who dies very quickly like uh anyways so jovian is replaced by two dudes 0.99

02:50:08.740 Valentinian and Valens, both of whom are chosen by the imperial elite because they are stupid. 0.99

02:50:15.780 They are easily manipulatable. So these two then split the empire, Valentinian in the west and 1.00

02:50:25.380 Valens in the east. Valens, um, was not a very good leader. The writing at the time takes great

02:50:34.180 pains to tiptoe around the fact that he does not make good decisions so valens got paranoid that

02:50:42.980 a guy named procopius who was one of julian's big men was uh i'm sorry the story took too long and

02:50:52.020 now the map's gone we didn't actually talk about the map um so julie valens gets paranoid that a

02:50:58.660 a guy named procopius is trying to steal the throne valens then tries to murder procopius

02:51:05.060 procopius then actually tries to steal the throne he almost succeeds and calls in the gothic soldiers

02:51:14.260 that have loyalty to constantine's family because procopius is claiming that he is

02:51:20.980 basically avenging Julian, who was part of Constantine's dynasty. So Goths marched with

02:51:30.340 Julian. Are you talking about Julian the Pious? Yes. So side note, we're calling him that. He's 0.96

02:51:39.660 known as Julian the Apostate. He is the attempt in Rome of like, hey, go ahead and keep the map

02:51:47.100 up there for a bit if you would nick i'm sorry we keep jumping around no no no it's fine go ahead

02:51:51.820 and keep it up until we say otherwise if you would please and i appreciate you being on top of it nick

02:51:57.580 so julian known to history as julian the apostate he was one he was the example of a roman emperor

02:52:05.900 that's like hey wait this is ridiculous our empire is founded on our loyalty to our gods

02:52:12.860 what is this christianity nonsense i get it's politically expedient but no this isn't the right

02:52:20.140 way to go and so he and his reign short though it was tried to bring the roman um establishment back

02:52:29.660 in uh in trough with their gods and uh you know all respect in the world to him for doing that

02:52:38.540 his reign was really short but it was very interesting in light of that and i wish i had

02:52:43.740 a good book recommendation and i don't off the top of my head but by all means anyone who's

02:52:53.500 interested in this kind of stuff julian the apostate research that as much as you can

02:52:59.660 it's fascinating and i think it's really inspirational and informative to i don't know

02:53:05.740 to a lot of things so i would encourage people to look deeper into him continue sorry about that

02:53:11.340 so julian leads a contingent of goths into persia which the area we're actually talking

02:53:20.220 about is the kind of dotted line between the word licinius and sassanian persian emperor

02:53:25.660 or empire shapur the second right julian had actually spent a lot of time in gaul

02:53:32.700 leading gaulish and germanic troops i mean against other germans sure but he like literally fought in

02:53:40.320 a shield wall with germanic and celtic warriors this guy was the real deal as far as like

02:53:48.580 thanes and jarls were concerned right so when he was like puts hellenic and roman polytheism back

02:53:58.700 in their rightful place this would have been seen as a good thing for the goths in a certain sense

02:54:05.100 in like a distant kind of way so julian dies unfortunately and procope and uh jovian takes

02:54:14.820 over and then valens and valentinian valens gets it in his head that procopius is trying to

02:54:20.000 overthrow him procopius gets attacked procopius then actually tries to overthrow valens and

02:54:27.200 And Procopius calls in two people, Ermanarek, Jormunreker, from, you know, from the Norse sagas, and Athanarik.

02:54:39.700 Athanarik's troops actually occupy the city of Byzantium in Thrace.

02:54:44.580 Like, they hold it, because Procopius had it, and he gets betrayed by his generals, which is how Valens takes over.

02:54:50.500 valens then comes back and he actually like accosts a thaneric on his way out of thrace

02:54:58.100 and there's a rather apparently embarrassing incident where a thaneric says like bro i was

02:55:04.360 working for procopius you killed him i work for you now like we're just mercenaries and valens

02:55:10.720 like throws a temper tantrum because all of his retainers are like yeah dude just let him go

02:55:15.640 they're they're they don't care they're not gonna try anything valens then um

02:55:22.560 leads an army uh into gothia the area on the map that it's like kind of under the word goths it has

02:55:35.300 like kind of reddish and yellowish stripes and just starts attacking now i've seen sources that

02:55:42.820 say he's trying to go after ermanaric but he actually seems to be going after a thanaric

02:55:47.560 um i don't know what's i presume he didn't really have much of a plan and was just kind of lashing

02:55:55.500 out at this opponent of of uh his the the soldiers of procopius right this is where the um the treaty

02:56:06.120 on the danube comes from where a thaneric says he rules due to wisdom not power right which again

02:56:13.360 remember is the first quotation from the goths it's kind of interesting that the people who pour

02:56:18.100 out libations to the gods their leader describes himself as ruling through wisdom and not power

02:56:23.760 so this starts a running conflict between a thaneric and valance and it's during this time

02:56:34.740 that a thaneric's men are really clamping down on the problem of apostasy and part of that is

02:56:42.380 because it's also during this time that a thaneric is dealing with the huns so it doesn't really show

02:56:47.480 it well on the map here but if you look at this at where it says the word goths on the map the

02:56:53.500 the huns are actually coming in from there and they are fighting against the goths and a thaneric

02:57:00.560 is trying to shore up his regime against them but also play not really flagged on the play but a

02:57:08.400 pin in the play no i would like to do an aside on the huns for a second because it addresses a

02:57:15.100 question yes in our queue that i think is very worth this is i think this is the perfect time

02:57:22.260 to address it and i think it'll help clarify and it's something that spawn and i have been

02:57:26.920 over a number of times during our Volsunga Saga episodes and our other, you know, treating

02:57:36.700 of the relevant lays in the ETA element.

02:57:44.920 Our question is, oh, no, he asked two questions and I'm stopped on the wrong one.

02:57:51.580 Hold on.

02:57:52.580 I apologize.

02:57:53.580 Yeah, the screw up wiped the question from mine.

02:57:56.380 remember what it is but i don't want to like get it wrong um no you're good i can't find it now

02:58:02.060 oh here we go the hans arian were the huns arians were they chased out of asia by genghis khan

02:58:10.300 no that's a historical genghis khan comes much later 800 years

02:58:15.180 Genghis Khan is a 1200s phenomenon but were the Aryans is an interesting question yes and no by

02:58:28.380 this point in their push they were a loose confederation of nomadic peoples and as they

02:58:39.540 came from the steppes as they would roll up tribes it's like join our confederation join our war band

02:58:48.900 or be destroyed cool we're huns now we're all huns now so the huns at this point incorporated a number

02:58:58.100 of what you would call slavic and then germanic peoples into into their retinue their initial

02:59:06.020 population was step nomads and you've got this uh bayou of where the asians meet the

02:59:22.740 like og caucasians and you've got some mongols and you've got other you know ukrainian russian

02:59:34.020 white people so it's a it's a mixed group of people that does include a significant asiatic

02:59:42.340 you know almond eyed contingency it's hard because the descriptions we have of the huns

02:59:53.940 come from their victims which always paint them as other and as you know these like almost

03:00:00.820 those little swarthy beady eyed demons on horseback they're known at this point to the 0.94

03:00:09.380 christian population of the world as attila is the scourge of god he is you know the torture 0.91

03:00:17.640 implement of the almighty against the the pagans because he is largely hurting um at the at this 0.93

03:00:28.100 early stage is largely hurting germanic tribes people in eastern europe so

03:00:36.500 some of the huns are arians some of them are mongols many of them are somewhere in between 0.95

03:00:44.500 and a lot of them are just people that caught up and it's like hey join our war band or die 1.00

03:00:51.380 so you might ask chris you're a language nerd what do you have to say about where the huns are in

03:00:56.980 in addition to everything the alzheimer gothi said the question is what do you mean by a hun

03:01:00.980 because as he said at this time like there's a number of germanic heroes little h heroes like

03:01:08.280 cool dudes not you know who the huns roll up and they're like you know friendship ended with

03:01:15.660 the lombards now attila is my best friend and then the precise moment it's no longer useful

03:01:21.920 they're like huns i always hated them and immediately start fighting them um we know

03:01:29.220 three words from hunnic the first is medos which is obvious it's mead it's obviously an importation

03:01:39.240 from proto-germanic it's just cognate with mead the next is camos a lesser barley drink and then

03:01:46.280 there is Strava, a funeral feast. Linguists think that Kamos and Strava come from Proto-Indo-European

03:01:53.860 words, so we don't really know. They might have spoken Turkic or whatever the heck. There probably

03:02:00.560 wasn't all that big of an original Ur-Hun populace. What probably happened is that these powerful 1.00

03:02:07.680 outsiders were able to unify a kind of constellation of other groups around them just through sheer

03:02:13.540 inertia. There is an interesting theory that traces movements of the steppe peoples into Europe

03:02:20.580 towards a series of defensive, preemptive pushbacks by the Chinese into the steppe.

03:02:28.280 Now we're talking about like military actions that are still in what is today modern China.

03:02:33.880 So it's kind of a domino effect where like the Chinese emperor pushes against this steppe leader

03:02:38.380 who pushes who pushes who pushes who cause Attila to enter Europe it's probably not likely that the

03:02:44.800 Huns came from too far too far east like rural China east um apparently the the original Huns

03:02:53.480 practiced head binding which is an odd thing that doesn't really happen much in Europe

03:02:57.000 but who knows right we don't really know much about them we could have there was once a guy

03:03:05.700 by the name of...

03:03:07.120 There was a guy by the name

03:03:15.840 of Priscus of Panium

03:03:17.480 who lived roughly 410

03:03:19.920 to 472. He wrote an

03:03:21.780 eight-book work, The History of Attila,

03:03:24.180 exploring the Goths as a people,

03:03:26.100 their language, their religion,

03:03:27.800 their culture, where they came from, their heroes,

03:03:29.680 their kings, their society.

03:03:32.320 Priscus basically got deputized

03:03:33.960 to be a diplomat to the Huns. He didn't want to do that. He wanted to be a nerd in his library

03:03:37.940 and got repeatedly deputized to be the diplomat to these

03:03:41.960 people. To demonstrate just how in with the Huns Priscus was 0.95

03:03:45.900 at one point he had to deliver a very precious necklace from the Byzantine 0.67

03:03:49.760 Empress to Kreka, Attila's top

03:03:53.960 wife. Priscus was alone with 0.99

03:03:57.660 Kreka and Attila's son

03:04:00.980 without men watching them for i don't know how long but long enough for them to presumably talk

03:04:07.240 like attila left this guy alone with his wife for long enough for something to happen that

03:04:14.000 should demonstrate how much this guy mattered in the byzantine hunnish diplomacy this is well

03:04:19.460 after a thaneric by the way but it's just a fun fact um yeah priscus wrote an eight book work the

03:04:26.080 history of Attila, and then in the mid-900s Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos received a

03:04:35.440 vision from Yahweh telling him to cut and paste the entire Byzantine imperial library into a 53-book

03:04:44.160 set, reducing Priscus's eight-book set to just 35 lines. That is basically everything we know

03:04:52.880 about the huns those 35 lines the reason yahweh told um constantine the seventh to do this was

03:04:59.920 because yahweh felt that the imperial library was too big it was hard to read all of the books in it

03:05:06.160 and that thus constantine the seventh needed another dining hall to party in so the huns this

03:05:13.120 is kind of why the huns just show up and like where do they go well we literally do not have

03:05:19.920 the book that told us what happened and where they went and stuff um attila dies and his horde

03:05:24.880 collapses i already mentioned about the nosebleed it's probably not a nose people don't just have

03:05:30.240 nosebleeds and die you know there's something that causes it um were we gonna hit other questions

03:05:38.480 before i go back into a thaneric and valens because we've kind of gotten out of atherid

03:05:42.800 in wingerick um i can talk more about wolf last you're muted sir

03:05:50.160 i catch it before you say it but after i start talking but i appreciate your reminders on it

