Asatru Folk Assembly - 8⧸12⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 214 - Völkerwanderung

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

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

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Thank you.

00:02:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:03:00.000 Thank you.

00:03:30.000 Hello, everyone.

00:03:53.460 Welcome to this week's edition of Victory Never Sleeps.

00:03:56.460 For those of you listening at a later time, we had a moment of silence at the beginning

00:04:03.920 of the program to remember Bradley Hewitt, a beloved member of ours that passed away

00:04:10.400 over this last week.

00:04:12.740 So, hail Brad.

00:04:18.560 With that, we are joined again by resident historian and folk builder Chris Savage to

00:04:25.640 continue a history series that we are doing

00:04:30.760 tracing the ancient and original relationship

00:04:38.880 between Aryan man and our Isir

00:04:43.600 from the dawn of our folk

00:04:47.560 through the various wanderings and transformations over time and space

00:04:53.420 that brought us to the much more familiar Viking period.

00:05:00.020 So, yeah, I'm eager to talk about this one.

00:05:04.420 This one will butt up against several other topics

00:05:08.460 that Chris has been on to hit with us

00:05:10.600 about various ones of our heroes

00:05:12.080 and different tribes of our folk.

00:05:16.720 So it should be an interesting one

00:05:19.160 that fills some gaps and connects some pieces.

00:05:23.420 A couple of other things.

00:05:26.060 First, you guys are incredibly generous.

00:05:29.000 I really appreciate it.

00:05:30.540 We all very much appreciate it,

00:05:32.320 and I believe that the ICER appreciate it.

00:05:35.300 We had a bunch of people trying to donate on the last program,

00:05:39.180 and that was the exact time we found out

00:05:41.980 that our current payment processing situation didn't work.

00:05:49.300 so that is under repair and we are getting that all figured out unfortunately it moves at the

00:05:57.560 speed of you know however many business days at a time so while we're in the process we have

00:06:03.980 a temporary solution so anybody who would like to uh to donate during the course of this program

00:06:12.040 we've got qr code in the corner we are working on that that would be directly into the austral

00:06:18.040 Paul Assembly's account. You please feel free to let us know over in the chat or on the side,

00:06:26.080 however you'd like, or email us if you have a place that you want your donation to go to.

00:06:32.400 There's not a lot of new news, but to bring everybody up to date with our current donation

00:06:37.840 situation. The pavilion. I've been out at Sigurheim working on ground prep for the pavilion.

00:06:45.640 um we have folks should be working on making progress on that uh you know week and a half

00:06:58.180 from now folks coming down to help get that all prepped and ready and hopefully start the

00:07:03.980 foundation process you guys have been very very generous we appreciate that got all we have 29.4

00:07:11.220 percent of that total already and we are looking to have something very nice erected for everyone

00:07:18.580 by ainary bloat when our national event is going to be at cigarette so we're hard at work of that

00:07:26.580 thank you for your donations if you are interested and you would like to the qr code to donate

00:07:31.300 is on the side there so thank you um

00:07:34.420 And, Nick, where are we looking at, where are we at for paying off FraseHoff?

00:07:44.180 The other big one that we are working on currently fundraising for is to pay off FraseHoff.

00:07:50.720 Currently we're sitting at 47.2% paid off on that, which is fantastic.

00:07:56.440 We dedicated FraseHoff in December, on December the 6th of 2025.

00:08:02.680 So I believe we are set up for a 10-year loan to pay that place off.

00:08:09.400 And we are four years and a quarter into those payments, I believe, at this point.

00:08:19.540 So we are doing fantastic on making progress there.

00:08:23.940 And, again, that's because you guys are very, very generous.

00:08:26.880 So thank you for everyone who tried to donate last week.

00:08:30.620 And everybody who wants to donate tonight, the QR code is the way to go.

00:08:35.540 While we're talking about that, this is going to be good in perpetuity to donate monies to the AFA,

00:08:44.380 or at least in foreseeable perpetuity.

00:08:48.020 So if you'd like to donate, you can donate through the QR code.

00:08:53.060 brother and uh yeah also we have kind of a store solution on that our store is

00:09:02.580 temporarily down as we figure out our uh our payment processor which again we are well on

00:09:08.980 the way towards resolving but in the meantime you can manually email store at roomstone.org

00:09:17.780 tell us what you want we can finalize any cost on that and get those shipping

00:09:22.560 So it is not as clean or as pretty as it was previously, but we are working on it.

00:09:27.320 And in the meantime, you can still get AFA products and you can still contribute to the AstroFolk Assembly and our various fundraising efforts.

00:09:36.740 And if you really don't like the QR codes for whatever reason, we have Buy Me A Coffee back up.

00:09:44.920 So you can go to my buymeacoffee.com slash victoryneversleeps.

00:09:48.840 You are also welcome to do that.

00:09:52.100 So, yeah, but anyways, you guys are real generous.

00:09:55.060 We appreciate you.

00:09:56.040 Sorry for that interruption in our ability to accept that generosity there for a moment,

00:10:04.120 but we got a plan in the meantime, and we're on the way to resolving it.

00:10:08.560 That said, it's worth noting that Spectator Clifford Erickson, my good friend,

00:10:14.560 has been hard at work on all of the phone calls back and forth with people working on that,

00:10:20.480 so thank you cliff we appreciate you very much oh other notes coming up this weekend at all

00:10:30.080 five of our hoffs we will be celebrating freight facts would invite you you are heterosexual and

00:10:38.000 white listening to this program you should come on out to celebrate freight facts see what we're

00:10:44.080 all about um please reach out to any of your local folk builders and we can get you all set up for

00:10:51.360 that i will be my daughter and i will be going up to phrase hall in austintown ohio to celebrate

00:11:00.240 there so we would love to see you guys um if you can make it out that would be a good thing to do

00:11:07.520 and like i said you can touch the local folk builder get you all squared away um

00:11:14.080 for anybody listening simultaneously we'll be celebrating fray faxie at odenshoff in

00:11:19.680 brownsville california thorshoff in lyndon north carolina baldershoff in murdoch minnesota

00:11:27.840 york's off in white springs florida and uh phrasehoff in austin town ohio if you can make

00:11:36.400 it to any of those please do we would all love to see you there it's a great opportunity and

00:11:43.920 this is the time to do it with that chris take us back into the past

00:11:55.920 all right so we are going to continue our series on the history of the folk

00:12:01.200 and what leads from our ancient Aryan ancestors to us Aryans here today.

00:12:07.020 Because our religion is an ethno-religion, our relationship with the divine is inherited,

00:12:13.100 and it is thus necessary for us to understand how we got to the present day in order to practice our religion properly.

00:12:20.520 To that end, here as before, I am not going to give you a lit review that synthesizes hundreds of papers across dozens of fields,

00:12:29.080 presenting cutting-edge and novel theories and archaeogenetic techniques to discern cultural

00:12:33.700 linguistic data. Rather, I am going to present to you a meaningful and usable narrative to guide you

00:12:40.160 as a person. It doesn't matter how much hyamnaya you can fit in a bell beaker or how many afonsievos

00:12:46.780 you can shred me in a stalk. We are all human beings. We have to get up tomorrow and go to work.

00:12:52.140 How are we supposed to act? How are we supposed to view ourselves? How are we going to do these

00:12:57.080 things. Where are we going? Where have we been? Who is we? That is what I am presenting to you

00:13:02.920 today as far as the narrative that we're talking about. So last time I was on, we covered a few

00:13:08.360 things. First, that modern European that is white people are distinguished from or by descent from

00:13:15.460 several European groups, which themselves descend from a single population that emerged in Europe

00:13:20.020 during the Ice Age. Second, that modern European that is white people are distinguished by a

00:13:26.060 cultural, linguistic, and genetic dominance of the so-called Indo-European peoples, whom are our ancestors.

00:13:34.160 These were cattle-rearing horsemen who experienced their ethnogenesis on the western shores of the Black Sea around 4000 BC or so.

00:13:44.500 The descendants of this ethnogenesis then proceed to move further westwards, deeper into Europe.

00:13:51.620 Third, that the relationship that we as Aryans have with the divine 0.84

00:13:54.700 descends predominantly from the one that these horsemen had

00:13:58.180 due to participation in an agonism, a contest.

00:14:02.420 The contest in this case was amongst several lineages,

00:14:06.060 going back to a single population in the Ice Age,

00:14:08.460 for which, so to say, which sibling would inherit the father's lands, as it were.

00:14:14.860 Fourth, after spreading across Europe,

00:14:17.820 these horsemen began to experience a great series of differentiations,

00:14:22.560 but they do not have any rupture of continuity.

00:14:25.900 It's like branches coming out of a tree limb, right?

00:14:29.160 So we covered last time the Ice Age to the Indo-European Conquest. 0.95

00:14:35.740 So now we're going to go from cattle herders are in charge of Europe 0.52

00:14:40.240 to the setup for a number of previous VNS episodes we've done.

00:14:45.460 the arminius episode the goths episode the anglo-saxons episodes i didn't intend you to

00:14:51.680 deploy these right now nick um the upcoming scandinavian episodes we're going to start off

00:14:58.280 around 2000 bc as northern europe is entering the bronze age where they're going to pause for one

00:15:03.860 moment because i'd like to acknowledge jim bob who bought us a five dollar coffee thank you jim bob

00:15:09.900 we appreciate your he says we have his support and we appreciate your support jim bob thank you

00:15:14.620 very much. Also, Gilbert donated by means of the QR code, proof of concept. He even was able to

00:15:23.640 get a message on there, which much appreciated. Yeah, so Gilbert donated $150 and says heal the

00:15:34.300 gods. He'll heal to the givers and heal to you, Gilbert, for your continued donation. So him

00:15:42.380 doing that shows that you can put a little message in the uh um in the donation at the qr um qr zell

00:15:51.820 link which is awesome and it can put right there where you'd like the funds to go so thank you guys

00:15:58.300 for that appreciate it and uh it works so back back to the story so we're going to start off

00:16:08.060 around 2000 BC as Northern Europe is entering the Bronze Age. We're then going to move through the

00:16:13.820 Iron Age up to the Roman period, the migration period, and enter into the Viking Age. This is

00:16:19.660 going to require a bit of jumping around as we go, so please bear with me. Alright, so what does

00:16:26.140 Europe look like at this time? So to get us to the Bronze Age, let's just do a brief rundown of

00:16:31.580 what's happening in Europe as a refresher and contextualizer. Nick, do you want to throw up the

00:16:36.300 overlap map all right so there are a variety of material cultures in europe which means people

00:16:45.980 making things in a certain fashion and the two major ones are the bell beakers and the corded

00:16:52.380 ware both of these descend from the indo-european step right these two peoples have expanded across

00:17:01.260 europe by the end of this period they've fully and totally conquered it they've established

00:17:05.740 alliances with farmer and hunter-gatherer populations across the continent and begun

00:17:09.940 intermarrying with them. When the easiest fruit gets picked, people start pulling away to find

00:17:15.880 new gains. That is, when the borders are filled in, the periphery starts pulling away from the

00:17:21.440 center. And what's important here, remember, material cultures overlap, which is kind of

00:17:27.040 obvious because there's that big blob that says overlap, right? But there's many, many smaller

00:17:32.280 material cultures throughout this, right? Do you want to insert the Late Bronze Age map, Nick?

00:17:40.440 All right, so this is what Europe looks like at the time, or rather this is what the development

00:17:46.280 of the bell beaker and corded ware material cultures looks like. The blobs on this map

00:17:51.000 are different material cultures, which again means ways of making things that get left behind for

00:17:55.400 archaeologists. The Urnfield system and the Atlantic Bronze Age go on to become the

00:18:01.320 proto-Italo-Celtic peoples, pulling away from the center in a sort of west-southwest fashion.

00:18:07.320 This goes on to become the Halstatt and Latene material cultures. And then we've got Italy,

00:18:11.880 which is more complicated and the intricacies of it are not really relevant here.

00:18:16.280 In the east, there's the development of the so-called Scythian world, which means the

00:18:20.840 Indo-Iranic peoples, including groups other than just the Scythians and Indo-Iranic peoples,

00:18:26.200 such as the people who go on to become the proto-Baltoslavs. And of course in the southeast,

00:18:31.080 there's the paleo-balkan world and the greek world in the north there's a poln northwards

00:18:38.440 so what is today germany which is more or less the center of europe experiences this

00:18:44.440 north-south split with central germany becoming increasingly vacant while concentrations of

00:18:50.440 people begin to build up in the north and the south about what year is this this is around

00:18:56.520 entering 2000 BC, entering 2000 BC to 1600 BC. So the southern peoples end up becoming part of

00:19:09.080 the burgeoning proto-Celtic bloc, whereas the northern peoples end up participating in what's

00:19:13.880 called the Nordic Bronze Age. So at this point there's two meaningful Indo-European groups in

00:19:20.440 Europe. There are Proto-Greeks and then there's what we could call Common

00:19:26.920 Indo-European, which means everyone on this map that isn't labeled Greek or

00:19:32.560 Nuragic civilization. Everyone in Europe today that isn't a Greek has Indo-

00:19:38.920 European blood descending from this singular common Indo-European population.

00:19:43.500 The Indo-European peoples in Europe across various material cultures practice

00:19:49.180 what is essentially one unified religion with one single culture, one single political system,

00:19:55.060 and one single language. They become increasingly differentiated at the time, but at the start,

00:20:01.480 they're just really one group. So the reasoning for that is that the Greeks actually enter Greece

00:20:07.700 a little earlier. There's a lot more of Europe that isn't Greece than there is Greece. So the

00:20:14.260 Greek popular, the Proto-Indo-European peoples that would become the Greeks entered Greece a

00:20:19.000 little earlier and by 2300 uh proto-greek was more or less um mutually unintelligible with

00:20:26.780 what we call common proto-indieuropean at the time do you want to say something sir

00:20:31.020 um yeah i want to i want to point out because it needs constant reaffirming

00:20:39.160 in order for these people to exist to have their worship clearly these people and their religion

00:20:47.240 and their worship, which we still practice today, was existent.