03:05:56.640 um so i think it's a decent intermission to kind of go through and catch a couple of

03:06:06.160 uh maybe a couple of questions we can see what we can do here yeah so let's take an intermission

03:06:11.600 let's catch a couple of questions at the end of the broadcast we'll you know properly catch you

03:06:18.640 up on all four of our gothic heroes and their days of remembrance uh when you were in your

03:06:26.160 down time i don't know if you heard it but i mentioned why we celebrate the days of remembrance

03:06:30.400 on the days that we do for Wengeric and Atherid. Oh, yeah, I told everybody Atherid is on the

03:06:41.200 feast day for St. Sabbath, which I thought was cool flex. And then Wengeric, same thing. There

03:06:50.080 is a uh orthodox day of mourning or whatever on their calendar for the uh the martyrs burnt in

03:07:00.080 the revival tent or whatever and that's the day that we're honoring uh lingerick and then how did

03:07:06.400 we get october 23rd for king auric why are you gonna do me like that nick so i'm trying to i'm

03:07:14.560 trying to remember it and there was a good reason i'm trying to recapture what that reason was

03:07:22.560 i will find it put a pin in that by the end of this broadcast i will explain to you why

03:07:28.720 i nick keeping me honest i appreciate that so um going back so but here here's the thing

03:07:37.840 chris you are amazing thank you so much you are really delivering on the information on this

03:07:45.920 so you guys know inside baseball reason this shows the way it is

03:07:51.040 most of us can't just drop three hours of expository speaking on you guys so it needs

03:07:59.040 to be fueled with question and answer and conversational tone certainly i need that

03:08:03.760 Chris being able to go and in granular detail lay out the known history of the goths in this period

03:08:13.360 and doing it for three hours now this is a treat and I know that some people zone out cool we try

03:08:22.200 to have a lot of different content on here that's going to appeal to different folks and different

03:08:26.580 interests but for those of us who love history and love learning new stuff and I've already seen

03:08:32.340 this in the comments. This is really a treat. So seriously, Chris, thank you very much for this.

03:08:41.320 It's a good time to go back over some of the questions. Might as well while we've got a

03:08:45.160 little bit of time, and then we can go into the next half here, because there is more to say

03:08:49.540 about the struggle between goth and Christian at this time. One might ask why I don't say

03:08:56.860 Ausatru and Christian? Well, I did. There's no difference between goth and Ausatru. And that's

03:09:03.760 a beautiful thing for us to aspire to. Before we hit the questions, I just want to,

03:09:09.640 um, I completely forgot what I was going to say. Uh, it's okay. You'll get back to it, but

03:09:17.280 yes no um so there we are very the conflict between christianity and paganism is immediately

03:09:27.200 obvious for obvious reasons it is worth stressing here that the christians tell us that the reason

03:09:35.100 why a thaneric and atherid and wingeric and aoric are doing their thing is because they are

03:09:42.400 punishing people who are refusing to perform and participate in Osotru, which at the time is wrapped

03:09:48.300 up in, like, you can't not be loyal to Thor and also not be a criminal. Like, refusing to be loyal

03:09:57.320 to Thor literally means you are allowed to commit theft in a certain sense. So it's worth reiterating,

03:10:04.080 We live in a day and age where religion is optional, and being American does not imply a particular religiosity.

03:10:14.340 For a long time, it implied Christianity, but we live, you know, post-enlightenment, there's this smorgasbord of religions thing.

03:10:27.060 So from somebody in a modern understanding of our social contract, this might seem jarring.

03:10:35.880 The social contract looked very different in the days of our ancestors.

03:10:42.960 It wasn't a choosing of faith.

03:10:47.160 Faith was a fact.

03:10:48.660 the gods were a factual

03:10:51.520 part of life.

03:10:57.160 There weren't atheists. There weren't people who had

03:11:00.920 different thoughts and feelings about stuff. I mean, there's

03:11:04.900 always been crazy people, but no, these

03:11:09.060 are the gods of our folk and our ancestors. These are

03:11:12.900 thus a living part of our state

03:11:17.240 and our function and our folk and all of the things we did in life the closer you get back

03:11:23.980 to the golden age the more all of these things fit within the synergy that we talk about of being

03:11:30.300 whole being hail being healthy and living out so true there was no separation loyalty to the gods

03:11:40.040 was loyalty to your nation, was loyalty to your king, was loyalty to your father, was loyalty to

03:11:47.880 your warband, was loyalty, was all of that. Any piece of that that was incongruent

03:11:56.440 was both criminal and sinful in our modern understanding of it. So question. Hey there,

03:12:06.880 a question for you guys this week. With the theme of victory never sleeps and a general trend towards

03:12:12.940 finding ways to win, what are some of the best ways we can obtain victories, large or small,

03:12:19.120 in our everyday lives? How does being a good member of the AFA contribute to your ability to

03:12:26.460 win those victories? Thank you for all you do. Well, thank you, Tyler, for your questions. You

03:12:32.320 consistently submit those and we appreciate them uh chris has disappeared chris you still with us

03:12:40.560 all right he is not still with us so until he bounced

03:12:43.600 he'll be back so when he he can maybe hit this when he comes back from where i sit

03:12:53.280 it's hard because the opportunity for victory is so much and so many that we don't realize and it

03:13:01.600 all depends on who you are and where you're at in your life if you are not in the physical condition

03:13:09.280 you want to be in every step of getting closer there is a victory if you aren't happy in your

03:13:18.080 marriage fixing your marriage is a victory if you're struggling with raising your children

03:13:25.920 finding a way to do that more effectively and better is a victory. If you want to advance in

03:13:35.600 your career, getting a promotion is a victory. If you don't like your career and you want to do

03:13:41.460 something else, finding a different job is a victory. If you're ignorant and you want to be 0.99

03:13:50.580 wiser. Every book you read, every new thing you learn is a 1.00

03:13:56.260 victory. If you want to help the Ausitru Folk Assembly and

03:14:06.220 Ausitru to flourish, getting involved, volunteering at your

03:14:12.980 Hoff, volunteering to do an AFA project, talking to the people

03:14:17.420 that you meet that are heterosexual white folks that should be here, that bringing any one of 0.55

03:14:24.500 those people home is a tremendous victory for us. If you struggle with things in your life, 0.96

03:14:31.460 you're struggling with addiction, you can break free of that. That's a victory. If you're,

03:14:36.940 you know, having trouble being the son you want to be to your parents,

03:14:44.860 repairing that relationship is a victory.

03:14:48.840 If you're broke, getting financially successful is a victory.

03:14:54.280 All of those things are victories.

03:14:57.200 A key to all of those things is building successful habits

03:15:03.380 and being consistent in the implementation of those habits.

03:15:08.340 Consistency is the best, most sure path to victory over the long run.

03:15:14.060 consistency gets you there while you are consistent in your steps towards victory

03:15:23.420 recognize opportunities to accelerate it there's a lot of things you can do to accelerate it 0.63

03:15:29.200 but in the meantime and this is you know maybe a stupid analogy but it's what comes to mind

03:15:34.620 your mortgage every mortgage payment gets you literally a step closer to paying your mortgage

03:15:41.660 be consistent make every single mortgage payment but you can also can make side payments towards

03:15:51.300 your principal to get that happening quicker and faster and better ideally do all of that

03:15:57.100 but if all you can do is be consistent on that mortgage payment you will get where you're trying

03:16:03.520 to go so do the consistent thing and while you develop a habit of being very consistent

03:16:11.180 then add little acceleration if you can. But the second part of the question is how does being a

03:16:19.860 good AFA member contribute to that? First and foremost, and the least tangible but absolutely

03:16:26.900 real, being a good AFA member aligns you with the ICER. They appreciate what you are doing,

03:16:36.140 they smile upon you, and they bless your endeavors. If you do nothing different but become a faithful

03:16:44.440 AFA member, you will see victories where you did not see them before. You will see success at the

03:16:52.080 things you are trying to be victorious at faster than if you were not a successful or a enthusiastic

03:17:00.580 kfa member beyond that though it connects you with a network of um of family of fellow worshipers

03:17:13.940 who want to help you and want to see you succeed you have a wealth of knowledge of all of your

03:17:20.180 fellow afa brothers and sisters that have seen similar things been through similar struggles

03:17:26.820 and want to help you succeed you have people that have jobs and can help you get a job where they

03:17:33.460 work you have some people that own their own business or entrepreneurs that can help you

03:17:39.940 have opportunities you have people that can help you find a place to live near them

03:17:46.420 you have people that can help provide you a safety net to hey they will help take care of

03:17:52.500 you if you fall on your face while you're trying to pursue victory. You have people that want to

03:17:58.640 encourage you, be forces to keep you accountable, to hold your hand on each and every step that you

03:18:08.860 need towards victory. We've got a whole group of people that do that when you're talking about

03:18:14.060 like addiction recovery. We got a bunch of people enthusiastically trying to help with that if you

03:18:19.860 want to get in better shape and fix yourself physically. We've got a lot of people, including

03:18:25.360 a number of our go-thar, that want to help you if you want to get better spiritually or learn more

03:18:30.880 or become, you know, more knowledgeable about things you're weak on that would love to help

03:18:36.080 you with those things. There's people like Chris here that clearly nerd out on these obscure points

03:18:43.220 of history. They'd love to help you if there's something you don't get or you don't know about

03:18:48.240 that you want to learn on Chris would love to help you like hey here's some resources here's

03:18:53.500 how I figured this out here's you know let me explain the connective point between this thing

03:18:58.600 you know and this thing you don't know any of us would love to help you with anything we've got

03:19:04.100 we've got people in the AFA that are accomplished in their field of countless different both

03:19:12.120 professions and hobbies and if you want to get better at any of those things many of us there's 0.86

03:19:19.960 probably a few jerks that don't want to help but there's a whole lot of people that would love to 0.64

03:19:25.240 help one of the things that's a funny phenomenon people want to help when we see people struggle 0.99

03:19:36.840 there's almost a robotic hey if there's anything i can do let me know

03:19:42.120 We say it robotically, but at least in the AFA, we don't mean it robotically.

03:19:47.820 Most of us, when we see a fellow AFA member who is struggling or who has something they want to achieve, we desperately want to help them.

03:19:59.880 We want to find things we can do to be useful and helpful to get them to the next level.

03:20:07.760 ask for those things you don't get what you don't ask for but if you ask i think you'll be very

03:20:14.920 surprised at what you get because a lot of us just it is and maybe this is selfish and it's whatever

03:20:23.020 a lot of us want to help we want to help for you who are helping but a lot of us our soul

03:20:32.740 is elevated through helping. It's elevated through other things, too. But as noble people,

03:20:41.560 we want that opportunity to help raise someone up and to help them be better in their lives.