00:20:53.660 All of these people had a relationship with the Aesir.

00:21:00.080 At this stage, they did not call them the Aesir.

00:21:04.080 I don't believe that at this stage the names of our gods are attested in that way.

00:21:09.020 Yet, these people and the Aesir were united in trough, had been together for thousands of years, are still together, and even, you know, 2000 BC, before there are proper Germans or Scandinavians or Celts or Slavs or any of these things, you have Aryan people and our holy gods united.

00:21:36.940 the gods are with all of these peoples on that map these same gods traveled with those greeks

00:21:44.140 down there and then started you know making their wine into spritzers

00:21:49.740 um these people all are the sons of the all father these people are all our folk

00:21:58.700 in trough with our gods you can see a couple of different branches now starting to develop

00:22:05.100 of different names and different stories

00:22:09.080 on how they relate to our gods.

00:22:12.720 But these same gods have led these people

00:22:15.640 from the steppe into Europe

00:22:19.160 and into developing civilization there in all of Europe.

00:22:25.480 And just to quaff some trivia on the word Aesir there,

00:22:30.480 on the word Aesir there, Aesir, the plural of As, is actually cognate with the Hittite

00:22:38.480 Hashus and the Proto-Indo-Iranian Hashus, both of which mean like lords, right? The ones in charge,

00:22:51.740 coming from a word meaning like, you know, the ones who create life or something like that.

00:22:59.360 And this word goes on to become Ahura in Avestin and Asura Asura in Sanskrit, right?

00:23:11.080 So we're talking about one founding population, and then from that founding population, a big family tree emerges.

00:23:20.340 But they all go back to one origin point.

00:23:23.360 There's no ruptures of continuity here, right?

00:23:27.740 No, these are all lineal descendants of Asker and Idla.

00:23:33.480 And they become increasingly differentiated over time, but at the start they're just one group.

00:23:38.780 Can you throw up the battle axe culture image, Nick?

00:23:43.580 So that one group is a Neolithic people. 0.98

00:23:46.660 They use stone tools. 0.99

00:23:48.060 around, backing this up, I said we'd jump around a bit, around 2900 BC, the first herder

00:23:55.920 Indo-European peoples start moving into Scandinavia. It is already inhabited by two

00:24:01.220 distantly related groups, the hunter-gatherers and the farmers. The herders that move in are a

00:24:07.460 combination of corded ware and bell beaker that gives rise to the so-called battle axe culture

00:24:11.780 in scandinavia because of their battle axes which are you know two-headed axes so there's

00:24:18.820 colonization of sweden and norway from germany and southern denmark but remember the bell beaker

00:24:24.260 culture is still going on alongside the battle axe culture and everything involving material

00:24:28.260 cultures is very very complicated throw up the pitted wear culture image nick so the hunter

00:24:35.700 gatherers are the first people to enter this territory they are descended from that shared

00:24:41.620 ice age population they are the pitted weir culture so-called because their wares have little

00:24:48.180 pits on them these people engaged in the growing of crops they just didn't farm grain

00:24:53.860 they grow root vegetables flax they eat seeds they make seed oils they have large-scale fisheries

00:24:59.220 and deer parks these people are very sophisticated socially and technologically

00:25:04.580 but they don't grow grain, and as such their societies don't display the characteristics

00:25:08.660 of a grain-based hydraulic despotism. Remember, agriculture means grows grain,

00:25:15.940 hunter-gatherer means doesn't grow grain, it doesn't mean doesn't grow animals,

00:25:21.620 and doesn't grow plants. So the Bell Beaker peoples essentially coexist with the pitted 0.96

00:25:27.700 ware culture and mingle genetically, like hunter-gatherers and herders live in the same 1.00

00:25:33.320 spaces and hunter-gatherer men marry herder women and vice versa. These people are distantly 0.86

00:25:39.060 related to the Indo-Europeans, as I've said. In Britain, in Germany, in Scandinavia, these

00:25:44.920 hunter-gatherer peoples are the ones that build the stone circles and the dolmens and various

00:25:50.260 other ancient structures. They built Stonehenge, they built Newgrange. These people seem to coexist

00:25:56.220 and integrate with the Indo-Europeans remarkably well, and the Indo-Europeans end up using a lot

00:26:02.120 of these ancient tombs and holy sites that these Neolithic hunter-gatherer populations built as

00:26:08.640 religious places. This isn't really co-opting because this is just two cousin populations

00:26:14.160 reuniting as one, and one cousin says, wow, your house is amazing. Let's both live here, right?

00:26:22.440 These two populations go on to conquer the farmers. You want to insert the funnel beaker map, Nick? 0.83

00:26:33.640 So this is the map of the funnel beaker culture, so-called because of their funnel-shaped beakers.

00:26:41.240 These are the farmer peoples. These peoples come after the hunter-gatherers. They make thatched

00:26:47.380 dwellings and grow grain interestingly they have a decent amount of hunter-gatherer dna

00:26:52.580 indicating that their society was probably the result of these so-called hunter-gatherer

00:26:56.900 resurgence the big summary of that is that when the farmers um spread out through europe

00:27:05.300 uh they quickly take over and drive off the hunter-gatherers but then the hunter-gatherers

00:27:10.740 experience a resurgence and take power sometimes by displacing farmer populations sometimes just

00:27:17.940 by conquering farmer populations we're breezing through centuries of very complicated history in

00:27:23.220 a few sentences i know but we got to keep moving now this doesn't really happen in germany proper

00:27:29.380 however the farmers were far more established in germany and then the indo-european peoples

00:27:34.900 conquered them. So Scandinavians have a large or have a larger amount of hunter-gatherer ancestry

00:27:41.380 and less farmer ancestry, whereas Germans have more farmer ancestry and less hunter-gatherer

00:27:46.680 ancestry. This narrative requires a large amount of simplification, blah, blah, blah.

00:27:52.840 Why did the herders fight the farmers, but not the hunter-gatherers? Well, they didn't think of

00:27:57.240 themselves as herders, hunters, and farmer-gatherers or farm... you know what I mean. They thought of

00:28:03.020 themselves as complex polities with their own histories and we're simplifying them to make this

00:28:09.220 easy to talk about the reality would have been extremely complex and nuanced but we just don't

00:28:15.640 really have intricate records of that reality we use the word conquer but it's also clearly

00:28:22.420 more complicated than just ooga booga me king me kill you me take women right but the point is this

00:28:29.860 the germ the what becomes the germanic world forms out of a single population a single language

00:28:37.680 culture and religion which has an internal north south split of which group of outsiders did we

00:28:43.660 conquer and absorb germans and scandinavians are thus genetically extremely closely related

00:28:49.500 in part due to stuff that happens after this about half of this shared ancestral herder population

00:28:56.320 that culturally wins out with the remaining half being a question of are they more farmer

00:29:01.860 in germany or more hunter uh gatherer in scandinavia but the unity of the conquering

00:29:07.800 peoples means that this distinction smooths out over time so a guy can move from like northern

00:29:14.080 germany into sweden just fine if he's you know a herder all right so we leave the neolithic the

00:29:22.920 Stone Age, and we enter the Bronze Age. Around 1700 BC, Scandinavia and Northern 1.00

00:29:27.960 Germany are part of this Nordic Bronze Age. They work bronze, they 0.98

00:29:32.280 farm, but they also herd. They have complex diets with lots of meat, lots of

00:29:37.560 dairy, lots of fish. Genetically, the people in the north are more hunter, and

00:29:42.540 the people in the south are more farmer, and the whole culture is Indo-European

00:29:46.200 derived. Remember, this is all very complicated, and we're talking about

00:29:51.660 comparatively small population numbers so there's actually keep in mind to throw in if you just look

00:29:59.020 at the map the further you're into and even the bigger um european map that we were looking at

00:30:08.860 you see mountains and you see stuff the people in the plains and in the green spots can farm

00:30:20.060 and herd better with grassland and stuff the further you get north the colder it gets

00:30:28.700 if you look at all those mountains in scandinavia especially in norway

00:30:35.580 your farming options become much more limited your grazing options become much more limited

00:30:42.780 so adapting to hunting um you see that in a lot of northern climates around the world

00:30:52.140 the further you're in a fertile place to grow crops you do different stuff than when you find

00:30:57.820 yourself in the frozen mountainous north with a much smaller growing season and much less space

00:31:04.060 to do those things so it's just something to keep in mind there's no doubt deep cultural traditions

00:31:11.500 on why some of these groups of people were whatever percentage they were a hunter versus

00:31:17.260 gatherer versus farmer versus pastoral but a lot of that is dictated by culture and a lot of it's

00:31:25.020 dictated by what plot of land and what climate you find yourself in and it's worth bringing up here

00:31:35.100 about the the ecology of this region the last glacial maxima was about 24 000 bc

00:31:46.940 we're at 1700 bc so we've got you know 22 000 years of time in between the ice age and now in the

00:32:00.700 the story europe at this time becomes full of intense thick deep deep forests right so that

00:32:16.840 map that nick put up with like the terrain that's a modern map europe is full of these extremely

00:32:25.780 thick forests and in order to grow crops there you not only have to like not be in the frigid 0.67

00:32:31.820 mountains of norway you have to be able to cut the trees down so when these indo-european step 1.00

00:32:37.040 herders come in they light these enormous forest fires to just burn down this shockingly dense 0.98

00:32:46.300 forest right they are literally bringing with them grass in some circumstances right because

00:32:53.340 the the forest is just too thick for grass to grow if you go and look at a real european old

00:33:00.660 growth forest there's not many of them left they do not have grass because the trees are so big

00:33:06.400 and thick and the leaf canopy is so dense that there's not a whole lot of light hitting the

00:33:13.520 ground right so another point to reiterate here we often breeze through you know farmers hunter

00:33:25.420 gatherers indo-european step herders these are complex people with their own complex internal

00:33:31.600 political world the indo-european step herders are a lot more unified in part due to just

00:33:38.420 They're like descended from a very small number of lineages, right? But they're also warlords coming to blows with each other constantly. The farmer peoples did not conceptualize themselves as farmers. They conceptualized themselves as whatever this village called itself, separate from whatever that village over there called itself. 0.99

00:33:59.440 the hunter-gatherers were you know in charge of europe for like 10 000 years

00:34:06.640 those people had extremely complex and intricate political and social worlds that we just

00:34:15.520 are blurring over because i mean they're all closely related so i guess right when when

00:34:26.160 we're talking about like conquest and this group and that group we are blurring lines to make this

00:34:33.460 story easier because again we're covering thousands of years of history between last episode and this

00:34:40.720 episode's finishing like we will have gone through you know 180 to the present like 10 times

00:34:48.680 humans were there the entire time and had lives just as complex as ours

00:34:54.440 right you guys understand you guys got to understand this here i want to make a point

00:35:00.540 while we're at it first i want to make a point of saying someone bought us a coffee says helping

00:35:06.680 you stay energized thank you someone i appreciate that um i'd also like to say directionality

00:35:14.120 matters here a lot and it is a hard habit for us to break because any study of history or archaeology

00:35:23.080 or sociology we come up with modern tools and tricks to help us categorize things

00:35:34.360 In our mind, when we apply those to ancient people, there is a tendency to think that

00:35:44.560 they thought of themselves that way, which is erroneous.

00:35:48.880 So Cordy Ware people didn't get mad at Bell Beaker people because they made their urns

00:35:57.160 and their pottery wrong.

00:36:00.040 These people didn't, these weren't the things that these people chose to identify as the

00:36:04.280 important elements of their culture that separated them from their neighbor.

00:36:09.060 They're just things that we can look at as points of commonality to, you know, you gotta

00:36:14.480 draw lines and say, we're talking about these people over here, oh, we're talking about

00:36:18.400 these people over here.

00:36:20.320 Hunters and gatherers, these are hungry people that try to get food where the food's at.

00:36:25.240 If you are a farmer in Kentucky and I pick you up and set you in Fairbanks, Alaska, you

00:36:30.920 are not going to farm.

00:36:31.920 You are going to become a hunter-gatherer because you're hungry and you're going to

00:36:37.900 feed your family with what's available in the place that you find yourself.

00:36:42.380 You might be a devout Pentecostal in Kentucky.

00:36:46.020 You're still going to be a devout Pentecostal in Fairbanks.

00:36:48.760 You're just going to have to get your food a different way.

00:36:51.920 So a lot of these things that are defined by career and circumstance and material culture

00:36:58.640 don't necessarily reflect the points that bonded communities together or that were defining

00:37:05.920 cultural impacts.

00:37:06.920 And it becomes increasingly confusing as we go through this episode with some of the different

00:37:13.700 groups of people, because historians throughout time, even in antiquity, would classify them

00:37:20.600 by artificial means that were useful to the intelligentsia in Rome or in the Ivy League

00:37:29.840 or in London or wherever the historian might be, just remember that directionality is how

00:37:38.880 modern people, whenever you find yourself to call modern, sort data.

00:37:45.740 It's not indicative of what the most important things were to each of these people or a

00:37:50.360 self-identifier that meant that there wasn't overlap like this guy made his poverty wrong so

00:37:56.440 we can't have peace or marry or we're different people i hope that makes sense but the direction

00:38:02.760 out when you don't apply modern things as if ancient peoples are beholden to modern scholastic

00:38:09.800 theory so if we defined things today like how we do with archaeological material cultures

00:38:17.000 The Altair Yurghothi currently lives in the seersucker culture, and I live in the winter coat culture, despite both of us also living in the blue jeans culture.

00:38:26.120 And yet we are both Americans speaking the same language, practicing the same religion, same culture, and are part of a contiguous polity with contiguous norms and standards. 0.89

00:38:34.360 But there's a lot of Chinamen who are also part of the blue jeans culture, but do not have the same language, religion, culture, political, and cultural, and norms, and standards.

00:38:49.520 There are two pre-Proto-Indo-European languages in Europe that are very well attested, and those are Basque and Etruscan.

00:39:01.460 the basques and etruscans never thought of themselves as being one people

00:39:08.540 they were their own thing with their own complex political norms and ways of doing things

00:39:15.720 even though they do share a common ancestry far enough back we often lose the forest for the trees

00:39:26.500 and apply ideas of, like, Westphalian sovereignty onto ancient peoples

00:39:33.580 and do, like, the whole, oh, Britain and France are so different.

00:39:37.620 They have nothing in common kind of thing.

00:39:39.700 And it's like, you know, you plot their DNA and they're, like, 0.98

00:39:42.880 two points that overlap compared to the Chinese, right? 0.51

00:39:47.840 All right, back to the story.

00:39:50.740 That's Northern Europe we're talking about.

00:39:52.800 You want to throw up the Late Bronze Age image again, Nick?

00:39:57.140 it's the big urn field one no no the one with the big orange in the middle

00:40:04.740 that one all right so central and southern germany are part of the urn field culture

00:40:10.420 and the atlantic bronze age system these people aren't called so because uh urn field culture

00:40:16.820 because they'd cremate their dead and then store the bones and ashes in urns that were buried in

00:40:21.300 fields um as an aside when you hear cremation most of the time historically that means using

00:40:28.500 fire to strip the flesh off the bones and then storing the bones in some capacity

00:40:34.900 this urn field culture plus the atlantic bronze age system is a massive continent-wide

00:40:40.340 indo-european culture these are the ancestors of the italo-celtic peoples they are quite diverse

00:40:46.260 internally, as we've said. This is an economic, cultural, political, and religious zone where a

00:40:52.460 king and his thanes could get on their chariots, ride off into the sunset, find some other king to 1.00

00:40:56.640 get in a fight with, conquer people in a huge stretch of territory, and then do it all over 0.97

00:41:01.300 again. A scald could be born in Iberia and hoof it all the way to the Balkans, plying his trade by 0.98

00:41:08.080 singing songs of the gods and heroes recognized by everyone in Europe who spoke more or less 0.94

00:41:12.680 one coherent language along the way. This block goes on to become Gaul and Rome, this

00:41:20.340 Urnfield Atlantic Bronze Age block, amongst a variety of other smaller states. So we have

00:41:26.380 Germania in the north, Greece in the southeast, and a bunch of little groups like the Etruscans

00:41:31.600 and Basques scattered throughout an otherwise seemingly uniform proto-proto-Italo-Celtic

00:41:38.320 european milieu so to say again uniform is an oversimplification but remember you could go 0.74

00:41:45.720 from portugal to the border of greece speaking one language and these people all poured out

00:41:53.920 horns or vases pottery drinking vessels or mugs to the icier with probably different images in

00:42:08.300 their mind depending on where they were at i think the icier wore warm weather clothes in the

00:42:14.000 mediterranean they probably wore furs and cold weather clothes when we're picturing them up north

00:42:19.980 but these people were all pouring out offerings because pouring out was a the libation or pouring

00:42:26.700 out of an offering is the primary source of doing um making offering to the gods these people were

00:42:34.820 all doing it at this early stage all of these people all across this span all to our gods

00:42:44.740 and using remarkably similar language even when they do start to differ diverge and differentiate

00:42:52.660 like english father latin peter greek patter right the the languages at this time are still

00:43:03.300 extremely obviously related. So just kind of looking ahead on the language front,

00:43:10.760 around 1000 BC, we have a northern proto-proto-Germanic world and a southwestern

00:43:17.240 proto-proto-Italo-Celtic world. In the east, there's a developing proto-proto-Baltoslavic

00:43:23.100 world, which similarly derives from and has religious, cultural, and political continuity

00:43:28.620 with the earlier common Indo-European world.

00:43:32.660 By 800 BC, someone from what is today France

00:43:36.520 would find a noticeable dialectical differences

00:43:39.760 with someone from what is today Denmark.

00:43:42.220 By 300 BC, they're speaking languages

00:43:44.300 that are recognizably similar,

00:43:46.160 but not mutually intelligible.

00:43:48.040 By 10 AD or so, when our Arminius episode took place,

00:43:51.820 Proto-Celtic and Proto-Germanic

00:43:53.380 are no longer recognizably similar,

00:43:55.460 although a well-traveled man

00:43:56.920 would pick up on their distant relation.

00:43:58.620 But it's worth noting here that if you were fluent in Latin or Gaulish, you were basically like, you know, halfway to knowing the other.

00:44:12.620 But these differences are due to subtle differentiation over time, not due to any sort of fundamental rupture.

00:44:19.620 That is to say, circa 100 AD, a Celt, a Germanic, a Roman, and a Slav all perform bloke to Odin,

00:44:27.860 and while they might differ in specific words or form of ritual, all of their words and forms of

00:44:33.420 ritual are in a continuous lineage back to their shared ancestors. There is no cutoff at this time.

00:44:41.760 All right, so we've got this huge Bronze Age milieu stretching from Iberia up to, into what is today Russia, going down into the Balkans and to Greece. 0.86

00:44:57.140 This is when the Iron Age starts to begin.

00:45:00.140 We're going to come to talking about Bronze Age and Iron Age, Germanic in particular, society in a bit, comparing and contrasting them.

00:45:10.500 So first, we've talked about Northern and Central Europe.

00:45:14.420 We've talked about how you have like, you know, Germany,

00:45:16.840 and then there's this sort of movement spreading them apart

00:45:21.020 with some people wanting to go north and settle Scandinavia

00:45:24.400 and some people wanting to move south

00:45:26.840 and participate in this Atlantic Bronze Age urn field milieu.

00:45:32.720 And so there's this gap that's forming in Central Europe.

00:45:37.280 What about Southern Europe?

00:45:38.980 For context, Southern Europe is fascinating and complicated, too complicated to get into in depth in this episode.

00:45:48.400 From 3000 BC to 1200 BC, there's a flourishing civilizational complex encompassing Mycenaean Greece, Minoan Crete,

00:46:02.760 the numerous Anatolian city-states, numerous Levantine city-states, numerous Mesopotamian

00:46:08.920 city-states, and the fabulous complexities of Egypt. All of these are civilizations under

00:46:14.840 themselves, and all of them are extremely complicated, with huge amounts of internal

00:46:19.280 religious and cultural and political and economic diversity. All of these groups are worlds under

00:46:25.140 themselves, and all of these groups and these groups within these groups are fighting and

00:46:28.880 allying and engaging in complex trade and political alliances and scheming and moving goods around.

00:46:36.080 It's all very complicated and it's all very interesting but it's quite a ways away from

00:46:40.000 the protagonists of this episode who are on the periphery of that world's periphery.

00:46:46.560 Around 1200 BC that world starts to collapse.

00:46:50.800 this is a big and complicated and messy process but in short piracy disease state collapse famine

00:47:00.440 economic turmoil war all of this causes the bronze age mediterranean world to begin to crumb

00:47:07.580 this has massive knock-on effects in central and northern europe trade stops flowing out of the

00:47:14.160 Mediterranean, and warriors and mercenaries start flowing in, seeking adventure and wealth in the

00:47:20.420 upheaval. This Bronze Age collapse takes centuries. The story of the Iliad is the highly mythologized 0.79

00:47:29.320 story of a conflict in this collapsing world. And just to demonstrate how intense this collapse is,

00:47:37.660 the Greeks are illiterate people in the Bronze Age. They have writing via what is called Linear 0.91

00:47:43.080 b which is a relative of linear a linear a is used to write um minoan which is a language that

00:47:51.960 we don't know much we don't really know much about in terms of what it sounded like but we

00:47:58.440 do know quite a bit about its grammar interestingly enough because in the ancient world people would

00:48:04.660 mix scripts very often like imagine if we spelled the word vodka using cyrillic characters and like

00:48:11.880 word t using the chinese character cha right so uh linear b is this script that was initially

00:48:21.400 invented by the minoans and then the mycenaean greeks took it up and then the the bronze age

00:48:28.360 collapse happens linear a and linear b go away and one man one man was blind to the opposition

00:48:39.080 who said that no no the greeks were never literate they didn't have writing until the phoenicians

00:48:43.000 gave it to them that man was homer and in the odyssey he talks about he has a odysseus tell

00:48:49.160 us about one of his illustrious ancestors and this ancestor is given a a tablet and on it there are

00:48:55.800 baleful scratches wicked wicked scrawlings writing and the tablet says hey bro kill the guy who

00:49:04.520 brings you this tablet and he hoofs it from one king to another and then anyways um and linear a's

00:49:13.640 partial decipherment comes about because in many of the records in palaces the the cretian palaces

00:49:21.960 they'll have these uh they'll have these lists and they'll have like characters characters stuff

00:49:30.760 characters characters stuff in this order and um linear b was deciphered when an english

00:49:38.600 hobby linguist on a whim decided oh well what if i just assume that it's not

00:49:45.400 phoenician or chinese or sumerian but instead is greek and the thing is he did that because none

00:49:51.320 of these previous decipherment attempts had anything approximating work and in one summer

00:49:55.800 vacation he had found a lost writing system and these linear a minoan texts have stuff stuff stuff

00:50:07.320 stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff olives using the greek word for olives or like the greek word for

00:50:13.480 bread because it's bread imported from mycenaean greece and so they would have and and through this

00:50:21.320 they were able to find out that the language is verb, subject, object, and word order,

00:50:25.720 so it was like, you know, gave the king bread, gave the king olives, gave the king wine.

00:50:31.800 We have no idea what the language sounded like, though.

00:50:36.040 The Cretans speak a language that is not Indo-European.

00:50:41.400 They invented writing at least once. They have complex political systems.

00:50:46.120 they are an independent people in this meta civilization of the Bronze Age

00:50:53.140 Mediterranean. So the thing about bronze and why the Bronze Age was so conducive

00:51:00.040 to trade is that bronze requires trade to make happen. You get copper by taking

00:51:05.800 certain stones that are generally greenish and heating them up. You can

00:51:10.120 get the fire really hot by blowing into it with tubes and if you if you get the

00:51:15.340 hot enough, the rocks start leaking this shiny orange metal liquid that, when it cools, solidifies

00:51:23.740 into a malleable substance. And if you crush the green rocks up really finely, you can get even

00:51:29.100 more of this substance. Tin is similar, making a silvery metal from white rocks, but from different

00:51:36.460 rocks. And here's the problem. The geological processes that result in copper rocks and tin

00:51:43.180 rocks only happen when they're far away so 10 is almost never close to copper and vice versa got

00:51:52.140 to go to different minds far away from each other to make it happen so you have to have large-scale

00:51:58.300 trade networks to move the tin which was generally not as useful as the copper tin is pretty soft and

00:52:05.980 flimsy on its own. Copper is really nice, but it's also quite soft. If you mix copper and tin,

00:52:13.980 you get bronze, which is harder and can be made much sharper and lasts longer. So you mix these

00:52:20.060 two together and you make bronze. You want to throw up the image of the Bronze Age sword, Nick?

00:52:25.180 This is a Bronze Age sword. Notice how it is rather squat, very pear-shaped. That is just

00:52:32.940 how these swords have to be due to the material properties of uh bronze right they're almost

00:52:38.220 kind of like big daggers more than they are like hark yonder fair maiden kind of swords right now

00:52:47.020 to just give you an example of how uh big these trade networks were bronze age britain was a big

00:52:54.380 exporter of tin and shipped that tin via boat to egypt the levant and greece but this is a risky

00:53:02.540 endeavor with lots of capital costs smart dutchmen and smart englishmen invented the discipline of

00:53:09.820 finance to get around all of that risk and cost in shipping things by boat when the economy

00:53:18.140 collapsed so too did the metal shipments as an aside here copper cyprus cyprus was a big exporter

00:53:27.900 of copper and the word for copper in many languages means something like that which is of

00:53:33.040 cyprus. Copper working has this scientific foreign technical air to it. Iron meanwhile

00:53:42.140 requires a hotter fire and it cannot be cast like copper. So what you actually do to work copper is

00:53:49.040 you melt it, collect it, pour it into a mold, pop the mold open, and then heat treat the item as

00:53:57.120 needed right so iron requires a hotter fire and it can't be cast like copper or

00:54:04.140 well it can but cast iron is heavy and extremely brittle and it doesn't take an

00:54:08.960 edge very well instead if you were to make iron at this time you get this

00:54:13.940 ugly ball of glass and metal and you'd have to heat it up and then you then you

00:54:19.200 pound it and then you fold it and you repeat this makes a metal that has this

00:54:24.880 weird like glassy grain inside of it and it like only bends in line with the

00:54:30.040 grain and it's actually a little bit bendier than copper is it doesn't make

00:54:35.280 it doesn't take that good of an edge it's heavier oh and worst of all it

00:54:39.740 rusts copper forms a patina which is a pretty green layer that's why the

00:54:46.180 Statue of Liberty is green by the way and you can keep a copper blade for ages

00:54:51.640 by simply keeping the cutting edge sharp or also oiled but iron iron's oxides suck up water from

00:55:01.580 the air which causes the molecules to puff up and slowly break apart the structure of the object

00:55:09.140 this is why iron alloys rust into dust they literally puff up with water and break apart

00:55:15.260 You want to throw up the Iron Age swords, Nick?

00:55:20.380 Chris, it's a question in the chat, but it makes more sense to ask now.

00:55:27.400 The Iceman, Utsi, was his axe a copper axe or a bronze axe?

00:55:33.420 I think it was copper.