03:20:49.000 We become more by our experience helping others and getting them to level up. That's a victory

03:20:58.720 for all of us too. So that's a big way that AFA membership helps you. Now that we've got Chris

03:21:07.580 back, do you have any thoughts on the question of what are some of the best ways that we can

03:21:16.560 obtain victories, large and small, in our everyday lives? And how does being a good member of the AFA

03:21:22.420 contribute to our ability to win those victories i think you pointed out that uh the virtue of

03:21:29.540 perseverance is one that grants victory in a lot of cases it's not fun to put your nose to

03:21:36.980 the grindstone and do something consistently but it does produce results and you'll notice

03:21:43.700 that people spend a lot of time thinking about how to achieve things in like one fell swoop that just

03:21:48.900 fixes everything they don't spend a lot of time thinking about how to do something small every day

03:21:55.620 little by little to achieve a big goal because it's hard but they know it works

03:22:01.860 that's not to chastise anyone but it is to say that you know you have to take things slow in

03:22:06.660 some instances and you it's not fun to like pay off a mortgage and if you think about it as

03:22:15.940 you have to do this little thing consistently then it's it's actually kind of liberating to

03:22:22.420 have that stability like you can base other things off of that it acts as a springboard to do stuff

03:22:30.740 you know like having a budget is based off of well you have to have food you have to make rent

03:22:36.500 payments etc etc etc um in addition to the knowledge base just being part of a community

03:22:44.020 and moving forward is massively important and having people even if you're not getting free

03:22:52.180 heavy machinery training just having friends who get things and are willing to even if you just

03:22:59.940 need to vent hear you is massively helpful being part of a community is helpful even if you're not

03:23:08.260 at a given moment receiving some kind of specific benefit like oh yeah i get free rides because i'm

03:23:13.780 pay or the afa whatever you know we are social creatures no man is an island just being part

03:23:21.940 of a group is a benefit in a lot of ways i think so is your your buddy well like there's some kind

03:23:34.660 of white thing on my shoulder but i think it's maybe something shiny on the anyways i'll figure

03:23:40.900 it out i don't know what this is but it's bugging me i think it's just the shine off leather there

03:23:45.620 but anyways it's the tism don't worry about it so uh gutiska razda the gothic language was it

03:23:58.420 a divergent language of old norse or was it old an older language that adopt that adopted

03:24:05.620 after migration this one is all you chris so um gothic split off from the ancestor language of

03:24:19.380 gothic and proto-norse around 100 a.d so just to kind of back it up with language families the name

03:24:26.580 comes from when some stuffy european academic decided to name a language family based on the

03:24:33.140 sum total geographic extant of the extant languages. So Indo-European was coined before we found out

03:24:41.060 about Hittite, the Anatolian languages in general, and Tokarian because it stretched from India to

03:24:48.580 Europe. Tibeto-Burman stretches from Tibet to Burma. Sino-Tibetan from China to Tibet. When a

03:24:58.260 language has proto in it with the exception of proto-norse for a specific reason i'll go into

03:25:03.940 that means that it is reconstructed it is proto-indo-european because it is a reconstructed

03:25:08.740 language you can put a proto language wherever you want it's kind of arbitrary we just put it at

03:25:15.300 the most recent point we can reconstruct proto germanic is not attested except possibly through

03:25:22.820 certain names that are filtered to us through greek and latin but that doesn't really count

03:25:26.580 proto-nors doesn't count because they said like okay proto-nors was spoken in like 400 ad

03:25:35.460 and then they found runestones from that period so it's technically no longer

03:25:39.940 unattested because we do have words from them um we actually humorously enough we actually have

03:25:46.740 a runestone with the the uh i can't remember what the specific phrase is but it's like

03:25:54.020 like Erlaz, which is the Scandinavian cognate of Aryan, like Arya from Sanskrit,

03:26:02.180 surviving into a Scandinavian language.

03:26:05.020 Anyways, Gothic split off from an ancestor, a shared ancestor of Old Norse.

03:26:12.440 And we can tell, as I said, because of a number of divergences and differences from Old Norse.

03:26:18.060 You can look this up if you want.

03:26:19.580 It's like, oh, the vowel grade is...

03:26:21.700 the palatization is a blunt one like the the distinction between like the you know icelandic

03:26:28.060 and almost a few with in gothic it's few in old english it's theo that's a very easy one to point

03:26:37.000 out as opposed to more complicated vowel stuff or like uh case grammar which is a little more

03:26:44.300 complicated to explain on the fly. So it's not, I guess you could say it diverges, but it diverges

03:26:52.380 from an ancestor of Old Norse. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. No, you're good. You're good.

03:27:02.900 I think that made a lot of sense and was good. Next question. The Federati were, they comprised

03:27:09.720 almost entirely of gothic troops at this period i think that's the key to understanding this question

03:27:17.640 your question has a lot of different answers depending upon you know the century or even the

03:27:24.040 decade that you're talking about so there's a guy who's pretty interesting named theodosius

03:27:29.480 that comes up in the story of a thaneric um as time went on there was an increasing gothic

03:27:37.800 contingent in the byzantine military i don't want to spoil the story because it's kind of cute how

03:27:43.000 the turn happens but yes it becomes increasingly gothic and the goths maintain that independence

03:27:50.920 of the photorati more so than other groups um again without spoilers the scythians get increasingly

03:27:59.560 just fed into the normal military instead of being part of this parallel military

03:28:05.240 the the Scythians the the Illyrians the Dashians increasingly just go into the army instead of being

03:28:14.600 a separate but theoretically allied army so all of this depends if we were talking about

03:28:21.140 um Arminius's day it looks different um at that time you would still have like Italian

03:28:30.500 forward so but what they like to do is take neighboring peoples from one part of the empire

03:28:40.260 and send them to a distant part of the empire to fight it bleeds the fighting men of a potential

03:28:48.100 threat on one part of your border and uses them in you know in your military waxing at a distant

03:28:57.940 part of your border with people that they have no kinship to or no tie to if you start sending

03:29:03.780 kinsmen against their kinsmen you can have unexpected complications in your battlefield

03:29:10.820 that you don't want but this is a really smart play it's dual purpose and it's not always

03:29:16.740 exploitive these people will get paid well their leadership at different times become

03:29:22.340 equitas they become like knights yeah um in the empire they get general ships they you can go

03:29:35.080 really far one of the in the federati or being you know in the roman auxiliary in some fashion

03:29:42.860 you can go very far in the empire and it can be very beneficial so it's not like a slave army 0.98

03:29:48.420 that they're impressing into service but it is a way to send you know angry young men from one 0.67

03:29:53.940 part of your empire to go fight different looking folks in a different part of your empire 0.99

03:29:59.540 it serves dual purposes it's really kind of a genius thing one of the criticisms that the roman

03:30:05.540 traditionalists levied against caesar and his regime was that like you know it resulted in

03:30:12.020 belgians in the senate house like literally like like people from germania setting foot within

03:30:19.460 certain parts of rome not just like holding political office but like physically being

03:30:25.120 in certain areas well and holding office where you know ethnic romans are subordinate to them 0.59

03:30:33.100 depending upon their position and that was a really interesting thing and there became a point

03:30:39.460 in the you know as the empire started to crumble to where you weren't allowed military service

03:30:45.540 as a roman right it was exclusively germanic at one point certainly in the in the western empire

03:30:53.380 and it was a it was a very strange thing but at this period yeah chris's is and out for you

03:30:59.540 that's re that's why i said let's start with talking about what the roman and byzantine

03:31:03.540 emperors were because they rome starts out as a republic like republic from respublica meaning

03:31:11.780 the matter or affair public the public affair the affair that belongs to everyone you know

03:31:20.420 the thing that belongs to everyone the all thing right a republic formally is a a body that exists

03:31:29.540 separate from any one man and in european history this is juxtaposed with feudalism where

03:31:35.300 theoretically there's a point circa like you know 1200 ad where england is the king of england

03:31:42.500 england is richard wherever richard is that is england even though he didn't spend most of his

03:31:48.340 time in england he spent almost all of his time in you know angevin france right no that is england

03:31:55.780 in his body he is his his body is england right and in shakespeare you have like hamlet referred

03:32:05.300 to as denmark because he he is denmark there is no separate political body to the individual of

03:32:12.940 the king and this goes on two legs yes like unironically though if he dies there's a new

03:32:19.240 denmark and this goes back to the thing with sabbis and with the warlord socialities this

03:32:25.660 comes out of that there is no higher body that i don't know if encompasses you or that you compose

03:32:32.740 is the right way to look at it but like going back to the rex and the theden these positions

03:32:38.740 were not democratic in the sense of like well i didn't vote for him but the position is on the

03:32:44.780 one hand balancing the the gods telling like in you know odin says a thaneric enact my will

03:32:52.440 and then the gothic people accept a thaneric is our leader they don't vote in like a oh well you

03:33:01.480 got one vote less than the other guy so you lose sense but they do assent to his leadership i will

03:33:07.600 follow you right and that is lost during christianization with this atomization and it's

03:33:15.880 the social structure is rebuilt through the web of oaths of feudalism right like theoretically

03:33:21.560 like the pope gives the king land the king then parcels it out through oaths going down to the

03:33:27.500 peasants who agree i'll give you a tenth of your the produce that i harvest from your land if you

03:33:33.220 me raise chickens right that is and this is why i say i brought up the thing about the tribes is

03:33:40.580 like the state that athanaric is leading is unsophisticated considered compared to the

03:33:45.460 byzantine empire and certainly compared to today's states but it is a republic and like an ethno

03:33:51.460 republic there is a body there that athanaric has to act appropriately appropriately towards

03:33:58.580 he can't just say well i'm the king and the and then whatever you have to do what i say because

03:34:03.220 i'm the king he actually does have to meet certain criteria and standards importantly the god's

03:34:08.660 criteria and standards but you know this is why it's wisdom and not power people listen to him

03:34:14.100 because they follow him not because he can force them to do his will either through might or money

03:34:20.340 right um i'm completely lost track of where we're at

03:34:24.980 sorry you're muted

03:34:28.120 I didn't catch it at all there no you were fine uh we were talking about the federati

03:34:36.220 and their composition and I think we got that covered so the next question is luck happenstance

03:34:43.340 coincidence can these words be discussed as far as they apply to ausitry certainly they can so

03:34:50.400 So luck is its own thing, and I will handle that separately beyond luck as far as coincidence and stuff.

03:35:01.300 So luck is a tangible storehouse of your, in a way, your spiritual might, your favor with the gods, and things of that nature.

03:35:23.900 So through right action and consistent right action, you build a storehouse of luck that's drawn upon to be successful at things.

03:35:37.520 The storehouse of momentum you have in the right direction plays into each of the small decisions in your life.

03:35:47.540 and where there's not an opposing force that's greater it often you know just plows through

03:35:56.760 other things you have certain people that skate through life on stuff because their luck is so

03:36:04.540 much that it overwhelms things that would throw them off course in a lot of ways luck is momentum

03:36:14.020 but it's momentum built through a storehouse of right action you inherit a certain amount of luck

03:36:21.340 from your ancestors we share collective luck in the form of hymenia with associations that we have

03:36:30.700 in the afa by being a member of the afa a certain amount of momentum from the luck built through 30

03:36:39.560 years of the house true folk assembly is applied to you and things in your life and not the full

03:36:45.480 share of it but a portion of that that helps speed you along your way and helps good things

03:36:50.920 happen when we talk about you know wishing someone good luck we have it as just this like

03:36:58.760 turn of a phrase it's not in an house true concept you know i wish you luck means here i will break

03:37:07.080 off a piece of my luck and give it to you in the hopes that it helps you be successful

03:37:15.240 it's finite and it's something you've accumulated so when you spend it you you are spending

03:37:22.600 something that's finite but investing it wisely comes back to you and yields and yields profit in

03:37:29.480 that sense as far as you know coincidence

03:37:37.480 there is a one of the fundamentals in ausitru and in the magical practice as it relates to

03:37:44.680 ausitru it's the ability to recognize and harness synchronicity or coincidence

03:37:52.440 when you function consistently within the right flow of earth the right flow of fate the right

03:38:03.240 when you can see and understand the tapestry that the norns weave and you act within the

03:38:10.800 right flow of action consistently you draw synchronicity towards you you create a current

03:38:21.240 within earth which translates to fate that draws favorable things towards you

03:38:30.520 um it's like you become a synchronicity magnet the closer you are to living right

03:38:39.880 and the more consistently you live right you bring these things towards you

03:38:44.640 So there's one plank of doing the right things to bring those things your way, but there's another additional wisdom in being able to recognize synchronicity to see when things are unfolding in a certain way and to know how to act accordingly to that unfolding.

03:39:05.700 harnessing those two things is at the very core of magical and metaphysical efficacy within

03:39:14.860 ausitrum um but one thing even if you're not a vicky and you don't practice you know the more

03:39:22.020 esoteric portion of our faith doing the right thing at the right time consistently and over

03:39:30.260 the course of years, brings positive synchronicity to you and helps to build a momentum and draw

03:39:40.980 fortuitous happenstance to you. As well as you winning the goodwill of the Isir helps for you

03:39:55.220 to get blessings in your life in ways that you realize and ways that you might not realize. 0.92

03:40:03.120 All of those things, I think, affect luck and happenstance, as you would put it.