00:55:36.320 There you have it.

00:55:38.300 Copper can be worked into tools and make blades and stuff.

00:55:41.540 don't get me wrong it's just not as good at uh at that as bronze is yes thanks nick so that

00:55:51.340 those iron age swords were rusted to hell and back right those are from you know like

00:55:58.640 500 bc those bronze swords are from like 1500 bc just to kind of show you just how

00:56:10.860 much iron degrades so quickly but there's three big bonuses to iron first it's everywhere those

00:56:21.820 little black grains of sand on a beach you can get a bucket of them and get iron out of them

00:56:27.260 bogs have these big lumps of iron in them due to um actually like uh plant processes the vegetation

00:56:35.500 makes the iron clump up rivers have this iron is everywhere iron is in your blood

00:56:43.340 and the processes to get that iron result in an intermediary product that's pretty crappy

00:56:49.740 and has to be processed further anyways so iron production actually scales up really well because

00:56:56.140 once you make that initial investment subsequent investments are relatively small whereas copper

00:57:04.140 production demands finer, more bespoke practice. It doesn't level off as you scale up, it just scales

00:57:11.100 linearly. Second, copper is typically cast, which means that you need to make molds. So in addition

00:57:17.100 to copper smelters and copper smiths, there's also mold makers and mold casters. Iron, meanwhile,

00:57:24.300 is worked into shape by a smith, and a smith can make basically anything if you give them enough

00:57:28.380 time to make the tools and figure out how to make the things so theoretically one guy can be a one

00:57:34.620 man metallurgy industry if he's working with iron one man cannot be a one-man copper industry um

00:57:42.380 there's a cool little line uh there are two professions that get to make everything in

00:57:49.580 their workshop blacksmiths and poets third iron has this weird little just this tiny little quirk

00:57:59.900 of chemistry wherein if you get the ratios of the iron and a variety of rocks just right it makes

00:58:08.540 this super hard very weather resistant nigh unbreakable metal that can be honed to flint

00:58:15.820 levels of sharpness steel you know the riddle of steel ah yes the riddle of steel

00:58:27.740 and so iron working has this mystique to it with the iron worker as this sort of magical figure

00:58:34.860 copper working is this very industrial very technical craft whereas iron working is all

00:58:40.060 dependent upon the skill and might of the smith who is this singular figure of creation literally

00:58:46.940 translating human effort into the creative act so chris we're going to wax fantastical we have

00:58:54.460 a question and it's relevant to what we're talking about sword of iron from blood

00:58:59.900 how yeah you could do it um if if Genghis Khan exsanguinated each of his victims and kept it

00:59:12.380 all and like refined it down to just get the iron would that be enough to make a proper sword

00:59:20.300 I could do the math if you wanted but we're going to be here a little bit so yes I appreciate you

00:59:26.000 Because I know that you would.

00:59:28.460 There is some finite number.

00:59:30.780 This is extremely grim.

00:59:32.020 Pardon me.

00:59:32.880 There is some finite number of humans that you could kill and drain the blood of to get enough iron to make a sword out of.

00:59:40.240 The problem is that pure iron is actually quite soft and rusts extremely quickly.

00:59:51.220 Iron oxides form very fast and then they are hydroscopic.

00:59:55.620 So they suck up water from the air and then puff up, which is why iron dissolves as it rusts, but why the Statue of Liberty can just sit out there for centuries and not dissolve away into dust, right?

01:00:09.420 So AI says 360 to 600 people.

01:00:14.100 That's fewer than I thought.

01:00:16.560 As would I.

01:00:17.160 Now, if we're being grim, the reason why steel is actually iron with specific adulterants in the form of like nickel and like vanadium and a specific amount of carbon made in specific ratios, which you can get from the human body.

01:00:40.100 like a human body has nickel and vanadium and weird things like cobalt in it and you know

01:00:46.020 carbohydrates or carbon so in theory you could make like steel from a human uh very heavy metal

01:00:53.620 but not really something that an iron age warlord no i i guarantee you there were iron age warlords

01:00:59.620 who thought this would be the coolest idea ever i don't know how many of them succeeded though

01:01:03.940 that's the real question um so speaking of warlords any warlord who can make a hill fort

01:01:11.700 and some furnaces can have his own iron working operation because again if you really really

01:01:16.820 really want iron you can just chuck dirt in a furnace for weeks and weeks and weeks on end

01:01:21.940 and you will eventually get iron iron is extremely um common there's big brain physics reasons for

01:01:31.860 for why iron is is so common it's not not worth getting into you want to throw up the hill fort

01:01:38.400 image nick do i have to i'm looking up research on blood swords okay so this is a hill fort when

01:01:53.660 you hear about like the neolithic barrows or like you know earthen works this is what we're talking

01:02:00.780 about. This is a hillfort. It houses a warlord and his retinue and their private village.

01:02:07.500 It's basically a private town for producing weapons and food. When you read about Odysseus'

01:02:14.460 Ithacan estate in the Odyssey, this is actually what they're referring to. He lives on an island

01:02:21.260 in one of these. When we talk about warlords here, we're talking about guys who have private

01:02:27.500 villages funding them arming them and funding and arming arming their bully boys and these these

01:02:34.560 typically have um i don't know if you can see it all well but there's like a wooden palisade on

01:02:39.560 this one on top of several layers of trenches and earth hills some of these hills were artificial

01:02:46.020 so the warlord got enough people together to like build a hill for him to build his company village

01:02:55.200 on top of for the purposes of extracting wealth from other nearby villages and retreating to this

01:03:02.240 in the k in the inventive invaders this is the precursor to the castle

01:03:07.520 in a lot of ways did you want to say something else here you go these are

01:03:14.480 no

01:03:16.960 okay so sorry i realized i was muted no at this time i am just reading the

01:03:24.080 detailed calculations on making

01:03:26.420 the bloodsword.

01:03:29.160 Making the bloodsword.

01:03:33.460 To be fair, I'm sorry.

01:03:34.820 That was my question originally, and I've started

01:03:36.580 this now as a rabbit hole.

01:03:38.200 Okay, so everything aside,

01:03:39.820 we're joking, and it sounds

01:03:42.680 silly, but we're grown men,

01:03:44.840 and it is fascinating

01:03:46.360 to, like...

01:03:48.840 I think it's in balance.

01:03:51.040 I think it's in keeping with all of these

01:03:52.840 things.

01:03:54.080 I do think it is scientifically useful and relevant, so this is part of the learning process.

01:04:03.080 It is interesting, but no, this is...

01:04:07.080 Chris, I'd be remiss if I didn't make the point here.

01:04:14.080 You have a rare ability that you are bringing knowledge of history, of linguistics, of metallurgy.

01:04:23.080 You're bringing a lot of high-caliber things to the table this evening, and I thank you for it.

01:04:29.660 I think the audience will continue to appreciate this from years to come.

01:04:35.980 We get nothing but positive feedback on what you've been bringing to the show.

01:04:39.500 This is amazing. Thank you.

01:04:42.420 You're welcome.

01:04:43.140 Fun little, speaking of linguistics, so the modern English word iron comes from the Middle English iran, which comes from the Old English isern, which comes from Proto-West Germanic isarn, which comes from Proto-Germanic isarna, which comes from Proto-Celtic isarnon.

01:05:05.080 Celts mentioned. So that is theorized to come from the Proto-Indo-European word

01:05:12.680 which means blood. Proto-Indo-European distinguished two words for blood

01:05:24.840 is the word that means um blood inside the body whereas is the word that means blood outside of

01:05:38.240 the body if you lick iron like a piece of iron it tastes like blood does the taste of blood is

01:05:47.640 because of the iron and the hemoglobin which is to say that you know which is to say the number

01:05:56.440 of men in the iron age who thought about it'd be cool if i had a sword made out of blood is not

01:06:01.960 single digit but it is it's it's actually something that was noticed relatively early here celtic

01:06:09.480 smiths noted the similarity between metallic iron and human blood right like everyone bites their

01:06:17.320 tongue at some point in their life and knows what blood tastes like so around

01:06:23.560 1200 BC to 600 BC there's this collapse of the Bronze Age and we enter this

01:06:31.080 period of darkness where Anatolia just lose the entire Anatolian

01:06:35.920 civilizational complex just dies out the people don't go away but Anatolia never 0.99

01:06:41.260 recovers scratch that anatolia loses predominance from 1200 bc to like 1080 when the turks show up

01:06:53.180 but i digress the greeks lose writing most of the mediterranean world enters a period of darkness

01:07:02.460 the egyptians the pharaoh manages to hold everything together by the skin of his teeth

01:07:06.860 so for this iron age in the north in northern europe to start you have to remember here

01:07:13.400 they basically lose the ability to import metal like they were a neolithic people making hose and

01:07:21.200 axes out of stone bronze comes in rich people can make swords out of bronze the bronze goes away

01:07:29.440 like i don't even know what an american equivalent would be other than like

01:07:34.700 imagine if we could no longer import semiconductors we can't make this stuff

01:07:39.940 in-house and we don't have the time to pivot to figuring out how to make it in

01:07:45.940 house so everything just goes kerplot so around 600 BC this period called the

01:07:53.540 Nordic Iron Age starts this is when North Northern Europe gets good at making

01:08:01.100 iron i want to digress it's not a digression it's the point of this episode but i want to i want to

01:08:07.340 talk a bit about what happens to the culture and the religion and the society of europe

01:08:14.900 when this collapse in between the bronze and iron ages happens because surely the ancient

01:08:22.100 equivalent of no longer being able to make semiconductors would be a big deal so bronze

01:08:29.380 Age Europe was ruled by central leaders who embodied a solar character. Literally. They

01:08:36.320 bedecked themselves in sun imagery. They are the center of their society, and their society's

01:08:43.420 political conflicts are characterized by highly ritualized duels between competing elites.

01:08:50.380 But there's little open warfare. Society is largely the extended household of the Bronze Age

01:08:57.120 king who parcels out land, women, cattle, and gold to his retainers, and is attended to by a vast

01:09:04.840 personal household bureaucracy. In Greece at this time, we know about this quite a bit because we

01:09:11.640 have Homer and Linear B. Homer tells us this beautiful poetic description of the Bronze Age

01:09:18.040 world and then linear b like writes up there are like tablets found in these ancient palaces

01:09:26.100 with linear b writing on them talking about like the number of boar tusk helmets that the king

01:09:32.080 owns homer talks about men wearing helmets made of boar tusks in the iliad right in greece at this

01:09:40.440 time, this position of this solar king, this is the Wanax. That term is used for three men,

01:09:49.540 or I guess two men and one male figure, in the Iliad. Agamemnon of the Greeks,

01:09:56.020 Priam of the Trojans, and Zeus of the Olympians. Just to give you an idea of how important

01:10:03.240 this Wanax figure was,

01:10:07.160 Zeus is a Wanax. 1.00

01:10:10.080 The Wanax was essentially the racial king, 1.00

01:10:13.680 high priest, and physical manifestation of the race. 1.00

01:10:18.220 Priam and Agamemnon bring in these huge armies of warriors

01:10:22.540 to fight at Troy because these men are lesser elites,

01:10:25.660 loyal to them out of patronage,

01:10:27.500 but also literal racial loyalty.

01:10:30.140 like i have to i have i cannot stress this enough it's literal when i say racial loyalty

01:10:35.340 the trojan army is made up of aristocrats who left troy to go conquer the rest of anatolia

01:10:40.920 and then they got into mesopotamia and then ethiopia so homer um mentions memnon the prince

01:10:48.920 of ethiopia he's not black he's an ethnic trojan who is the descendant of an army that marched

01:10:56.040 south, kept conquering, went to Ethiopia, and conquered it. He comes back because as a descendant 1.00

01:11:04.320 of the Trojan race, he is required to by blood loyalty when his king, his Wanax, calls. Now, 0.97

01:11:14.700 Homer is telling us a highly mythologized story here, but remember when Agamemnon says,

01:11:20.760 i need as many men as i can get to go get my brother's wife back

01:11:24.900 everyone who can is required to go when odysseus tries to get out of this he has to fake being

01:11:34.000 insane to the point of like they're gonna leave him to die in the field because he's that crazy

01:11:38.780 insane because he's just expected to go he can't say eh i'm not feeling it boss

01:11:44.400 agamemnon called odysseus as a basileus has to rise up and do his duty his literal duty

01:11:53.040 just as an aside to demonstrate what religion is like at this time so we have agamemnon the

01:11:59.220 wanax then we have the basileo which is what um uh hector for the trojans but um achilles and

01:12:07.100 odysseus are for the greeks they're basileo right um odysseus is into wanax he's the basileus of

01:12:13.740 ithaca one of the suitors that is bugging his wife and son while odysseus is away is a

01:12:21.800 sacrificer by trade and odysseus actually has him killed for sure uh sing he singles him out this

01:12:29.460 guy's like wait no stop i'm a sacrificer i sacrifice to the gods and odysseus says

01:12:33.460 well you've been hanging around with the suitors surely you sacrificed for my misfortune and then

01:12:38.920 kills him right so you can you can see this kind of distinction here of like the basileus and the

01:12:46.980 wanax have priestly character that is independent of just knowing the technical means of making

01:12:53.840 sacrifices to the gods right the majority of people in these societies are serving in the

01:13:00.820 household of the king or in one of the households of one of his things and it's worth remembering

01:13:05.980 here. Homer has their one Wanax of Greece and one Wanax of Troy, or of, like, Anatolia as a whole,

01:13:13.000 right? The reality is there would have been, you know, dozens of competing Wanaquois. I don't know 0.92

01:13:19.480 what the plural is, and I'm not going to look it up. Dozens of competing Wanaxes in Greece.