03:40:10.640 So the next question is a...

03:40:15.160 We could go on all night, and we won't because time is limited, but...

03:40:20.480 chris what's some good ideas you have on would you have gnostic information to talk about how

03:40:29.400 fake christianity is reasons christianity is fake give me a few oh um i brought up the trinity i

03:40:39.260 guess the thing about it is that i don't think that formula given allows for other things other

03:40:44.440 like consubstantial persons and hypostatic union you know um gnostic informant is a guy on twitter

03:40:51.880 as i understand it in like the kind of adam green sphere i don't i i don't think we do that kind of

03:41:00.280 internet blood sports stuff i don't think he's a bad guy or anything i'm not trying to counter

03:41:05.320 signal him or whatever i just you know i don't i think the problem would be if we were to bring

03:41:11.800 him on this program it would just kind of be to rail on christianity rather than to talk about

03:41:17.240 um i think you could make some good criticisms about who wrote the gospels but that's

03:41:25.080 i care less about whether or not christianity is fake and more about the truth of the icr

03:41:30.520 and the ancestors absolutely and i think it's a better focus of our time but you asked the question

03:41:35.000 and I'll try to throw a couple of just stuff.

03:41:39.820 Actually, this has better insight into that question.

03:41:43.420 The question originally was,

03:41:44.760 would you have a Gnostic informant on 0.92

03:41:48.400 to talk about how fake Christianity is?

03:41:50.860 Oh, well, that's not the question.

03:41:51.800 I changed it to information

03:41:53.780 because that's what I thought it was a typo.

03:41:57.260 Okay, for your original question.

03:42:00.200 No, because it's not what we're doing here.

03:42:02.980 I think it's probably really useful information.

03:42:08.180 Yeah, no, we wouldn't.

03:42:10.180 That's not the program that we offer.

03:42:11.840 I'd be curious to listen to his talking about said.

03:42:16.460 It's an interesting topic, but the point of Victory Never Sleeps is to talk about Alcetru.

03:42:22.520 We try to answer or address other faiths within the context of how they relate to the subject that we're talking about

03:42:30.300 or how they relate to a particular point within ausitru but um no we don't really invite external

03:42:38.620 speakers about other religions onto the program because it's not really the nature of this

03:42:44.860 particular program but appreciate that so the next question and this gets into kind of some

03:42:50.780 more meat and taters of what we're on were the huns arians oh no we already didn't have that

03:42:57.740 so we're on the next uh all right do you think the way christianity took over europe 1.00

03:43:05.420 is comparable to how now all this degeneracy and islam and europeans being replaced in their 0.85

03:43:12.940 countries they try okay this is a continuation of that they tried to convert all europeans 0.99

03:43:20.300 now it's about trying to force all european countries into a place where their native

03:43:26.460 population will be reduced to a minority what are your thoughts chris i think there's similarities

03:43:34.860 you can draw and they're not raw it's not like they're incorrect similarities i think that if

03:43:41.100 we're being honest though the problem with drawing too close of a similarity beyond just

03:43:47.500 state-enforced cultural revolution towards the dissolution of ethno states in the name of

03:43:54.140 imperialism is that if we're being honest christianity is a lot more put together than like

03:44:00.700 i'm just gonna call it wokeism as like an ideology like there's a central text there's

03:44:05.260 doctrines there's dogmas there's in there's a there's ideologues there's like bishops

03:44:10.620 there's a church that's not really the case with like liberal progressive ideology and

03:44:17.900 And quite frankly, Islam isn't really being pushed on white people, or even non-white people in the West, by the state.

03:44:28.760 It's kind of just, like, allowed to do stuff that Christianity isn't.

03:44:33.820 Like, I don't think I've ever actually seen an Islamic evangelist in my life.

03:44:38.620 And I lived in Detroit for a while.

03:44:39.820 you know i don't think i've ever seen any any kind of like state promoted become a muslim 0.96

03:44:49.900 and you don't have to wait as long at the dmv or whatever kind of benefits or like only muslims

03:44:56.400 can vote benefits it's more so that muslims are just brought in and not and treated with kid 0.87

03:45:02.780 gloves but even then you do see these forces of dissolution working against them they're just 0.87

03:45:09.680 arbitrarily more put together and willing to fight for their stuff than christian groups are

03:45:15.880 and i mean i say that there are christian groups that like get upset about abortion and the like

03:45:20.320 but you know when you see oh there was something at the supreme court or whatever recently about

03:45:27.340 like parents can opt out of lgbt education classes at schools or something that was won by muslims

03:45:36.140 but it's not like islam is spreading it's just kind of arbitrarily late to the game 0.98

03:45:45.500 in terms of liberalism yeah i see what you're saying i don't think that that is the one for

03:45:53.260 one case because again you're it wasn't like the roman empire or some formant formal organization

03:46:04.860 stayed true to its own thing and then inflicted christianity on the rest of us

03:46:11.580 they were part of the christianity they were spreading and then yeah they would spread the

03:46:17.180 destabilizing christianity but it was a part of what they were about it wasn't the same thing

03:46:22.380 where you see very traditional societies today inflicting degeneracy upon their opponents 0.83

03:46:29.980 in order to weaken them while maintaining a non-degenerate society themselves and there 0.62

03:46:36.380 there is in the roman empire just to add real quick in the roman empire there was a loose 0.89

03:46:41.100 attempt at creating like a kind of unified christian ethnos with people like theodosius

03:46:46.620 who will talk about it a little bit who it's like what ethnicity was he well he looks like a white

03:46:52.860 dude on his coins and statues and he was born in the province of hispania he could have been

03:46:59.980 who knows what right as much as there is like a attempt at multiculturalism producing like the 0.65

03:47:11.480 beige mulatto every race combined into one thing it's not like in blue diamond phillips it's not 0.80

03:47:19.580 like it's to produce like a like ethnos with you know rules and beliefs and stuff like chris 0.98

03:47:27.240 like the unit the the christian homo globus every man in one body still has like limits

03:47:35.900 the ones jesus put down and there's a church and there's rules they're not our rules but

03:47:41.460 they're like rules there's no real rules to like the lou diamond phillipsification of the globe

03:47:46.860 you know yes so next question if christians uh develop a wisdom to organize on the basis of race

03:47:56.780 church community etc and seek to buy land and establish christian boroughs uh moving in groups

03:48:05.400 to effectively take over small towns outside of major American centers like Austin, Texas, or wherever,

03:48:12.940 and of course recognizing Talmudic Judaism slash Zionism as a heresy to condemn, 0.78

03:48:19.600 would you see this as a positive development for white folk? 0.96

03:48:24.040 Yes, absolutely. 0.99

03:48:27.160 It's not the right development or what I would like,

03:48:30.820 but it is certainly better than atheistic reveling in degeneracy.

03:48:38.460 I would gladly take 1950s America over 2025 America.

03:48:46.700 But it doesn't mean that's the optimal solution,

03:48:50.080 but that would be a better situation than what we currently face.

03:48:55.500 But again, it's not what we're trying to do here,

03:48:58.280 but yeah that would objectively be better than what we're currently sitting with

03:49:03.080 does the afa have an equivalent to sunday school and bible study sort of but in informal ways we've

03:49:10.680 tried it more formally and not enough people really want to participate but we have various

03:49:16.360 different lore studies conducted by gothar and by folk builders across the country if you acquire

03:49:24.120 to your local folk builder they will let you know specifically in your case if you ask cliff he can

03:49:29.640 get you squared away i i just to add my two cents real quick i also don't know if we have our

03:49:36.120 relationship with our sacred texts the same way that like christians do like reading the bible

03:49:42.280 is like an actual important thing in a lot of forms of christianity i'm not saying we don't need

03:49:48.360 to read the eddas and sagas but like our religion is about worshiping the gods not

03:49:55.640 reading the bible or reading the eddas and sagas yeah so it's like absolutely and i think that's a

03:50:02.600 really important point our religion is about participating in the gift cycle and worshiping

03:50:08.840 the gods to the extent that your reading our lore helps you to do that absolutely

03:50:18.360 but that's certainly not a requirement in the same way uh it's it's a little bit different but we do

03:50:24.840 have lore study for people who are curious you know by all means read whatever you want but you

03:50:31.320 can read you can become an expert on the lore and not be also true you can also never have touched

03:50:38.280 the lore once but actively participate in the gift cycle and be also true I believe uh I'm sorry go

03:50:46.440 I believe Goethe John Rock once told me that there was a point where all of the world's wisest gothar were literally illiterate. 0.93

03:50:55.700 So. 0.98

03:50:56.880 There you go.

03:51:00.600 What do you think about things like the modern gothic subculture?

03:51:05.580 I think that's not germane to tonight's subject because there's no point of similarity.

03:51:10.840 so goth equals at some point in medieval times the term goth becomes cognate with german

03:51:22.360 and then in the romantic period german literature and things have a dark macabre

03:51:31.720 expression to them so then the dark and the macabre becomes labeled as gothic thus 0.98

03:51:40.280 daddy issues kids that want to wear all black and be emo and be silly goofs 0.64

03:51:50.520 hearken to what the romantic period would describe as gothic that is several steps 0.92

03:51:57.400 removed from having anything to do with actual the goths that we are referring to in this broadcast

03:52:06.120 were you going to say something nick before i chimed in i was just going to 0.93

03:52:10.120 say you just crushed every trip pants wearing black fingernail painted face and you you you

03:52:16.840 learned me a thing or two with my crow tattoo and such i didn't i don't know why i didn't even put

03:52:21.640 that together so uh the origin the origination of gothic in like gothic cathedrals comes from like 0.65

03:52:30.920 a oh i can't remember when it was but it i'm gonna say like the 1400s there was some italian snob

03:52:37.960 who was butthurt that uh the french were making prettier churches than the italians were

03:52:44.120 um and he derided the glorious french cathedrals as like gothic barbarism like in reference to

03:52:53.880 the goths as opposed to romanesque right right literally gothic as opposed to romanesque and

03:53:01.480 the term just kind of merged into like dark and gloomy and then the subculture itself was really

03:53:07.640 influenced by like edgy dark gloomy music in a lot of ways um it's like so many steps removed

03:53:17.000 from a thanarek that i think if you told him like this is what a goth is in 2025 he'd probably be

03:53:24.280 embarrassed like oh where did our people go wrong it's like oh that i i will flag on that he would

03:53:29.480 definitely be embarrassed i think uh if you talk about gothic architects i think if you talked

03:53:35.240 about you know gothic literature uh those people would be embarrassed i think if you talked about

03:53:43.480 uh gothic um americana where you're talking about like dark seedy new york things they would also

03:53:52.760 find that embarrassing i think all parties would be embarrassed by goth subculture of uh

03:54:00.280 of the modern period but it is what it is different people like different stuff we all have

03:54:05.000 silly hobbies i'm sure that you know laid out any of my silly hobbies people might

03:54:09.880 make fun of too so i'm not trying to be a jerk to anybody um 0.95

03:54:15.960 this one's interesting uh magyar versus hun we're both hungarian 0.58

03:54:22.200 break it down for us chris as i understand it there there's no meaningful i mean i guess

03:54:33.380 some hun guy bred into a lineage that eventually led to the magyars but as i understand it the

03:54:39.060 magyars have no real connection to the huns proper they did adopt like our glorious lineage going

03:54:47.680 back to attila we're so tough kind of thing but i don't think it's like like uh like hungarian

03:54:56.160 is like a uh a finno-ugric language right like it's related to like finish it's not

03:55:03.120 yeah it's a relic they're not the same people okay so there is a root like

03:55:09.920 there is an intermixture in hungary of lingering asiatic raiders in a really distant and

03:55:24.080 i guess there's something there but 0.82

03:55:28.480 the politically incorrect term for a retarded person is a mongoloid not because they're 0.88

03:55:41.520 actually related to the mongols but down syndrome people tend to have asiatic looking eyes 0.87

03:55:51.200 so when eastern european people would have a child with down syndrome 0.95

03:55:55.760 clearly that must be the genetic lineage of the mongol invasions because this kid's got slanty 0.96

03:56:04.260 eyes and i think we deal with a similar thing in hungary although if you look at somebody like 0.99

03:56:13.540 charles bronson he doesn't quite look like the rest of us something looks a little bit 0.99

03:56:17.760 a little bit asian and a little bit dissimilar but he certainly doesn't look like a chinaman

03:56:24.680 so there's a mixture of people when you get on the corner of the the steps as they intermix

03:56:32.200 into europe and sometimes that comes out in strange ways uh is loki jesus no that's something

03:56:41.940 that we need to resist the urge to do our lore has nothing to do with jewish lore there's not

03:56:47.900 an overlap there was no like meeting of the minds and let's overlap characters they are completely

03:56:53.720 and entirely separate as our races are completely and entirely separate there's not a

03:57:00.920 they're not all part of the same story that's that's not a thing which brings us back to uh

03:57:09.880 take us back to our history chris if you would okay so where we left off valens had just got

03:57:16.520 done defending his throne from a claimant, and he's now upset at some of the

03:57:25.640 soldiers that participated in that, I guess I'll just call it a civil war

03:57:30.020 freeze. He then leads an army into Gothia. If you want to bring that map back up,

03:57:35.760 Nick, so we can just kind of, just for reference, because people are moving

03:57:40.220 around here nah thanks so i mentioned that a thanaric apparently swore some kind of oath

03:57:52.360 that he would an oath of enmity to rome that he would never set foot on roman soil which really

03:57:57.380 means byzantine like the byzantine empire's soil that doesn't make much sense because he literally

03:58:02.220 leads troops into thrace thrace is that part of europe that's like leads into anatolia from greece

03:58:09.360 right so valens leads an army through thrace into the thurbing territory ostensibly trying

03:58:18.580 to reach ermannaric but also trying to punish um athanaric everything involving what valens

03:58:27.740 is trying to do here is very spotty presumably because all of the roman and byzantine writers

03:58:32.480 are trying to save face for whatever Valens was trying to do.

03:58:37.640 It seems like, and I don't know how the order of this necessarily happens,

03:58:43.320 but it seems to some degree like there's a fight,

03:58:47.460 and Athanaric wins a battle and then loses a battle, maybe.

03:58:53.620 He then does a kind of tactical retreat,

03:58:56.480 and Valens then gives up and signs the treaty on the Danube, right?

03:59:07.080 This is kind of a running theme in that Ariaric, Aoric, Athanaric,

03:59:11.720 this lineage doesn't necessarily seem to be all that good at winning wars,

03:59:15.420 but they do seem to be pretty good at winning political victories

03:59:18.980 out of the stuff happening around them.

03:59:21.940 so in any event there's a peace treaty signed and valens basically agrees all right i won't invade

03:59:29.480 you you won't invade me i'll throw you some like token cash here and there to like prove i'm good

03:59:36.260 for it okay and thaneric then starts shoring up his state and there seems to be an academic idea

03:59:45.400 that he kicks up the persecutions of apostates into overdrive i don't really know if that's the

03:59:50.320 We don't have a lot of data on, like, how many of these things are actually happening,

03:59:54.860 how often are they happening, you get the idea. 0.98

03:59:57.820 So while there's peace with the Byzantines,

04:00:01.960 the Theanarch focuses on the Goths and domestic policy.

04:00:07.300 I don't know if Nick said this, but again, there is a middle position that frankly no one likes,

04:00:12.720 which is both worshipping Jesus and Thor, or at least, you know, keeping your Christian leanings private.

04:00:20.300 um in any event i just wanted to get that out so in the around 370 an interesting thing happens

04:00:29.640 a guy by the name of fritigern a goth um rises up in opposition to a thaneric why isn't entirely

04:00:38.260 clear but he gets in a fight with a thaneric loses one battle and then gets two guys um aletheis and

04:00:47.000 Saffrax, who, if you've watched the Venture Bros, are the first supervillain and henchmen.

04:00:53.240 Then Aletheus, Saffrax, and Fritigern appear to win this second battle. Or maybe it was the

04:01:00.280 first battle and then they ditched Fritigern. It's not really clear, the timeline is spotty,

04:01:05.160 but Athanaric retreats his forces into the mountains of Coquiland, which is the mountains

04:01:12.360 of Romania. Presumably this is also where Simondor Froði learned the dark arts in the school run by

04:01:19.480 Satan. In any event, Fritigern finds himself in a bit of trouble, and in the tale of a Thanaric,

04:01:28.600 a Thanaric actually kind of takes a back step out of the limelight, and things focus on Fritigern

04:01:34.720 here. So to sum up a lot of historical speculation and quandary, why does Fritigern rise up against

04:01:43.340 Valens? So, or sorry, rise up against a Thanaric. I think that Valens, I keep saying Valens here,

04:01:53.780 Fritigern, I think, was upset at a Thanaric centralization of power, possibly into a clique 0.85

04:02:01.920 of these children of the hostage uh elites you know aoric's son was or ariaric's son was sent

04:02:10.300 abroad so were other sons i'm betting that there was a an ideological elite that had like seen

04:02:20.660 beyond the veil and were like keeping to their own just to a certain degree at least in terms of

04:02:28.500 ensuring that this ideology of no really guys, Byzantium is a problem, was prosecuted properly. 0.77

04:02:36.980 I think there also might have been, to some degree, an expectation that a Thanaric would be throwing money at certain warlords like Fritigern,

04:02:48.860 and he just wasn't possibly due to the money not being present.

04:02:51.840 the reason why i go into this is that fritigern fights a thaneric twice a thaneric retreats

04:03:01.100 deeper into safe territory and then fritigern seems to be at a loss of what to do

04:03:08.480 so he actually moves his barbarian horde into thrace which again is that kind of peninsula

04:03:16.440 going into Anatolia from Greece.

04:03:21.440 This is problematic because Valens initially doesn't want this to happen.

04:03:26.440 So Fritigern offers to convert to Aryan Christianity,

04:03:30.440 and it's worth pointing out here that this time Valens, the Byzantine emperor, is an Aryan.

04:03:35.440 Trinitarianism in the Christian role has a very devout and very organized elite,

04:03:42.440 but it is not a popular position. Various what Christians would now refer to as

04:03:47.540 heresies are still the dominant form of Christianity amongst Christians. So

04:03:54.040 Valens gets in a Gothic Aryan priest to convey a message to Valens, and Fritigern 0.95

04:04:02.860 gets a Gothic Aryan priest to convey a message to Valens saying, in return for 0.96

04:04:09.540 your support and funding against a thaneric by fritigern will convert to christianity

04:04:17.100 valens apparently doesn't believe him at first um he's just like no this is a trick i'm not gonna do

04:04:26.100 it um so valens then lets them in with some kind of scheme of getting rid of fritigern and his

04:04:39.880 horde so fritigern and his large barbarian horde cross the danube and enter into thrace

04:04:46.320 valens then has them basically placed in a concentration camp and denies them food

04:04:54.300 again we're talking about fritigern's barbarian horde fritigern is at least opposed to our hero

04:05:01.540 a thaneric i don't know if he maintained the christianity thing or not or even if he really

04:05:06.120 did it who knows but so fritigern and his barbarian horde cross the danube enter into thrace

04:05:12.160 and then literally get put in a concentration camp they are denied food they're treated extremely

04:05:17.720 badly by the guards um there's an anecdote given that the the byzantine guards would like buy the

04:05:26.640 children of the goths in exchange for dog meat like they would buy the children of the goths to

04:05:32.220 sell into slavery at their own profit in exchange for giving them a dead dog to eat because they

04:05:38.380 were being denied food that badly um so apparently what had happened i don't know how much of this is

04:05:49.160 just cope as opposed to like an actual idea but the governor of thrace was actually supposed to

04:05:54.720 supply the concentration camp with food and he was just taking the food and selling it on the

04:05:59.900 market instead of giving it to the goths in the concentration camp things start getting ugly in

04:06:05.660 there, and Fritigern demands to speak to Valens. And instead, okay, well, you got to go through

04:06:13.080 the governor first. Valens and a few other Gothic elites then have dinner with the provincial 0.82

04:06:19.460 governor and some other Byzantine elites. They then try to kill Fritigern at dinner. 0.76

04:06:26.040 There's a few other Gothic generals in here that I'm leaving out. They're not really important

04:06:31.040 because they stop showing up at this dinner. 1.00

04:06:33.620 Aletheus and Saffrax disappear here.

04:06:36.940 Fritigern literally disappears. 0.93

04:06:39.620 He escapes the attempted murder dinner, 0.82

04:06:42.160 gets back to the Gothic horde in the concentration camp,

04:06:45.440 and leads a, I guess it's a revolt, a breakout,

04:06:48.940 and they then start stomping around Thrace

04:06:52.320 as this massive barbarian raiding horde.

04:06:55.700 At one point, they come to a city,

04:06:58.960 I believe it's Adrianople.

04:07:00.360 you can take the map down nick um i just wanted everyone to know where thrace was right and

04:07:07.960 they start stomping around thrace i believe it's adrian noble they take it might have been

04:07:12.680 nicopolis it doesn't really matter and they rate it and they're they go up to rate it and

04:07:20.120 the locals are actually like no no we want to join you screw byzantium so then he gets this big

04:07:26.360 contingent of like locals from the area including like 10 000 armorers and i was looking into this

04:07:32.600 like why are there so many armorers in his horde from raiding like adrian opel or whatever that's

04:07:37.800 because the city in question was the one that the central planning committee had deemed fit to make

04:07:42.040 armor right like again i brought up the central planning ideology of constantine that's that's

04:07:48.840 not like a joke like he there was actually like all right this city will make silverware this

04:07:54.760 city will make armor this city processes food like that kind of thing going on and so he gets

04:08:01.000 this huge contingent of armorers who come go around raiding with him so he's leading this

04:08:08.120 massive army around that's literally like raping and pillaging the countryside while this is going 0.77

04:08:14.600 on a thaneric is getting in a fight with the huns and it doesn't seem to be going well

04:08:19.800 around this time it seems that a thanric also catches ill which comes up later so

04:08:26.600 valens says you know what you know like the whole like fine i'll do it myself bit and he leads an

04:08:36.820 army to go fight fritigern that goes very poorly um in the process of fighting fritigern valens

04:08:45.740 loses the entire byzantine treasury and army he loses a battle comedically badly um oh where is

04:08:56.120 the thing i've got all of how exactly valens dies isn't entirely clear he may have gotten shot in

04:09:03.540 the head with a dart after riding out into battle without armor on he may have done like a poor

04:09:09.080 maneuver and a route happened and he got trampled by his own men one story has it that he gets

04:09:15.380 knocked off his horse and goes and hides in a hut that gets burnt down another story is that he gets

04:09:21.800 wounded and goes in a hut that gets burnt down valens dies badly and in doing so he loses the

04:09:30.100 byzantine empire the eastern empire right the entire treasury and the entire army the byzantine

04:09:37.680 empire circa like uh 379 or so has no men for an army and no metal with which to mint coins like

04:09:48.020 they literally do not have gold to make into coins to pay people to make armor right there's

04:09:54.760 no emperor and there's no one really in charge the byzantine elites put a hispanian nobleman by

04:10:03.460 the name of Theodosius in charge. Theodosius goes to Honorius, who is the emperor in the west,

04:10:09.760 and says, hey man, can you lend me some money and some men? And Honorius says, lol, have fun with

04:10:16.940 that. So Theodosius is in charge of a state with no money and no men that is facing Persian hostility

04:10:25.180 in the east, Hunnic hostility in the north, and has a very upset gothic warlord rampaging around

04:10:32.340 thrace shockingly close to its capital so theodosius goes to a very unlikely source of where

04:10:42.540 to get men a thaneric feeding of the goths a thaneric at this time seems to have run into a

04:10:50.220 spot of trouble because of the goths and presumably his illness and weakening health

04:10:55.240 And he actually takes up Theodosius on this venture to move his tribe into Byzantium and live there. 0.96

04:11:05.840 And I want to pause for a second here and explain what that means.