01:13:26.240 Anatolia was full of city-states in the Bronze Age, each of which was led by a man claiming to be,

01:13:32.060 like king of the universe to say nothing of like central europe where we know for a fact it was

01:13:38.080 full of all sorts of bronze age warlords coming to blows about all sorts of stuff

01:13:41.760 so the iliad sort of centralizes everything for the sake of drama but it's not wrong

01:13:50.680 right it's just you know it's telling the story of world war ii as if you know uh

01:13:58.440 Hitler and FDR physically fought right so the majority of people in these

01:14:07.560 societies are serving in the household of the king or in one of the households

01:14:11.780 of one of his things and that doesn't necessarily imply physical proximity

01:14:15.680 these aristocrats would personally know very few of the people in their

01:14:19.320 household the relationship of these householders with the divine however was

01:14:25.140 mediated through their relationship with their thane or their king and remember the king is

01:14:31.700 literally the king literally and metaphorically like makes the sun rise or so it seems

01:14:38.100 and again this solar thing there's a lot of sun imagery in the bronze age all across europe the

01:14:46.180 indo-europeans in the bronze age had a big big fascination with the sun

01:14:50.900 that changes with the iron age in the iron age people are ruled by tribes which are ethno

01:15:00.080 republican unions of people united by shared ancestry and by warlords who distribute booty

01:15:06.020 amongst retainers warfare also becomes a lot more common and a lot less elite in nature

01:15:12.560 in the bronze age everything is about these big duels between aristocrats and you'll note if you

01:15:21.820 read the iliad there's a lot of like prophagocles rides up on his chariot and meets preftanom

01:15:29.240 and says hark tell me your ancestry then they like share genealogy and then they say so it is

01:15:36.760 then a duel to the death and then they like fight one-on-one this is because in the bronze age

01:15:43.680 these aristocrats are fighting for control of the villages and they'd you know show up once

01:15:49.520 a quarter to get their cut but they they really didn't have much immediate control over

01:15:56.040 everything outside of their hill fork it's a lot like feudalism in that regard right

01:16:03.760 in the iron age warfare becomes a lot more common and a lot less innate a lot less elite in nature

01:16:12.440 groups of people now fight their weapons and armor are a lot more efficient and less flashy

01:16:17.920 and common iron is a lot bendier than bronze at this point in time so spears axes and arrows

01:16:25.420 become the weapons of mass warfare because it's really easy to get like this much iron and put it

01:16:32.180 on a long stick or get this much iron and put it on a short stick that you then launch through the

01:16:37.300 air with a bow. You couldn't really do that in the Bronze Age. A Bronze Age warlord couldn't

01:16:44.380 outfit every man who he called a fight for, even if he wanted to, because bronze was just expensive

01:16:50.840 in the Bronze Age. This is the time, this Iron Age, is the time of mass warfare, which there is

01:16:59.360 now warfare is no longer just honor duels between elites it's gangs of men jumping each other and

01:17:05.040 armies going out to fight small armies but still um you might have heard of the tolent's valley

01:17:13.380 battlefield that was a big bronze age fight the biggest uh armed conflict in europe for quite a

01:17:22.540 long time it involved 4 000 people about 2 000 on each side this was not a war this was two

01:17:31.320 groups of people like migrating that bumped into each other and decided that they could not

01:17:37.400 that they came to blows so it's like a war of like a war of a war involving 4 000 people is a war of 0.85

01:17:46.780 like cataclysmic extermination in the bronze age let's be clear here so the iron age has armies

01:17:57.140 small armies but they're armies priesthood as we understand it starts here by the way

01:18:04.140 men start having the vocation of being a religious leader rather than merely a ritual specialist or

01:18:11.800 inheriting some kind of, you know, my father tended this temple and his father tended it,

01:18:17.600 that sort of a role. Scandinavia and Germania imported essentially all of their bronze,

01:18:24.300 so part of this change we're seeing in the Nordic Iron Age is that it's just possible for these

01:18:30.660 people other than the elites to have their own weapons. Part of where these warlords and tribes

01:18:34.940 get their power from is that they start distributing weapons and giving people license to commit

01:18:39.900 violence, both defensively and offensively. This means that people can force participation in the

01:18:46.380 political and religious process. Settlements also start getting bigger in the Iron Age,

01:18:52.220 probably in part because metal tools are now far more common. This is worth noting, but in the

01:18:57.980 Bronze Age, people were still using stone tools, quite commonly, because bronze was too expensive

01:19:05.000 to make farm equipment out of for the most part so the population balloons in the iron age and

01:19:13.260 food production increases massively in scale so these iron age warlords are not just giving out

01:19:18.980 like spears they're giving out like hose and shovels and axes and ads is an axe is like this

01:19:26.800 and ads is this kind of tool like this it's like an axe rotated 90 degrees anyways as society moves

01:19:33.920 it's focused away from the households of the elites other people start being able to have

01:19:39.760 households do you want to throw anything in here also here you go sir no

01:19:51.680 no you're okay so i think everybody is listening with rapt attention um

01:20:03.920 no just to talk

01:20:09.700 I don't know when the appropriate mention is

01:20:15.000 because it is an overarching theme of our people

01:20:17.640 and it always has been

01:20:19.140 our folk

01:20:22.820 are heroic by nature

01:20:26.840 we have always worshipped and celebrated

01:20:31.540 the hero

01:20:32.400 I think we see that in Western culture personified during that Bronze Age period where it is champion versus champion often, or champion in a very small retinue versus champion in his other small retinue.

01:20:49.620 um you see that displayed throughout you know throughout the medieval period you see it in a

01:20:57.680 lot of different times but this idea of champion versus champion amongst heroes

01:21:04.140 is carried on even out of its um necessary historicity into you know well into the saga

01:21:15.700 age when you see heroes square off against hero i don't think you know in anywhere it's more

01:21:23.220 um profoundly illustrated than um

01:21:29.460 in uh in the various conflicts in the trojan war

01:21:35.380 like achilles and hector you see hero versus hero in a really specific and particular way

01:21:41.380 and um it's worth remembering here like we're talking about like the introduction of mass

01:21:53.140 warfare and stuff this idea of our champion sallying forth to fight for us continues for

01:21:59.660 quite a long time until like even into the invention of firearms right duels like i demand

01:22:05.800 unsatisfaction, pistols at dawn kind of stuff, is fundamentally this same sort of phenomenon, right?

01:22:13.460 What makes the Bronze Age special here is not that they're doing this kind of champion warfare,

01:22:20.380 it's that society is set up such that there's such a great importance on champion warfare.

01:22:27.740 You can sometimes see like the boomer, the boomer hot take of, you know, why do they care about their champion? Why don't they just go stab the other guy to death?

01:22:39.300 Their societies in the Bronze Age are set up in such a fashion that it doesn't really make sense to not have a champion.

01:22:47.460 And in absence of one, your faction has just completely crumpled.

01:22:54.460 Society is defined at this time in the Bronze Age by these feudal lineages, if you will, of conquering step horsemen who established themselves as these aristocrats, as the elite, over other people.

01:23:15.160 People that they're increasingly related to, by the way.

01:23:20.960 Now, interestingly, there's a lot of solar imagery in the Nordic Bronze Age.

01:23:25.860 It's recognizably about the sun and what the sun does.

01:23:29.560 There's the sun boats, there's sun chariots, there's sun wheels, there's people praising the sun.

01:23:35.780 There's people doing all sorts of stuff with the sun.

01:23:38.720 but then there's this massive volcanic winter that happens and the sun cult goes away

01:23:45.900 the the volcanic winter is three years long by the way so like it's actually winter for like

01:23:53.240 three years right that happens in the middle of the bronze age collapse in in northern europe

01:23:59.520 um which did not probably pretty clearly did not help the the case for the continued reign of the

01:24:06.460 sun-worshipping aristocrats right the symbols remain in usage but they become cool doodads

01:24:13.460 and not imagery of a cult and when i say cult i don't mean in the pejorative sense of like

01:24:21.400 you know the the yoga guru molesting people or whatever i mean this in the sense of like

01:24:26.480 an organized why are we doing things the cultic aspect is to say the aspect of religion of like

01:24:34.760 There is a coherent mythos that results in behaviors and rituals, and it communicates via symbols.

01:24:42.760 The collapse of the Sun Cult is the collapse of the central religious authorities, the households of the Bronze Age aristocrats, to mediate and control natural forces.

01:24:57.760 Bronze Age Europe seems to have had a religious characteristic largely concerned with the mediation of cosmic order and natural law

01:25:05.200 via central patriarchal authority figures who were the contact point for the divine.

01:25:10.400 It should be underscored here that this does not mean that these people were monotheistic,

01:25:14.400 or that they were entirely defined as people by their kings.

01:25:19.360 It means that the king was the central, the center of their life.

01:25:25.520 and it was the king and his center that had the biggest say in their relationship with the divine.

01:25:32.920 Linear B texts in Greece, from this time, from this same religious mode, are absolutely polytheistic,

01:25:42.020 and the continuity of religion between Iron Age Indo-European cultures goes back to the Neolithic.

01:25:48.520 And in Greece, it's very Greek, too.

01:25:53.220 Bronze Age Greeks worshipped Zeus, Ares, Poseidon, Hera, and Athena by name.

01:26:00.480 This isn't a monotheistic society, even though they really like the sun.

01:26:05.880 Rather, the sun is a sort of organizing principle for these people's society.

01:26:13.000 It's not necessarily their cosmology here, though.

01:26:16.180 There is one son and one king, and that one son gives out, or that one king, sorry, there's one son and one king.

01:26:23.380 That one son gives out life, like that one son, or king gives, like the one king gives out patronage.

01:26:29.500 Oh, God, it's a tip of my tongue.

01:26:32.980 But the king's household is full of people.

01:26:35.880 So too is the Sky Father's household full of gods.

01:26:39.080 The household of the king is the mediating mechanism for man's interactions with the divine.

01:26:44.000 But it's not the entirety of it, it's just the majority of it.

01:26:49.500 A way of thinking of it in today's language, the household of the king is the church.

01:26:55.000 Like the literal household, like where he lives, right?

01:26:59.000 The Iron Age, meanwhile, seems to break that up.

01:27:02.000 And religion becomes a lot more internally diverse in what it's trying to achieve.

01:27:07.000 It also becomes a lot more egalitarian in a sense, you could say.

01:27:12.000 Religion, in any sense, is done by more than just the leader, it's done by everyone in some capacity.

01:27:17.700 Men now have personal relationships with the divine, in addition to those mediated by the priests and the nobility.

01:27:24.000 Burial traditions become very diverse, and religious items proliferate.

01:27:28.700 Everyone can participate in a religion now, so everyone does.

01:27:34.700 From what we can tell, religion seems less focused.

01:27:38.200 There seems to be this transition from religion being a lot about ensuring and controlling cosmic order and more about living in accordance with it.

01:27:50.000 The king cannot control the sun, so man must live in accordance with the sun.

01:27:56.640 This amounts to a variety of interlocking, interweaving cults.

01:28:01.340 You have your personal relationship, you have your familial relationship, you have your clan's relationship, you have your tribe's relationship,

01:28:08.200 You have the relationship between you and the local priesthood as mediating your interactions with the divine.

01:28:14.000 You have your relationship with the king as mediating your relationship with the divine.

01:28:18.380 It's all very complicated, and there's a lot of overlapping, interweaving, interlocking layers.

01:28:26.080 As opposed to the strict pyramidality of the Bronze Age.

01:28:32.240 Now, I say society becomes more individualistic, but remember the prior system was one that essentially denied the entirety of the individual and focused only on the individual's role in the collective to a certain degree.

01:28:46.040 The gods have a relationship with my family.

01:28:49.480 That's individualism here by virtue of you getting to have a relationship with the gods that belongs to you and not the king in any capacity, right?

01:29:01.240 Last episode I mentioned the possibility of an Aryan Genghis Khan figure, that's Conan of course, who, or maybe a few figures like that,

01:29:12.240 who lived around 3500 BC-ish, leading the initial push out of the steppe,

01:29:20.240 and this being an explanation as to why we see such a tight cluster of paternal male, paternal male, paternal lineages in the genetic record.