04:11:09.760 I mentioned about the Fodorati.

04:11:12.860 What this basically means is that there's a parallel Gothic state existing within the borders of the Byzantine Empire for the purposes of fighting.

04:11:21.780 There is another group of people that have something similar at this time.

04:11:25.720 It's the Jews.

04:11:27.020 At this time, Jews are allowed to have a Sanhedrin, a local city council, basically, for themselves as a parallel state everywhere in the Roman, like the Byzantine and Eastern and Western Empire, except for the city of Jerusalem for Christian purposes. 0.81

04:11:45.260 right they are allowed to have what basically amounts to a parallel ethno state distributed 0.89

04:11:51.500 through the empire like like uh the mycelial mats that fungus have throughout dirt right

04:11:58.040 and the goths appear to be given something like that like this goes into during the rule of

04:12:05.680 theodosius and his children there are like gothic courts where if you're a goth and you break the

04:12:11.020 law with another goth you go to goth court and it's settled in the gothic manner so the army

04:12:19.740 of theodosius is basically the serving polity of a thaneric which appears to be getting pushed out

04:12:26.420 of gothia by the hunts right like things are going really bad for the goths that aren't in

04:12:31.600 the byzantine empire and this seems kind of odd because up until this point a thaneric

04:12:39.280 and his ideology is more or less focused on ensuring an independent gothic ethno-religious

04:12:46.480 state in opposition to on the one hand the byzantines but also the huns this is less

04:12:52.900 odd when you realize that what athanaric has more or less secured for his people here at least in

04:12:57.740 the short term is a continued existence as a sovereign entity within the byzantine empire

04:13:03.700 kind of like how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell your mitochondria has

04:13:07.840 separate DNA from the rest of your cell. Your mitochondria has its own DNA. It is

04:13:12.520 its own separate thing, just like the Gothic state was. A modern equivalent to 0.98

04:13:17.900 this would be actually Chechnya in Russia, where Chechnya is sort of its

04:13:22.300 own independent polity with like its own foreign policy, provided it

04:13:26.840 continuously sends out Chechnyan soldiers to fight for the Russian state.

04:13:31.400 Something similar appears to happen here with the Thurving polity in Byzantium.

04:13:38.000 Relatively quickly, when is it precisely? 381.

04:13:44.300 So Athanaric moves to Byzantium in 381, and he signs a treaty on January 11th, and then dies on January 25th.

04:13:55.540 He does not appear to have converted to Christianity, Athanaric.

04:13:58.660 he said the we have a second quote from him in addition to his mentioning about um wisdom and

04:14:05.960 not power he also is said to have marveled at the walls of byzantium and said surely this emperor

04:14:11.620 must be a god that doesn't sound like something a christian would say so i also checked every

04:14:17.780 single source period source that mentions a thaneric because if you look into a thaneric

04:14:21.840 you find academics say oh well of course he became christian he just had to why well he just of

04:14:27.900 course it happened you have to okay but like whatever it's well I just had to happen not a

04:14:32.640 single source mentions that they are converting from what I saw including I believe it was I want

04:14:38.680 to get this guy's name correct was it Themistius um if you want to say something here sir uh well

04:14:46.920 yeah I do so not only did he not convert there's tons of his contemporaries that did that there's

04:14:55.200 plenty of mention of so if it was just a bygone conclusion like of course he did well then of

04:15:04.960 course all of these people did but that's not an of course they mention it specifically they make

04:15:12.100 the point um and that's how we know a lot of the things that we do in this

04:15:17.480 this is less necessary outside of these points of conversion in certain periods

04:15:26.480 um like you don't need to mention in sweden in

04:15:33.400 700 and previous that people are also true of course they are and you don't need to mention

04:15:43.340 in, you know, 900 and after that they're Christian. Of course they are. But in that

04:15:51.000 window where there's overlap, we absolutely do. And it becomes very important that one of the

04:15:56.260 most noteworthy things to mention. If you can score the conversion of a, you know, a national

04:16:05.400 leader, that's absolutely recorded because that's a huge coup for the person who secures it. It's

04:16:12.220 very meaningful to say aha and see we converted the pagan and i have to do that in terms of

04:16:19.980 fritigern yes and i have two authors here of note the first is themistius themistius was a court

04:16:27.340 propagandist for theodosius emphasis on court themistius read out speeches talking about how

04:16:35.180 cool Theodosius was. I want to use a cruder turn of phrase than this, but Themistius's

04:16:42.540 oral abilities were pleasing to Theodosius's manhood. Like, these speeches are really

04:16:48.840 hamming up how cool Theodosius is. He does not say that a Thanaric converted. He mocks a Thanaric.

04:16:55.140 He doesn't say that he converted, which is interesting because if a Thanaric converted 0.92

04:16:59.220 to arianism and then theodosius basically won by recruiting his men well there's a triumph

04:17:05.620 of trinitarianism over arianism if a thaneric converted to trinitarianism well there's a

04:17:10.180 triumph of christianity over paganism there's no reason to not say it given that you are literally 0.94

04:17:16.340 themistius is literally look how cool theodosius is he beat a thaneric there's also another

04:17:22.340 author Ammianus Marcellus or Marcellinus that is a Hellenist he worships Zeus at this point

04:17:30.200 he talks about a Thanaric and he says um that a Thanaric was buried after our fashion with

04:17:38.300 splendid rites and a Thanaric his funeral possession was led by Theodosius now why

04:17:44.000 that's important I'll bring up in just a second here but Ammianus Marcellus Marcellinus is in

04:17:49.760 the text in question trying to craft a soft alliance between ositru and hellenism he and

04:17:57.660 a few other authors at this time including a number of christians sort of just kind of like

04:18:04.080 yeah ositru and hellenism are the same sort of thing they're opposed to christianity and our

04:18:10.460 european ethno religion so there's

04:18:13.460 after our fashion is interesting because amyanus is not a christian he does not view christianity

04:18:21.240 as us our we when he says our fashion he means in a pagan manner now that's kind of the thing

04:18:27.960 is it's a point to state if he was if his funeral was conducted as a christian as everybody else

04:18:37.380 was then you don't need to specify after our fashion the fact it was noteworthy is that the

04:18:46.500 people conducting it though christian were hearkened back to like okay well we got to do

04:18:52.500 this like grandpa did it because this is how he would have wanted it right that's the fact that

04:18:59.380 that's kind of a thing the reason why you would note something matters the reason why you wouldn't

04:19:06.340 mention it also matters so the fact that it was noteworthy is i think very compelling the you know

04:19:15.380 the omission of him being converted that would have been huge if he would write it politically

04:19:23.300 and religiously um in both senses and that's not the case and that's why we celebrate him

04:19:32.660 you know that's why we don't find any reason to not celebrate him and there's many reasons that

04:19:40.420 you've heard tonight he led the charge by issuing the orders setting the policy and and being that 0.51

04:19:48.180 symbol of opposition to this insurgent christianity amongst uh amongst goths and there's an

04:19:56.020 interesting interplay here so just to go back to this funeral real quick i actually was kind of

04:20:00.900 okay what does that actually mean our rights the the servings at least at this time appear to have

04:20:07.460 practiced inhumation like burying a body not just cremation so if he was buried specifically

04:20:15.060 that doesn't really mean much like christians do burial because jesus will come back and

04:20:19.860 resurrect them but that doesn't necessarily indicate anything because

04:20:24.500 Ossetri Thurvings practiced burial. Also, Theodosius could have just led a procession to enter

04:20:31.220 a cremation urn anyways. It doesn't really tell us much, right? I think that hour is more important,

04:20:38.580 particularly because Ammianus also talks about a fellow by the name of Frivita, who was a goth,

04:20:43.460 who identified as a Hellene, as his position in Byzantium in the Byzantine government, meaning

04:20:49.540 he as someone who worshiped odin was identifying as a zeus worshiper for purposes of like

04:20:55.940 classification christians also did this other pagans said this was a thing so i don't think

04:21:03.660 the hour means like oh he was buried in like a funeral involving aphrodite per se but it does

04:21:10.520 mean it was not christian yeah it's also true in this context i don't think that theodosius had

04:21:17.040 thanaric killed we don't see the sort of like that sort of skullduggery from theodosius he

04:21:23.600 actually seems to be relatively okay with asatru and asatruar probably because they were opponents

04:21:32.800 to arian goths really is why what the thing was and theodosius is viewed as a champion of

04:21:41.200 christianity but what he really did was just didn't rein in the excesses of christians against pagans

04:21:48.400 so like the serapium i think it's the serapium that gets torn down on under his watch he has

04:21:54.320 nothing to do with it like uh john crucistone just tears it down he just didn't stop john

04:22:01.440 crucistone from antifa-ing around he didn't stop ambrose from doing his thing because why would he

04:22:08.000 he's a christian but he wasn't like giving the imperial stamp of approval yes i the emperor say

04:22:14.480 do this he actually got chastised uh if you want to interrupt i'm going to talk about the massacre

04:22:20.000 of adriano posted so at one point um theodosius has this this gothic guy because he literally his

04:22:27.600 army is literally composed of goths at this point um by the name of butyric which is is a fun name

04:22:33.520 because it basically means like butter rich um king harlaus's strongest soldier so he's placed

04:22:40.960 in charge of this city and is like the military police occupying it for the emperor and theodosius

04:22:48.720 makes a law that basically says homosexuality is illegal and there's a charioteer in this city who

04:22:54.960 practices pederasty and butyric arrests him to execute him and a mob like attacks the

04:23:02.400 the jail i don't know if they had jails but the jail and i think they i believe they kill butyric

04:23:09.620 so butyric's men just rampage through the city and they kill a lot of people like i think it's

04:23:17.240 like in the thousands total is the number and crucistome and ambrose and a lot of other christian

04:23:22.560 bigwigs like cry oh how horrible that theodosius let this happen how horrible they're very lucky

04:23:29.500 that theodosius was a a kinder man than i i would have had them trampled the death of horses

04:23:35.260 if they did that to me and i was in charge there's like a story where crucistome or ambrose i can't

04:23:40.380 remember like denies theodosius access to a church until he repents for having like not punished the

04:23:48.220 person for like the people who did the massacre of adrian opel hard enough like not putting down

04:23:53.100 mob violence against the state what like anyways um one of theodosius's top generals was this

04:24:01.660 fervita guy who was a an asatra and he got like was the top military leader for a while in

04:24:09.680 byzantium so i'm not saying that theodosius was like our guy or a friend to asatru but he doesn't

04:24:16.920 seem to have been as like fervent of a persecutor of at least asatru as other byzantine emperors

04:24:25.640 would be presumably because he saw the utility in this gothic state and was like well we can

04:24:32.840 convert them over time later which all of which is to reinforce the point well if he's for lack

04:24:40.300 of a better term tolerant of asatru with this why is he not going to be tolerant with asatru

04:24:46.000 or when about Asitru with a man who's going to die in two weeks after coming

04:24:49.780 here and signing a treaty anyways,

04:24:51.880 not that he would know that, 0.65

04:24:52.860 but like the man is sick and died.

04:24:54.880 Is he going to,

04:24:56.080 we're only going to sign this treaty and save your people. 1.00

04:24:58.800 If you convert, 0.98

04:24:59.700 I don't really see that in Theodosius.

04:25:03.300 He doesn't seem to have that kind of guile in him,

04:25:05.820 you know,

04:25:07.580 go on,

04:25:08.180 sir.

04:25:08.760 No,

04:25:09.000 no,

04:25:09.160 no.