01:29:30.240 The Bronze Age collapse and the rise of the Iron Age is when this system really 0.71

01:29:38.360 starts to fall apart and the Aryan aristocracy that rules over Europe 1.00

01:29:45.060 starts to collapse. But it's not that they stop being Aryan. The Iron Age is 1.00

01:29:50.700 when everyone starts becoming an Aryan. And by this time, Europeans had been 1.00

01:29:56.480 genetically homogeneous for quite a while. These aristocrats were

01:30:02.000 genetically and increasingly culturally homogeneous with the people they ruled

01:30:06.740 over. This is where Europe, as we understand it today, really comes about

01:30:13.880 in the Iron Age. This is where our politics, our culture, our religion, our

01:30:20.000 our societies really come from. Once the Iron Age starts, a lot of things get set. So circa 3000 BC,

01:30:32.920 the idea of like, you know, milk drinking, horse riding, Aryan steppe warlords ruling over a

01:30:40.880 captured farmer and hunter-gatherer population is a gross oversimplification of reality, but it's not

01:30:47.620 a lie. It's just overly simplistic. By, you know, 1000 BC or so, there increasingly stops being a

01:30:59.800 meaningful distinction between these aristocrats and the people they're ruling over as far as the

01:31:06.460 dead bodies are concerned. The Iron Age introduces a further degree of egalitarianism in that now

01:31:13.400 you can own things made of metal without being an aristocrat without being like rich right

01:31:22.960 this isn't to say that it's like a communist utopia as much as it is that now people can

01:31:30.960 engage in effort to acquire things whereas once before they were in many ways locked out of

01:31:37.100 material goods and religious and political processes by accidents of their birth and this

01:31:42.620 is something that shows up in Homer where more than once some guy is like, hark, my name is

01:31:48.780 Prestigbluthocles. Who are you? And the other guy will say, I'm such and suchocles. I don't know

01:31:56.760 my great-grandfather's name. And then the first guy is like, you don't even wear a cuirass of

01:32:02.280 bronze. Die, peasant. And then just like stabs him unceremoniously. And this is a kind of, 1.00

01:32:10.260 homer tells jokes right like there will be people who named like farsighted who get shot in the eye

01:32:17.080 with an arrow and then homer as like the omniscient god-like narrator will just say and so

01:32:22.780 farsighted went off to hades bet he didn't see that coming like he made the iliad begins with

01:32:31.900 like a this black humor portion where um uh crises the father of christias goes to get his daughter

01:32:43.600 back because christias had been captured by the greeks and taken as a sex slave and he goes and

01:32:50.120 he's like all right greeks you win you are the superior aristocrats i am just a humble just a

01:32:55.960 humble sacrificer. I submit myself to you. Please give me my daughter back. And then Agamemnon like

01:33:02.780 laughs at him and practically has like one of the other Greeks like get on his knees kind of behind 0.78

01:33:09.240 the guy. And then so Agamemnon like pushes him. So the dude like tumbles over and then they like

01:33:13.960 laugh at him while he leaves. And then he like crawls out onto the beach, you know, sobbing with

01:33:19.920 age and demands apollo to help him out because he's been such a loyal worshiper apollo so apollo 0.71

01:33:26.320 like rains down plague arrows upon the greek camp so you know it seems almost kind of dishonorable

01:33:36.160 for to us today to hear about like an aristocrat just unceremoniously offing a peasant for daring

01:33:42.560 to get up in his face but it is a reality of the bronze age right do you want to say anything about

01:33:52.160 the this here sir um no other than that's fascinating and interesting um but i also do

01:34:05.840 want to say that steve bought us six coffees for thirty dollars thanks steve there's a question

01:34:10.800 ask what's wrong with the website um stores down while we process uh we're working on fixing our

01:34:17.840 payment processor there's a problem we're trying to get it addressed payment processor moves slower

01:34:23.920 than we'd like them to in the meantime the qr code that we have up there is a zelle link if

01:34:29.680 it looks confusing that's because when you both bring up the qr code you've got to like find your

01:34:35.120 bank and then it'll give you the then it'll set you up to sell money into the afa's account if

01:34:41.600 that's how you'd like to donate to us anybody who does want to donate we appreciate your your

01:34:46.160 contributions as always but yeah it's in the works everything else functionality should be fine if

01:34:51.680 you want to make a store purchase and you know what you want um go ahead and email us and get

01:34:56.080 you set up on the back end and figure out a workaround for you that's not a problem

01:35:00.800 but we apologize for any inconvenience while you guys while we're getting on the other side of it

01:35:05.040 it and we appreciate you guys um wanting to be generous to us and donate so thank you guys very

01:35:11.280 much no chris you're doing awesome um yeah keep keep going we'll let you put it so by about 800

01:35:21.440 bc we get into the warlords and the tribes by 800 bc the populations we find in europe are big enough

01:35:28.880 and sophisticated enough that they have formed complex societies. They form tribes,

01:35:36.480 governments where position is based on merit and status, usually led by some sort of supreme

01:35:41.440 executive who is flanked by a trained priestly judiciary with a background legislature, if you

01:35:47.920 will, composed of the high-ranking and elderly men and women of the polity. Some of these tribes are

01:35:53.600 are just outright cities with written constitutions a thaneric as the fudence of the goths was one of

01:36:01.600 these supreme executives where it's not like there was a vote but he's also not just ruling for his

01:36:08.720 own benefit without concern for the people around him um when caesar marched into gaul the city

01:36:16.700 states he found the opida in latin opidum means city that the romans didn't like and urbs means

01:36:27.180 city that the romans liked he found opida with like written constitutions and the the celts the

01:36:34.980 the gauls at the time they were writing in greek and it's not entirely clear if they were writing

01:36:39.540 in like the greek language or just the greek alphabet um both so it's worth reiterating here

01:36:50.260 all right europe is starting to fill in we're getting something akin to a complex government

01:36:54.500 as we recognize it today it's more than just a warlord extracting booty from a village

01:37:01.860 europe is in contact with europe you occasionally see people act as if like oh

01:37:07.940 the Greeks didn't know what was going on in Denmark. The classical era Greeks imported

01:37:16.480 iron tools from the Germanic world, including surgical apparati, while Aristotle was writing

01:37:24.940 about how, in accordance with the will of almighty Zeus, the northern European man is quite cold and

01:37:31.560 as such, quite slow to think. While he was writing that down, his society was importing 0.97

01:37:37.280 scalpels from Denmark because Greeks could not make blades sharp, fine, small, and high

01:37:44.780 enough quality to perform surgery with. The Germanics, for their part, imported huge amounts

01:37:51.700 of wine and drinking vessels from the Greek world, amongst other food ads. Glass was a

01:37:58.720 big import uh out of italy for example um glass beads were a cute little um native uh craft that

01:38:09.400 they did in the germanic world but glass panes and like glass cups glass sculpture that is

01:38:15.840 something they got from abroad um europe was full of people who would travel and bump elbows with

01:38:28.440 important people at the time the philosophers of greece held dialogue with the druids of gaul

01:38:35.160 right we don't necessarily know what that entirely entailed but these people were not

01:38:41.600 unaware of each other right so

01:38:47.020 random bit just real quick as you're talking about people the people's interacting across

01:38:53.540 cultures or across nation states or whatever we have to remember these people had the exact

01:39:00.980 same capacity for intelligence that we do they weren't any stupider than us they just had a few

01:39:07.020 less you know modern inventions but these aren't whether it's scandinavia germania

01:39:13.740 greece italy none of them are

01:39:17.380 like cavemen anymore these are modern humans with modern intelligence their brains work just as well

01:39:26.500 as ours you know like as a collective right um and our lack of understanding of portions of the

01:39:39.260 ancient world comes about more so due to lack of source material than lack of like people going

01:39:46.960 abroad and thinking oh i'll ask the locals what they believe and jot down their wacky nonsense

01:39:53.760 beliefs we know because we're told about like such-and-such's book on the whoever's

01:40:00.480 12 volumes set detailing their history and culture and the intricacies of their religion

01:40:06.420 and it just doesn't survive to us today and this is something that occurred shockingly recently too

01:40:14.460 we know nothing about the huns because the byzantine emperor took the 12 volumes set

01:40:21.080 describing their culture their history their religion their way of life and chopped it up

01:40:26.120 into like eight lines when he was renovating the byzantine library into being his like ninth dining

01:40:31.400 room the crimean goths have just like disappeared we're americans how many indian tribes do we know

01:40:39.880 existed that we just don't have anything written down about right so back to back to the ancient

01:40:47.640 world these polities are based on shared heredity and merit as material wealth starts building up

01:40:54.760 we get something new but also old warlords these are people who gather manpower by essentially

01:41:01.180 paying soldiers to be loyal to them they then seal the deal with the fictive kinship of oaths

01:41:07.560 and the lord retainer relationship to summarize this um to summarize the book lady with a mead

01:41:14.120 cup wonderful book to rise kindling um the king is the father the queen is the mother the things

01:41:21.800 are the sons and then the queen and the king you know acts as this conduit for the divine through

01:41:28.120 blood and this is this structure that emerges in the germanic world the germanic peoples actually

01:41:33.000 get a lot of this warlord stuff from the celts circa 800 bc in a lot of ways the germanic peoples

01:41:42.920 are kind of like the weird peripheral celts like if you look at the balkans today you've got south

01:41:49.680 slavs bosnians croatians montenegrins serbians kosovoans and you know then you've got bulgarians

01:41:58.980 macedonians so you've got a lot of slavs right okay so the balkans is where the slavs live

01:42:03.660 oh and then there's there's the albanians and the greeks yeah they're quite similar to the slavs in

01:42:09.700 lot of ways even though they're not the same thing right there's a lot of i i read out a list

01:42:18.100 of words on another vns i can't remember which it was but i just told you like the proto-germanic

01:42:23.060 word for iron comes from a celtic word for iron these people imported their word for iron from

01:42:29.300 celtic i think it's like the word for tower the word for like curious breastplate a bunch of words

01:42:37.540 right there is an extreme continuity between the celtic world and the germanic world with the

01:42:45.620 germanic world kind of being this periphery to the celtic world in a lot of ways people often

01:42:53.300 cut a very firm division between the two and that really doesn't happen until the roman period and

01:43:01.460 And it's not necessarily because the Celts or the Germanics wanted it to happen that way.

01:43:06.520 So our story is taking place on the periphery of the Celtic world, circa 800 BC,

01:43:12.420 which then becomes the periphery of the Roman world sometime later.

01:43:18.360 The Proto-Germanic peoples are there, building up in numbers.

01:43:23.440 Their world is ruled by several centers of power. 0.88

01:43:26.820 And so we come to the beginning of the migrations.

01:43:29.260 What we know of as the Proto-Germanic language emerges from the so-called Jasturf culture around 600 BC.

01:43:40.080 The Jasturf culture is the, I believe it's the red one if I remember correctly.

01:43:45.960 The Jasturf material culture is surrounded by these lesser Proto-Germanic groups.

01:43:52.380 The green in Scandinavia, then the yellow kind of on the southwest and southeast of Jasturf,

01:43:58.340 and then that little blob to the right of jester but not the the bubblegum pink the bubblegum pink

01:44:04.320 is the bolts um so these are all these little lesser proto-germanic groups there are other

01:44:11.460 centers of power they speak with different accents maybe they like have a slightly different way of

01:44:18.180 making certain metal goods but they're one people right you can kind of think of this as like

01:44:24.300 you know this is dixie and then the jaster of culture is like kentucky right so the people

01:44:33.200 in this specific area their culture their language to a certain degree even their blood

01:44:39.900 spreads out into the peripheral areas and their dialect their customs their practices are the

01:44:46.020 ones that go on to be adopted by the germanic peoples as a whole not necessarily due to conquest

01:44:50.520 or bloodshed but simply due to high status again going back to the dixie example you know suddenly

01:44:57.160 kentucky is just the highest status place in dixie and everyone's doing things the kentucky way

01:45:02.440 they're wearing kentucky seersucker they have their own seersucker but they're wearing kentucky

01:45:06.840 seersucker they're speaking with a kentucky accent they have their own southern accent

01:45:10.760 but they're speaking with a kentucky accent you get the picture here right the jester of material

01:45:16.120 culture isn't super interesting on its own, as it's just a particular flavor of this pre-Germanic

01:45:23.800 that goes on to become Proto-Germanic. It just so happens to be the material culture that leads to

01:45:29.000 the Proto-Germanic one. There's a unification and homogenization period that occurs here.

01:45:36.360 The Proto-Germanic language, culture, and religion emerge from this center, this Jasturf center.

01:45:42.760 Jasturf is the specific flavor of the general Iron Age society that characterizes Western European at the time.

01:45:51.540 Western Europe at the time, excuse me.

01:45:54.280 This specific flavor would go on to characterize the Proto-Germanic peoples.

01:45:59.520 And so these peoples start pushing southwards, southwestwards, and northwards.

01:46:04.180 And it's worth noting here, material cultures are either named after what amateur archaeologist Hans Hugenblindenburgen thought their things looked like.

01:46:15.480 So bell beakers, well, some German guy thought their cups looked like bells.

01:46:22.700 Pitted wear culture, some German guy thought that their wares looked like they had pits.

01:46:28.360 Corded wear culture, some German guy thought that their wares looked like they were made out of cords.

01:46:34.280 Alternatively, they are named after places.

01:46:38.400 So like Jasturf is a place.

01:46:40.540 Sredni Stog is a place.

01:46:42.060 Yamnaya is a place.

01:46:44.840 Interestingly, Neanderthal, the term Neanderthal actually comes from the place where the cave is that the bodies were found in.

01:46:53.920 It's like a village in France or something.

01:46:58.660 Do you want to throw up the Germanic progression image, Nick? 0.96

01:47:03.480 Ah, crud, I should have sent you a bigger image. 0.76

01:47:07.340 Okay, so this here is the chronology of the expansion outwards of Germanic peoples.

01:47:16.020 Chronologically, the migration period is called such 100 AD to the 600s AD.

01:47:23.340 European historiography has this terrible Greco-Roman bias,

01:47:30.820 which to be fair is because the texts start in Greece, right? So there's this focus on things

01:47:39.200 occurring based on their relationship to Roman and Greek history, rather than things occurring

01:47:45.040 because of other people's history, right? So we say the migration period happens around 100 AD

01:47:51.020 through the 600s AD, but the Germanic peoples, from their perspective, are migrating since,

01:47:56.840 you know like 600 bc right we see this progressive movement from the north into the center because

01:48:06.440 remember where these people are moving into circa you know 180 here that is empty there's not a lot

01:48:15.800 of stuff there right there's this vacant vacant ish land where the Gauls had people had moved out

01:48:27.720 of central and southern Germany to go into Gaul to go into the Alps to go into what is now Poland

01:48:35.640 because they could make more money people didn't really think in terms of money but you know what

01:48:40.680 mean they could get more there right so the germanic peoples are experiencing this filling

01:48:46.840 effect into central europe at the same time that the romans are marching up into gaul

01:48:55.960 and interfering in this conflict between the west gauls and the east gauls so the uh

01:49:05.160 remember that void i mentioned in central germany yeah the germanic peoples move into

01:49:09.400 that territory and occupy it. This brings them into contact with Gaul, deeper contact with Gaul,

01:49:14.440 and the Romans. The Eastern Gauls get the idea that they can hire Germanic soldiers to help them

01:49:20.120 fight the Western Gauls and the Italics. The Romans, led by Caesar, put a stop to that,

01:49:27.080 but that puts Rome right next to the Germanics. Do you want to throw up the Hallstatt litana image, Nick? 0.95

01:49:33.960 right so this is actually two material cultures the the kind of um green tan one is older the

01:49:44.840 the gold one is later unless i got that mixed up point is this is like the celtic world right

01:49:52.840 this is the celtic world around this time you know 100 bc 180 or so and rome essentially absorbs it

01:49:59.800 But notice that that gray spot in the northeast, what is that?

01:50:05.440 That's Germania.

01:50:07.380 Augustus sets about trying to conquer it after he has assumed control of Gaul.

01:50:15.540 So the Romans referred to Cisalpine Gaul, which is actually that green area, the Insubres, the Boyi, the Senones.

01:50:26.020 And then there's trans-Alpine Gaul, which is southern Germany, that Hallstatt blob, into what we today call France.

01:50:38.700 So Augustus has absorbed France, Spain, a part of southern Germany, and Italy at this time, right?

01:50:46.000 And he looks north to Germania and says, let's go get them next.

01:50:51.940 augustus sets about trying to conquer germania he fails that failure is the arminius episode

01:51:02.280 that we did you want to throw that up now there we go arminius's actions created a separation

01:51:08.440 between southwestern europe and northeastern europe or just we you know southern and northern

01:51:14.780 which in turn keeps the Germanic peoples as a sort of semi-unified block, which is important for later.

01:51:22.500 So the Romans enact this process of managed chaos, essentially trying to pit Germanic tribes and warlords against each other. 0.94

01:51:32.140 But to do so, they have to give them stuff. 0.81

01:51:34.940 This results in the Germanics becoming increasingly hired to fight for Rome. 0.70

01:51:39.360 As Rome becomes increasingly multicultural, ethnic Italians are increasingly sidelined, and Germanic soldiers are prioritized by these multicultural Romans over Italian ones to prevent ethnic Italians from gaining power.

01:51:59.100 Theodosius is referred to as an Iberian. Theodosius shows up as a character in the story of Athanaric.

01:52:05.460 what does iberian mean was he a celt living in iberia was he some kind of basque oh maybe he

01:52:14.760 was one of the phoenician colonists maybe he was an italian colonist or a greek colonist

01:52:20.260 we don't know he was just an iberian presumably he called himself that because his genealogy was

01:52:27.340 actually quite complicated when we talk about multicultural romans we talk about that we're not

01:52:32.720 as the empire goes on hey oh bada bing bada boom my father was growing grapes on this land for

01:52:40.900 centuries kinds of romans and italians are increasingly removed from power and this

01:52:47.420 roman imperial kind of people builds up right they aren't people tied to the land with ancestors

01:52:57.580 in this here they're mobile they're multicultural and the Germans when we

01:53:07.060 talk about the Germanic peoples and the Romans increasingly coming into blows

01:53:10.820 when we're increasingly not talking about Italians ethnic Italians are

01:53:16.400 increasingly uninvolved in the Roman polity as time goes on and this allows

01:53:24.160 for the Germanic peoples to build up power in the Roman Empire. While this is

01:53:31.960 going on, the Huns are slowly moving forward in towards Eastern Europe. Now 0.95

01:53:38.320 all of this results into the great treason apostasy to Christianity. It is 0.94

01:53:44.320 from this that the Franks become Christian. It is from this that we get 0.69

01:53:47.680 men like Theodoric, that we get the Ostrogoths becoming Aryan Christians and 0.72

01:53:53.320 stuff like that this here in the short term ties into our arminius episode but it also ties into

01:54:00.840 our episodes on radbod and the loyal saxons it is this continental front this germanic tribes

01:54:08.680 moving southwest that leads to france spain italy but also to the question of why are these people

01:54:18.280 It is because they are increasingly drawn into the orbit of the Roman Empire, where Christianity becomes a hurdle to be crossed to gain further power in the Roman imperial bureaucracy, right?

01:54:35.280 right and just while we're rambling about the roman empire remember the roman empire

01:54:42.560 is increasingly also fracturing into an east and west block and the eastern empire is increasingly

01:54:48.960 pitting germanics against the uh the western empire do you want to throw anything in there

01:54:55.680 about that sir no just that i think um for people that maybe not don't have a frame of reference

01:55:03.360 especially when you're moving back and forward between many centuries to kind of throw some

01:55:11.520 years out i think help people to get a better situation on where we're at and the other thing

01:55:19.200 i just want to again kind of reiterate as you mentioned as these people move into

01:55:28.800 italy and into greece the religion deviates further and more like noticeably from the core

01:55:37.600 religion that they brought with them because there's all of the metropolitan influences

01:55:44.400 in the mediterranean and in the near east but again up until a lot of these divisions the

01:55:52.000 religious culture of central eastern western northern all of non-mediterranean europe

01:56:01.600 is still extremely similar because it's all working on the traditions of their ancestors that

01:56:11.120 you know at this point we're talking about 180 ish so

01:56:17.280 So 500 years previous, their ancestors were all practicing a fairly unified religious understanding.

01:56:28.560 And, all right, 100 AD, it's relevant to the goth episode, which I'll do my bit on in a minute next.

01:56:39.360 But, so, it's worth noting here, all right, 100 AD, fast forward to 400 AD, and we get men like Gainas, and we get men like Alaric, right?

01:56:51.280 These are Gothic leaders who have brought their military might up to the bureaucratic might of the Byzantine Empire.

01:57:01.980 And both are trying to subsume each other.

01:57:04.560 The Gothic warlords want—they look into the Byzantine world and see all of this territory ripe for plunder, and they want to conquer it and take it. 0.54

01:57:16.560 But the Byzantines, the bureaucrats and the eunuchs and the Christian priests and the government officials, see these Germanic warlords and see them as easily manipulatable. 0.69

01:57:26.560 And so they want to encompass them, tame them, and use them for their own purposes. 0.63

01:57:33.560 So, when Alaric sacks the city of Rome in 410, Alaric is ostensibly doing this because Rome is still run by a pagan senate. 0.77

01:57:50.520 Increasingly, the senate of Rome had fallen to not having any real power, right?

01:57:55.800 But ostensibly, he is punishing the pagan city of Rome and the ethnic Italians for their rebellion, their refusal to adhere to the will of the emperor in Byzantia.

01:58:08.900 And so there's this line in Augustine that talks about this, about how Alaric goes through and he spares all of the government offices and churches, but he tears down the temples to Minerva and Jupiter.

01:58:23.300 And there's this confusion here, but Alaric's like a barbarian. Why is he doing this?

01:58:29.400 It's because Alaric is trying to gain status in the Byzantine Empire by working for the Byzantine Empire.

01:58:37.700 He is an employee of the Byzantine Empire, enforcing an ideological conflict against what the Byzantine Empire sees as a rebellious province, Italy,

01:58:49.400 Practicing a foreign, because it's Byzantium's in Greece, right, but practicing the wrong ideology, that being Roman paganism instead of Christianity.

01:59:02.240 And this is why he leaves the churches and the government offices alone, because at this time, churches are government offices. 0.88

01:59:10.460 In order to interface with the Roman government, you have to be Christian. 0.77

01:59:14.460 so these warlords that think they can get a fast one on the romans convert because they are actually 0.96

01:59:23.760 getting a fast one on the romans because once they're in now the bureaucrats the government

01:59:29.700 officials the priests the eunuchs these guys have to deal with these germanic warlords right

01:59:37.140 so you know we as a church have positions on this but it's also worth just for the sake of

01:59:46.720 historical understanding conveying just what the heck is going on here like a gothic warlord

01:59:54.580 converts to christianity then goes and like sacks rome and tears down temples to jupiter like what

02:00:01.120 Huh? Well, this is why. He's essentially being hired by the Roman government and given a crap test, if you will, of, okay, you want status? Go sail abroad and punish dissidents for us. Right?

02:00:18.680 So, 400 AD, the Roman Empire is crumbling. As the Roman Empire begins to experience that

02:00:29.540 economic crumbling for a variety of reasons, it starts pulling away from its frontiers.

02:00:36.100 One of these is Britain. The earliest meaningful inhabitants in Britain were the hunter-gatherer

02:00:41.100 peoples, who arrived around 10,000 BC. These are the same in broad strokes, the same hunter-gatherer

02:00:48.100 peoples who inhabit Scandinavia, Germania, Gaul, Iberia, Eastern Europe, Italy, blah, blah, blah, 0.76

02:00:55.320 blah, blah. They're the hunter-gatherers. They are our ancestors. Then they have about 6,000 years 0.83

02:01:03.640 of being in Britain. Around 4,000 BC, the farmer populations arrive. Again, these people are also 0.95

02:01:12.580 our ancestors. They also derive from Ice Age refugia populations in Europe. Then 0.94

02:01:20.620 around 2500 BC, the first Indo-Europeans arrived. Come 450 BC, Britain was

02:01:27.700 importing goods from the Latene culture. This sets the stage for the Roman 1.00

02:01:33.400 conquest of Celtic Britain. Now this isn't about the deep history of Britain.

02:01:38.800 when Britain becomes Celtic, blah, blah, blah. Complex stuff. 400 AD, the Angles from southern

02:01:50.940 Denmark, the Utes, or Judas, as they're sometimes called, from northern Denmark, and the Saxons

02:01:57.560 from northwest Germany begin sailing to Britain. This is typically called a conquest or an invasion,

02:02:04.020 but the reality is that they were filling in an increasingly empty province that the Roman

02:02:08.420 Empire had abandoned. There's a point in Roman Britain where statues stopped showing up because

02:02:14.580 all of the statue makers had left, because there was no one hiring them to make this luxury good

02:02:19.380 anymore. Now today we think statues are not all that important, but remember these are a culturally

02:02:28.340 important luxury good. A Roman gentleman of even human status would have dozens of statues in his

02:02:35.460 his house he would have busts of his ancestors he would have busts of the gods he'd probably have 0.60

02:02:41.000 um there was a fact there's like a trend where roman men wanted to have like a big statue of a

02:02:47.740 god or like their wife or something in their like atrium and this was like you know part of them

02:02:53.260 showing off that they were classy and participating in the culture by which they meant you know

02:02:58.460 hellenistic culture because this was a greek thing to do to have a this look how look how cool i am

02:03:04.160 look at my statue right and so not being able to have statues is an important sign of economic 0.68

02:03:11.940 decline because like bro if you're a roman you've got to have statues right you'd be like for

02:03:19.100 americans it's like you know there's a period where the cars they stop painting them they're

02:03:24.400 just bare metal having your car painted is a status symbol in america right like if you're

02:03:32.220 driving down the street in Mater, that's a problem, right? So the Roman Empire is collapsing.

02:03:41.900 In the 400s AD, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Utes start moving in. They start filling in this 0.98

02:03:48.180 increasingly empty space that the Roman Empire had abandoned. The megalithic sites, the ancient

02:03:55.140 barrows first made by these hunter-gatherer peoples 0.56

02:03:58.580 oh we're not there yet nick 0.84

02:04:02.580 oh you might have just okay sorry sorry first 0.97

02:04:06.500 made by these hunter-gatherer peoples had been integrated into the celtic

02:04:10.740 religion the same happened with the religion of

02:04:13.540 the anglo-saxons which many celts appear to have adopted

02:04:16.660 when the anglo-saxons arrived so

02:04:21.860 So this is the setup for our loyal Anglo-Saxons episode here, and I'm sure the oldest here that he wants to talk about this, but just to say, it is important to remember that when we think of Britain, there is a genetic and cultural continuity going from the Ice Age, or the first inhabitants post-Ice Age, to the present day.

02:04:43.500 the modern Englishman is the result of several waves and foldings but ultimately of the same

02:04:51.940 stock and there is a continuity going back a long time Stonehenge had been has been a sacred site to

02:05:02.300 the bloodlines of the of the Englishman going back to like they never when it was it made like

02:05:08.880 8,000 B.C. or something like that.

02:05:11.920 From Stonehenge's creation

02:05:13.160 to the present day, it has been a site of

02:05:15.140 some kind of sacred importance.

02:05:18.880 Do you want to throw in anything there, sir?

02:05:25.680 Yeah, so I keep hitting on

02:05:27.220 the same thing over and over because it's the point

02:05:29.400 of...

02:05:31.400 I mean, the history of

02:05:33.300 these episodes is really cool,

02:05:35.520 but the meta theme

02:05:37.480 that I think is really important.

02:05:40.040 One thing we encounter a lot by

02:05:42.340 casual observers or new people 1.00

02:05:51.280 or the churlish are,

02:05:57.180 no, that's Viking stuff. 1.00

02:06:00.300 And they sequester our faith

02:06:03.820 to a period of time from, like, 700 to 1,000 in Scandinavia.

02:06:11.520 The more erudite will extend that to the places where it's undeniable

02:06:20.600 that the names of the gods are the same.

02:06:22.680 So it'll say, okay, Germanic people, and also Scandinavian people,

02:06:29.500 which come from a very clear Germanic root.

02:06:33.820 What I want to point out through these, what I think is really important to take home, all of these people worshipped our gods, worshipped the Aesir back to the beginning.

02:06:47.780 They worship these gods as they populate in Europe, as they settle down, as they fell back in upon themselves in conflict or in trading or whatever they're doing.

02:07:03.980 Through all of these movements, they are circulating.

02:07:07.440 All of these people were descendants of people who worship these gods since the very, very beginning.

02:07:15.040 we go thousands of years of linguistic developments and different cultures you know

02:07:25.180 staying put in different valleys or over a different mountain ridge and eventually

02:07:31.260 names and stories of the gods take on a very individual linguistic and cultural shape

02:07:39.780 because the relationship between that particular clan of our people,

02:07:48.220 their relationship with the gods is defined by a different set of circumstance

02:07:53.100 over their experience of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years

02:07:57.180 that's different than their cousins who are over that ridge or across that river.