04:25:09.380 I agree with your assessment on it.

04:25:11.340 And again,

04:25:12.520 it's,

04:25:12.960 it would be a really cool flex to suggest that he did even if he didn't right really cool flex

04:25:21.640 to claim that and nobody does nobody at the time does uh so i think that you know we have to stand

04:25:30.680 with the way he lived his entire life which was as a champion for our faith and uh you know we

04:25:38.140 stand with that and we celebrate it sorry it was Gretchen uh Gretchen that said yeah not have fun

04:25:44.840 with that bro not Honorius um so this actually turns out to have been a pretty good thing for

04:25:51.200 Theodosius to do because immediately Theodosius gets access to a general by the name of Modares

04:25:57.860 Modares beats Fritigern we're not giving a lot of details on that but he we're told that he

04:26:03.580 defeated Fritigern in battle if Fritigern fled. That's the last time that Fritigern is mentioned

04:26:08.940 in history. Then Theodosius sends two guys, Ricomeres and Saturninus. Ricomeres is a goth.

04:26:18.700 Saturninus is a Roman of some notoriety for other things. These guys then negotiate peace negotiations

04:26:26.860 with the entire barbarian horde, not a single leader or any leaders, which is interesting because

04:26:34.320 where's Fritigern? Well, he's not leading the horde. Maybe he died in battle. Maybe he was

04:26:41.420 overthrown. It doesn't really matter. He doesn't seem to have won. He seems to have been on the

04:26:47.260 outs, and Ricomiris and Saturninus then get these Goths and renegade Byzantines to calm down and 0.98

04:26:56.260 integrate back in and it's actually a pretty the byzantine empire experience is a bit of

04:27:02.180 peace and some growth and good times because of all of this um there is an attempt in academia to

04:27:10.700 craft a sort of arian opposition as if this was like a continuous faction fighting against the

04:27:21.740 Byzantine Empire. I don't think that's the case. I think that people see the thing about Fritigern

04:27:27.720 trying to become Aryan to Gideon Valens' good graces, and it's worth noting here, when Theodosius 0.96

04:27:32.600 takes over, that's when Aryanism loses. Because the one thing he was really good at was punishing 1.00

04:27:38.340 Aryanism. He was, if anything, a partisan for Trinitarianism more than Christianity, really. 1.00

04:27:44.540 Right. But the fact that there's these Gothic warlords like Alaric and Odoiker and Theodoric that come later that are Aryans in ostensible conflict with the Trinitarian Byzantine leadership, I don't think is an indication of like a Gothic opposition to Byzantium.

04:28:07.680 As much as it is that there was a faction of Goths that more or less wanted to do the thing that the Illyrians did.

04:28:15.560 Hey, we're Goths. We work together with other Goths.

04:28:18.840 Why don't we take over this operation and run it for ourselves?

04:28:23.880 But they're not really opposed to Byzantium. 0.95

04:28:27.120 They just want to be in charge. 0.84

04:28:28.800 As opposed to a Thanaric's group that theoretically do not want to be in Byzantium. 0.91

04:28:33.700 They're there because the Huns drove them out of their homeland. Really.

04:28:37.680 And not to keep talking about Forvida, but he's interesting as a kind of where does this go after Athanaric dies.

04:28:44.720 So Forvida is an important guy.

04:28:47.780 He marries a Hellenic woman. 0.93

04:28:51.040 He has to get approval from the emperor to do so because he's a foreigner marrying a Roman citizen. 0.91

04:28:59.220 Pagans cannot marry Christians at this point. 0.89

04:29:01.340 That is illegal. 0.78

04:29:01.880 The fact that this wedding occurs means that the woman he is marrying is a pagan in some way.

04:29:06.140 probably a Zeus-worshipper, we're told she's Greek. So at Fervita's wedding, a gothic

04:29:14.240 Aryan stumbles in and calls him out and says that he's a bad goth for playing ball with the 0.91

04:29:20.820 Byzantine Empire and is not fulfilling some kind of blood oath of enmity against Byzantium. Again, 0.93

04:29:26.700 blood oaths of enmity against Rome by Rome's enemies are a kind of stock trope in Roman

04:29:31.020 so how true that is is kind of up in the air i'm going to say it here there were celtic institutions

04:29:38.220 where the supreme leader could not leave a sacred precinct in rome the uh uh flamen dialis the top

04:29:48.020 priest of jupiter could not leave a specific area in the city of rome so that that's further

04:29:54.520 This could support the position of Athanaric and his Thetanship, this restriction on where he can physically go, he has to stay in his state unless leading it in war.

04:30:06.520 We're told that Athanaric and his men came to Byzantium as refugees, which is an interesting point there about why they're going. 0.68

04:30:18.520 But Frovita, at his wedding, gets called out in front of the Byzantine emperor for being a bad goth.

04:30:27.000 His response is to draw his sword, charge at the other guy, and stab him to death at his own wedding. 0.57

04:30:33.640 This enchanted Theodosius, and this was the start of Frovita's glorious military career, culminating him basically being the supreme military leader of the Byzantine state. 0.96

04:30:42.940 um so again this leads back to theodosius not really him being tolerant of these goths and 0.97

04:30:53.800 their silly thor worship because these people are literally all of the army at this point 0.99

04:30:58.280 but there does seem to have been this struggle between the osatru into trinitarian 0.97

04:31:06.240 kind of byzantine loyalist goths and these why don't we take things over and run it for ourselves

04:31:13.080 goths characterized by like odoic or aleric theodoric because again remember when these

04:31:18.480 people are sacking rome rome is still like majority pagan in terms of just the people

04:31:23.240 living there like into the 500s when aleric sacks rome he's really looting a rebellious province to 0.74

04:31:29.460 bring money back to his base of operations to fund his attempted coup when we come in attempted coup

04:31:35.920 there because remember all eric is doing military stuff there's a lot of gothic warlords who get up

04:31:40.820 to nonsense and shenanigans at this time that aren't really relevant to us because they're 0.98

04:31:45.240 arians and they don't really go anywhere there's a reason like everyone except jw's are trinitarians

04:31:52.460 today right um which ultimately brings us back to a thaneric's kind of regime as being

04:32:03.160 we've talked a lot about the ethnic nature and not a lot about the religious nature but i do

04:32:09.760 want to go back to just talking about the gothar real quick we haven't really talked much about

04:32:14.520 priests which is kind of interesting because in these christian like oh the evil king he's just

04:32:20.580 like the pharaoh from exodus kind of narratives there's always like the evil scheming pagan

04:32:25.880 priests with their magic sorcery and devil worship and that's not really present in anything here

04:32:31.460 wolf glass translates um several terms i think it's like presbyteros and some other term that

04:32:39.020 mean like elder religious leader but not necessarily like ordained clergy in like a

04:32:45.680 like a hierarchical sense just like a local priest he uses the term gothi

04:32:49.740 oh quite a bit but he uses it to refer to like local priests right i think that the there wasn't

04:32:59.380 like a firmly established vatican style brahmin flamen priesthood separate from the political

04:33:05.480 leadership i think political leadership and religious leadership were at this time

04:33:09.320 intertwined very tightly so there would be like village priests but they wouldn't necessarily be

04:33:15.440 like the the clerical authorities that was still these government officials like atherin and

04:33:21.660 wingerick whose positions of power were again it's not necessarily super emphasized but were

04:33:28.980 enforcing the will of the gods at the end of the day like the in a certain sense

04:33:35.920 i'm not a gothy blah blah blah don't listen to me if i'm wrong but like in a certain sense like

04:33:41.940 the gods are part of the tribe like a tribe includes gods you know what i mean here and

04:33:49.540 it can't really be separated from it they are getting orders politically and religiously from

04:33:55.340 on high that they are then in enforcing isn't the right word but like manifesting in reality

04:34:02.460 theology and politics don't really separate in this system right which kind of goes back to a

04:34:10.880 point about why if kinslaying is so bad why are wather and winderick allowed to kill goths even

04:34:20.320 for something as bad as apostasy and i do think part of that is the authority of the theme right

04:34:27.280 like a thaneric's position as supreme leader of the goths kind of grants him a little bit of leeway

04:34:35.500 in doing something like that um this isn't necessarily like genealogical in any way but

04:34:41.540 this does actually exist in another uh ethno-republican monarchy in the ashanti people

04:34:49.560 of africa they have an explicit hard fast rule ashanti are not allowed to kill ashanti only the

04:34:55.460 king is allowed to kill ashanti like execution can only be done by the king so it's not like this

04:35:02.660 idea is like fictional it's found among other amongst other groups like the authority of the

04:35:08.820 leader is the only thing that can violate this taboo against kinslay in particular because he's

04:35:13.860 doing it against people who have made themselves no longer kin i'm rambling if you want to interject

04:35:19.280 or go ahead no so you're you're not and i think that's the point is these people are specifically

04:35:26.480 abdicating their kinship that's a big part of what they're doing is separating themselves

04:35:33.440 from the line of their kin and they are acting against their kin and we have to

04:35:41.200 our faith has some pretty we have some pretty well accepted taboos or things that are bad

04:35:55.360 kin slaying amongst them but those are always balanced with like

04:36:00.640 obligations. If one member of your kin slays another member of your kin,

04:36:10.060 you have a conflicting obligation of vengeance and of not kin slaying. So there's not a right

04:36:19.360 answer. You just got to pick the best of what you've got. If you're in charge of maintaining

04:36:25.160 the integrity of your society and yeah there's another goth who's committing wrongdoing to 1.00

04:36:31.160 protect all of the rest of your kin you need to deal with your kin that's out of line there's a 0.99

04:36:38.760 big part of policing your own backyard rather than having an outsider have to do it that also factors 0.56

04:36:47.720 in to dealing with kin um so yeah kinslaying is bad but allowing one of your kin to disgrace

04:36:59.640 the nation and the gods and everybody and harm your kin worse is also bad um you see

04:37:10.200 that in our lore and in a high sense to where you know when when loki decides to

04:37:16.920 be complicit in the slaying of balder then vengeance ends up happening and you have to

04:37:22.840 inflict that vengeance even if it's amongst kin and so it becomes very ugly and very unfortunate

04:37:30.360 but that's part of things so this complete absolutism that people want to overlay on it

04:37:40.200 isn't practical and is never really how it works but it is a strong guiding principle that kinslaying

04:37:46.920 is bad and you mentioned yards real quick here just in case there's any doubt about like oh well

04:37:55.480 you're reading a lot of this supreme leader of the ethnos into this guy's position i just like

04:38:01.960 to back up to wolfalas's bible here he is translating words to match gothic cultural

04:38:07.880 expectations he would not do that if he was just mimicking like a thaneric's regime propaganda

04:38:14.840 so when wolfmas says that a state is a feed yard when he says that a government is a feedness

04:38:22.280 when he says that like oh what's what is it here like um yeah when he translates like rulership as

04:38:30.120 thief i'm not making this up like this is literally the word for polity in gothic at this

04:38:37.960 time is like a race group the word for ruler is leader of the race the word for like state is

04:38:46.440 race land like it it's it's like it's just so in the words even wolf last can't he would literally

04:38:53.000 have to create neologisms to not use these words and it shows up actually in other things like one

04:39:00.680 example is the stjorn the stjorn stjorn kind of in the nasal um which is an old norse translation

04:39:09.000 of the bible we see certain we see similar things here including the don't use the word feed to

04:39:15.000 described non-europeans we see these things in the helion we see them in beowulf now we see them in

04:39:21.320 different ways because beowulf with the whole warlord sociality they're moving away from this

04:39:25.320 tribal feed stuff but you get the point here like this conception of politics and religion is

04:39:33.880 intimately ethnic to the point where when wolf last translates matthew 8 11's um basilea ton

04:39:41.400 Auranos, he translates it as the thieb yard of heaven.

04:39:50.980 Like he literally has to reference race, ethnos, and implicitly ethno-religion in a statement

04:39:58.080 of Yahweh's dominion in the sky.

04:40:02.140 By comparison, the Wessex gospel, which is an old English translation of the Bible, it

04:40:06.580 refers to this as heaven's right basically right absolutely well so that brings us to

04:40:19.720 kind of the close of the main subject tonight we got two more questions to hit here and

04:40:26.920 then i want to just you know clarify our four gothic heroes and their days of remembrance

04:40:33.420 so everybody can be aware of that but we'll certainly make announcements and put it on the

04:40:37.820 calendar and whatever else but our our final questions of the night do you believe in the idea

04:40:46.140 that the future or the further you go back in time the more advanced civilization was

04:40:51.900 it's an idea prevalent in hinduism the so-called golden age or satya yuga that happened millions

04:40:59.180 of years ago i think it would explain certain legends like atlantis and hyperborea um

04:41:08.700 no and possibly

04:41:11.980 uh no we don't see in the historical period that being the case at all i don't i think

04:41:19.580 to think that there is a linear degradation of society from golden age to now as far as in a

04:41:33.260 archaeological economic technological material sense i don't think that's the case

04:41:40.700 in terms of closeness between man and god i do i think in a lot of ways

04:41:47.660 is there is a and I think this this is I think this is true across the board I think that there

04:41:56.780 is the golden age time where mankind and gods were much closer intertwined and we see that in a lot

04:42:09.680 of our high mythology and I think we see tales of really great things but what I do think is true

04:42:16.760 was there was a time where our folk interacted with our gods and the ancestors and things beyond

04:42:25.220 the veil in a much more front and center way, in a much easier connectivity, in a way that was a lot

04:42:34.480 closer. I think that distance has increased precipitously over time. I don't think that

04:42:43.820 precludes advanced ancient civilizations i think that stuff is fascinating i think you know

04:42:52.540 if we only think of technology in terms of the things around us that we see as advanced

04:42:58.700 it would look really different but we do see you know the metal megalith builders of

04:43:05.740 pre-history as being mind-boggling in the sophistication to do some of the things they

04:43:10.860 they were able to do. And we do have tales like you mentioned about Atlantis. So I don't think

04:43:16.220 it precludes that there may have been very advanced civilizations in the distant past.

04:43:21.420 That can be true. But I don't think it's a steady technological devolution at all. I do think there

04:43:30.800 is a drift from a closeness with the gods to a distance from the gods. I think some of that is

04:43:39.620 social degeneration, and I think a difference, another aspect of it is

04:43:44.880 how we've developed in our sensory perceptions and ability to perceive

04:43:54.480 beyond the five senses that we are accustomed to in this day and age.

04:44:00.760 There's a lot of theory and work that's been done on this,

04:44:07.520 But I think there's something dogs like animals and kids who are pre-verbal perceive things in the world really differently.

04:44:23.920 The more we are focused on verbal language and on written language, the less we pick up nonverbal communication, and I think the less sensitive we tend to be to other metaphysical things in our reality.

04:44:44.840 And I think that's a real thing that has devolved over time because we've repurposed our perception towards other things.

04:44:56.300 And I do think something's lost in that process.

04:44:58.780 um if i can just yeah please um i think in ancient times people had to be

04:45:11.360 a lot more focused on the gods in the spiritual world because they didn't have

04:45:16.700 as great of a control or understanding of the material world as we do today

04:45:20.740 and that's not to say that there weren't many people who are very pious but today piety

04:45:28.660 isn't people don't like pray to the gods for a good harvest because if they don't have a good

04:45:35.840 harvest they and their family die that doesn't really happen that much today the attention that

04:45:42.740 the spiritual is given has decreased as our ability to control the world has increased but

04:45:50.400 that doesn't mean that our ability to control the world correlates with impiety you know and

04:45:56.240 quite frankly you know there's stuff to be said for traditionalism but we have gained in knowledge

04:46:03.480 since a thaneric's day like you can read stuff from the norse period and it's like

04:46:10.000 guys do you like not get what's happening here like you are in the middle of an ideological

04:46:14.840 struggle you you realize you have to like prosecute your side or you lose right the ability to

04:46:22.800 understand these uh like the battle of ideas the struggle between abstractions is something that

04:46:30.320 the ancient world seems to have gotten implicitly in some cases but also have been woefully

04:46:36.640 woefully uh unprepared to actually do anything with like not to poo poo on ancient rome but it's

04:46:43.920 like with julian you know why does it take this guy coming along for anyone to do anything

04:46:49.200 do you not realize that if this thing you're fighting wins your ancestors end up forgotten

04:46:56.880 your bloodline ends up destroyed possibly literally like people today understand these

04:47:05.200 the combat between abstractions a lot better for example i'm just using this as an example

04:47:11.460 because i'm tired and rambly um i don't think that i don't think that giving up modern understandings

04:47:22.660 and mechanisms brings us makes us more pious inherently although i guess it could be useful

04:47:28.180 at an individual level you know and i think if frankly if we are to grow in advance it's to be

04:47:33.940 able to have such control and understanding of the world and also be pious to set aside

04:47:40.660 technological hubris rather than technology absolutely and there is an intensity to the need

04:47:50.420 when you are in need and you feel it if you are always in need it builds that

04:47:56.420 in a very particular way that circumvents common sense you don't rely on all of your

04:48:03.700 other sensory things when you're desperate you you circumvent that you don't try to out logic that

04:48:14.340 you believe you know the idea there's no atheists in foxholes everyone in neolithic times was

04:48:23.620 perpetually in a foxhole you are always very close to the line between life and death

04:48:30.500 so you didn't think about you know you didn't sit around and navel gaze and debate the deeper

04:48:38.240 mysteries of the universe now you believed in your gods you needed your gods and you relied

04:48:43.860 upon your gods you listened to your ancestors they were all around you and if you don't pay

04:48:48.500 attention you might become one very quickly and i think that that instinct moved towards a different

04:48:57.440 kind of perception as we develop different things sociologically reintegrating that

04:49:04.040 recapturing that's really important and the last question for tonight what are your thoughts on

04:49:11.540 such ideas as the divine masculine and the divine feminine and I depend I suppose it depends on what

04:49:19.720 you mean when you say those words. There is a unique and separate divine gift in masculinity

04:49:32.440 and in femininity. To embrace the inherent archetypical blessings of masculinity is an

04:49:48.060 act of piety, and is a good thing to do, and is the natural order of things to aspire to make the

04:49:56.500 most out of the blessings that come inherently with your masculinity. I believe the same is a

04:50:05.260 very true in femininity as it's passed down from the gods and the ancestors to our ladies. 0.70

04:50:11.900 we do that a great disservice when our women try to pretend they are men or to out outman men they

04:50:23.080 miss embracing the beautiful and amazing blessings that come with them being women

04:50:30.460 Same with our men. When we try to deny our masculinity or like somehow be metrosexual or be less masculine and more feminine, we're missing out on the things that are inherently our birthright as men.

04:50:52.540 In that sense of the divine masculine and the divine feminine, I think by negating and not acknowledging those very divinely blessed to us things, we do that a great disservice, and we do ourselves and our potential a great disservice.

04:51:13.480 um that doesn't mean there's not crossover there's you know women things that men can do

04:51:21.500 and men things that women can do but even in those circumstances where you're having to do

04:51:27.740 something out of necessity that's not necessarily in your uh your um gender wheelhouse there are

04:51:36.080 ways that you do those things in a masculine fashion and there are ways that you do those 0.64

04:51:41.340 things in a feminine fashion i have seen you know women be very successful in non-traditional

04:51:51.980 not non-traditionally women's roles by doing them in a feminine way and i've seen them be

04:52:00.780 woefully ineffective by trying to do non-feminine non-traditionally feminine roles 0.96

04:52:06.220 in a masculine way, at the end of the day, a woman trying hard to be a man is always going 0.92

04:52:16.060 to fall short of even the worst man because at the end of the day, they can never be as much 0.91

04:52:22.740 of a man as that really poor example of manhood. And same in the situation of manhood, a man who

04:52:30.120 tries to be a woman even the best of men that tries to be a woman is going to fall short 0.52

04:52:36.840 of the worst of women because he's not and it just doesn't work that way and when we act counter to

04:52:45.400 nature in a flagrant disrespectful way like that to to harken back to an earlier question we push

04:52:53.480 beneficial synchronicity away from us we sacrifice and we build a luck debt

04:53:03.720 and we alienate ourselves from beneficial synchronicity uh chris do you have thoughts

04:53:09.800 on that on divine feminine versus divine masculine um i guess i don't know what divine

04:53:20.360 divine like is it like a pool that is drawn from i mean that's what i said when i started it was

04:53:27.680 it all depends on what you mean by it i think you can yeah take a lot of different meanings from

04:53:32.920 that i i mean i know there's what there's like divine divinities that are masculine and divinities

04:53:38.960 that are feminine i don't know if like we believe that gender roles come from were given to us by

04:53:45.220 the gods right i don't know if we want to go so far as to say that like masculinity is like a

04:53:49.080 background field that we tap into that exists like does it pre-exist the gods or is odin's

04:53:55.920 masculinity different from ours i don't i i'm opening a can of worms but you know what i mean

04:54:02.020 here like it yeah no i don't believe in there's like a storehouse of yeah masculinity as its own

04:54:11.980 independent divinity or its own independent storehouse yeah no i believe that there is

04:54:19.260 the divine gift of masculinity and the divine gift of femininity and recognizing their

04:54:27.580 uniqueness or their difference is fundamentally important you should be masculine or feminine

04:54:35.020 as the divine want you to yeah absolutely all the things we do should

04:54:39.900 we should do our best to align them with divine will but that brings us to a close this evening

04:54:47.900 uh last minute questions we'll go ahead and hit those next time we join you um

04:54:54.380 chris thank you so much for tonight's truly epic dissertation on the goths

04:55:03.340 um i should write a book you you really should honestly this i think you know this blew me away

04:55:10.540 i think it blew a lot of our our audience away it was fantastic thank you so much for being on

04:55:17.660 uh it is always a pleasure to have you but you really you knocked it out thank you i'm pretty

04:55:23.340 sure i could cut out the extraneous bits and there's a solid four hours of just chris talking

04:55:29.020 about golf oh absolutely i was thinking like man i don't know how late we're gonna go but i gotta

04:55:34.700 listen to like five hours of me rambling to find clips to time stamp i mean it's hard because i

04:55:41.580 don't think this episode lends itself to a lot of like yeah really cool sound bites but no your

04:55:47.500 stuff was very solid very informative from a lot of different angles very very well done and i'm

04:55:55.020 looking at my notes and i'm like oh man i didn't say this uh we can talk about that one later you

04:55:59.820 know all right no you did you did fantastic so uh in closing the night we are celebrating

04:56:09.260 our gothic heroes king aoric will be celebrated henceforth on uh october the 23rd each year with

04:56:20.300 his day of remembrance uh hail aoric his son king athanaric is currently and will continue to be

04:56:31.660 celebrated on june the 9th of each year hail athanaric and um the uh noble men that

04:56:45.740 had to, you know, put in the elbow grease to do what must be done to maintain the loyalty of their

04:56:55.200 folk. We celebrate them. We celebrate Wengerik on March the 26th going forward, and we will

04:57:06.180 celebrate Atherid on April the 12th. So those are your new Gothic heroes, or I suppose your old 0.52

04:57:15.520 Gothic heroes that we are just now recognizing and elevating to the status in our, you know,

04:57:22.380 folk memory that they deserve. So thank you once again, Chris. Hail to our heroes.

04:57:30.680 uh witness fawn and i will join you next week as we continue our edda study

04:57:36.740 uh till then hail the isere hail the folk hail the afa and remember victory never sleeps

04:58:00.680 We'll be right back.

04:58:30.680 Thank you.

04:59:00.680 Thank you.

04:59:30.680 Thank you.

05:00:00.680 Thank you.

05:00:30.680 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - July 10, 2025

7⧸9⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 157 - The Loyal Goths

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