02:08:02.840 but all of their great-grandparents stood in circle raising horn to

02:08:12.260 the all-father and to the striker and to our guys um and this is this is kind of the theme

02:08:24.920 that I want to reiterate on this these people come from a shared culture a shared religion

02:08:31.220 these people's religious developments all trace back to the same gods who birthed our folk it's

02:08:40.420 very easy to confuse that when you come from you know modern day and you look back at a snapshot in 0.99

02:08:49.940 time well you know these people seem really different than viking people and they do vikings

02:08:56.420 seem really different than us but again all of our ancestors stood together worshiping the gods

02:09:03.620 that formed our race and this is the reality of i think if people are looking at these things

02:09:09.860 abstractly as these snapshots it's hard to see the connectivity what chris is doing a masterful job of

02:09:17.780 is weaving the connectivity for us to where it's self-evident and we see that our very

02:09:25.460 real gods shaped our most distant ancestors in the beginning of our race

02:09:32.820 we have been defined by our relationship with these gods in you know whatever those contexts

02:09:41.220 shift and change

02:09:43.120 and take on different flavor

02:09:44.980 up until the period that he is

02:09:47.080 now talking about where there's the

02:09:48.940 great apostasy where our people turn our backs

02:09:51.340 on our gods

02:09:52.440 and embrace 1.00

02:09:54.240 Semitic 0.93

02:09:57.320 Jewish God

02:09:58.240 up until this point

02:10:00.900 all of our ancestors

02:10:02.980 worshipped the

02:10:05.040 gods of Aryan people who we know 1.00

02:10:07.160 as the Iser

02:10:07.880 now we're tracing a very specific

02:10:10.800 thread that leads to our lore and the nomenclature we choose to use to understand our gods in

02:10:18.240 the best context for us, but all of these threads go back to the same source, to the

02:10:29.260 same spool, to the same ur font of divinity that have been with us since the first things

02:10:40.520 that since before the first people that chris spoke about a month ago and are with us through

02:10:47.400 the time period that he's speaking about through all of these different tribes even though some

02:10:52.760 of them have gone all the way to the edges of europe and now slosh back up towards the middle

02:10:57.800 and are coming up you know buddy heads with their brothers their sisters their cousins

02:11:04.040 that either stayed put or are at a different speed of migration.

02:11:12.880 So then there's the northern frontier of Germanic expansion in southern Sweden.

02:11:21.200 Scandinavia isn't really touched by the upheavals on the continent,

02:11:24.660 so Sweden and Denmark just increasingly sort of fill in.

02:11:27.760 At some point, there develops a distinction between the Svear, whose name means us, ours, the we, the us, and the Goths, whose name means they who pour out libations.

02:11:41.600 Sometime around 1 AD, the Goths sail southeast, landing on the Baltic coast.

02:11:47.620 From 180 to 280, the Goths migrate southeast, eventually coming to the borders of Thrace.

02:11:53.900 so if you've got like greece thrace is this area around greece the area beyond greece

02:12:03.300 away from the sea it is here that our episode on the loyal goths takes place the goths move

02:12:11.320 from southern sweden out of it into eastern europe actually through eastern europe all the way into

02:12:19.540 southern europe or southeastern europe gothic is very closely related to norse then but they

02:12:27.260 actually split off before a number of sound shifts happened and around the same time like 500 ad

02:12:36.180 there's a uh there were two spears that were found by archaeologists and both of them were named

02:12:43.340 or maybe equipped with the same magic spell i don't know it's not it doesn't really matter

02:12:48.100 um the same thing in norse and gothic in uh norse it was it's like brauner and in uh

02:12:57.860 in gothic it's like ronias or something like that both of them mean tester like

02:13:05.200 find out get it it's a spear so when we think about the goths it's important to understand 0.64

02:13:14.160 these people are swedes like there's a set number of generations between a thaneric and his

02:13:23.340 ancestors living in sweden right like accountably finite and as a germanic man of standing a thaneric

02:13:31.720 might have been able to tell you the precise number of ancestors it took to get from sweden to

02:13:36.880 him right go on sir so i just want to interject this and this isn't like the right time for it

02:13:42.800 whatever but it's related and it i remember it now also talking about modern people's misconceptions

02:13:50.720 so they think that also true is a scandinavian thing where it is in fact a all white people thing

02:14:00.560 um but they also with this because they have a scandinavian fetishism

02:14:09.600 may think that scandinavian people are more entitled to it than american people that don't

02:14:16.240 live in scandinavia what they don't factor in is that there's the exact same number of generations

02:14:25.440 between my ancestors that worship the icier and their ancestors that worship the icier the fact

02:14:32.080 that they stayed home and mine went and colonized and conquered and explored doesn't trace an any

02:14:42.960 closer distance chronologically they're you know roughly a thousand years removed from their

02:14:50.960 ancestor who their last ancestor that did look to odin and so am i and you know maybe chris is one

02:15:00.960 generation further removed because he's younger but within within three generations it's the same

02:15:08.480 distance and that's an important thing to track on this just like he's saying about

02:15:12.960 thaneric being able to talk about when they were hanging out in sweden so through my paternal

02:15:21.760 grandmother my father's mother i have the great luck of being a pomeroy which means

02:15:29.920 that I can actually give you some firm data on this.

02:15:33.920 I am 11 generations removed from Eltweed, Eltweed Pomeroy,

02:15:39.600 who arrived on this continent 1630s August 8th,

02:15:44.800 and I am 55 generations removed from Odin,

02:15:49.040 because Eltweed is himself a descendant of Alfred the Great.

02:15:53.600 Um, eleven generations in about the same amount of time it took a Thanaric's ancestors to go back to Sweden.

02:16:04.000 That's eleven names. 0.75

02:16:06.000 If, in my society, it was required for you to give nine names of your paternity in order to participate in the legal system,

02:16:16.200 I don't think it would be that hard to add two more names to the list, right?

02:16:23.600 All right, so, where was I on here?

02:16:27.800 So, it's here that our Loyal Goths episode takes place.

02:16:31.000 The migration out of Sweden that leads to the Goths. 0.69

02:16:34.620 And unfortunately, I guess, the Huns crash into Europe here. 0.84

02:16:40.020 And the conflict between the Huns and the Scythians and the Sarmatians and the Allens creates this chaotic void 0.93

02:16:46.420 where a peripheral people begins to expand outwards. 0.99

02:16:51.620 The Slavs. 0.83

02:16:53.600 The Slavs engage in a massive migration of their own and are free to expand into previously occupied territory 0.85

02:17:01.680 that was penned off by the Goths, the Byzantines, the Romans, and the Scythians, and the Sarmatians, and the Alans, and the blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:17:10.360 The Balts, who are related to the Slavs, had been an established people for some time,

02:17:16.080 and after the Goths moved through the Baltic coast, the Balts actually become far more organized,

02:17:22.140 and their population increases greatly.

02:17:25.380 Part of what allows for this is that the Balts and Slavs

02:17:28.980 are forest-dwelling agriculturalists. 0.80

02:17:32.440 So when the cattle-rearing horsemen of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Avars, Huns, and Goths,

02:17:37.760 because, remember, much to the bafflement of academics,

02:17:42.340 the Goths actually rode horses and herded cattle.

02:17:47.320 When the cattle-rearing herdsmen start to fall back and lose prominence,

02:17:52.140 There's this huge amount of territory for these people to fill in and occupy that's already been converted to pasture land, so it makes very good farmland.

02:18:05.340 Many years prior, just to fill in, sir, did you hear me say my genealogy there?

02:18:14.520 Yes.

02:18:15.580 Okay, sweet.

02:18:16.120 Okay. Many years prior, the ancestors of the Baltic and Slavic peoples were the eastern end of the Indo-European Iron Age and Bronze Age.

02:18:26.280 So what we think of as Balt and Slav comes out through a series of similar transformations, transitions, and primacy of a single center that we've discussed with the Germanics.

02:18:36.920 the balts and slavs typically don't show up in the vns episodes we've done thus far

02:18:43.100 but it's important to remember they are in this european block as well they are the eastern end

02:18:51.620 of it in a certain sense because you know once you go east of the the baltic and the slavic world

02:18:58.860 you run into like you know ugrics and tatars and turkmans and things like that right but they are

02:19:06.060 part of it. There are Latene and Hallstatt goods in the Baltic world, in the Slavic world, imported

02:19:14.660 through trade networks that stretched from Iberia all the way to what is today Estonia and Lithuania.

02:19:23.020 Right? And now we come to the final frontier of the Germanic world,

02:19:29.700 one that we have only passingly covered and that is scandinavia proper we will be moving forwards

02:19:36.220 with hero episodes on our scandinavian heroes or more of them we've done we've done some episodes

02:19:42.120 already on the latter day heroes if you will now that we've set some theological and historical

02:19:47.960 context for it we can go into scandinavia right looking at all of these various frontiers of

02:19:56.660 Germanic expansion, you'll see that the Scandinavians are the ones that remained true to the

02:20:01.340 Aesir the longest. It is partly for this reason that our religious tradition today begins with

02:20:06.260 this Nordic heritage. They were simply the ones to keep doing this in the best attestation the 0.98

02:20:11.460 longest. But it is also because they had seen the slow, gradual destruction of the Germanic world. 0.96

02:20:18.940 Do you want to throw up the Germanics map now, Nick? Sweet. Some academics are baffled at how 0.99

02:20:26.060 the Goths, the Anglo-Saxons, the Continental Germanics, and the Scandinavians could all have

02:20:31.140 such similar culture, language, customs, genetics, and religion. Their shared origin in the Jasderf

02:20:36.820 culture is why this is the case. The Anglo-Saxons, the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the 0.76

02:20:42.200 Goths, all descend from this singular shared populace that develops in northern Germany,

02:20:49.020 Denmark, and southern Sweden. The great similarity of their material cultures is because they all

02:20:55.740 descend from this chaster of material culture. The great continuity of this cultural body from 0.98

02:21:00.480 roughly 500 BC to 1280 is due to the near constant contact and interconnectedness of these people's

02:21:07.060 lives. Beowulf returns to Denmark from Britain to handle his inheritance, but Beowulf was not a

02:21:13.600 Viking conqueror in the Danewa, or rather a Germanic man in the 500s AD. That's when the

02:21:18.840 story takes place in-universe, so to say. A man of his standing could move from Britain to Gothia,

02:21:25.160 speaking one language, practicing one culture, and performing one religion,

02:21:29.740 and fit in amongst all of the peoples of the Germanic world.

02:21:32.600 Because up until quite late, these were all literally one single people.

02:21:37.480 And they were, like, Scandinavians were still saying that there was just one Germanic language into, like, the 1200s.

02:21:44.020 There was a debate about how best to Latinize the Norse language,

02:21:49.440 and one faction wanted to just crib Anglo-Saxon's orthography entirely because, well, they speak the same language as us.

02:22:00.140 The Viking Age begins around 700 to 800 or so AD and is characterized from the continental Christian Roman European perspective

02:22:10.180 as the time when Scandinavian pirates, merchants, and fishermen descended upon Europe.

02:22:16.620 But from the Germanic perspective, it is the time when the last holdouts of the Germanic world began to fight back against the Christian Roman imperial monster that was gobbling up Europe and asserted themselves against chaos, entropy, and disorder.

02:22:34.140 That brings them into conflict with hostile forces on the continent who are keen on conquering the Nordic world and eradicating its culture, religion, and political order. 0.51

02:22:45.380 And it was at that periphery of that periphery in Iceland, which is a colony of Norway, which is a colony of Sweden, that the school of Semundur Sigfusson saw fit to cast a light into the future. 0.59

02:23:02.080 It was there that men sought to ensure a way for Aryans to start from nothing and yet still be able to return to their gods, their ancestors, and their folk.

02:23:16.260 What we've seen through this two-episode history is a general historical process in which there is some uniform body, and within it is a period of progressive differentiation that occurs.

02:23:34.580 At the periphery, some split off going their own way.

02:23:37.840 But at the center, amongst these competing bodies, one will come to dominate the others.

02:23:43.320 It will not then exterminate them, but rather come to characterize them.

02:23:47.500 And so uniformity gives way to plurality, which gives way to uniformity.

02:23:51.820 Amongst the various contests and challenges and games that history plays,

02:23:56.760 we see our folk compete internally, not for who will survive, but for who will lead.

02:24:03.640 This is the second reason why we start at the Nordic tradition and not the Greek or Roman or Celtic ones.

02:24:09.840 These are important.

02:24:11.280 We should study them.

02:24:12.060 We should learn from them.

02:24:13.320 But we don't start with them. It is because Samander Siegfusson sat down and cast a light into the future that the Nordic tradition won the contest.

02:24:24.900 And it is because of that victory that many, many, many, many years later, Arnhofdi, Asagrim, Baloygar, Sigtur, Odin al-Fadr, could reach out to Steve McNallan and make him the herald that would begin the reforging of Aryan man's connection with the gods.

02:24:46.460 and that Steve McNallan would know who had reached out to him

02:24:51.500 and to whom it was that he would give his loyalty and devotion.

02:24:56.160 And it is for that reason that we begin with the Nordic tradition

02:24:59.880 and not the Greek one or the Roman one or the Celtic one.

02:25:05.600 Would you like to add anything, sir?

02:25:08.300 Well done, Chris. Thank you so much for that.

02:25:11.860 um no absolutely um i think that you covered and said that very well nick makes a point about

02:25:22.320 holdouts amongst the vaults you know latvians lithuanians and such in a much more primitive

02:25:30.200 form in a way that's not very easy to transmit the particularities of war to us in the same

02:25:37.440 clean way but yes they there were holdouts in the dark forests um

02:25:47.040 in the vault along the edges of the baltic for you know another few hundred years uh

02:25:53.440 took a long time to finally um eradicated that spot but yeah the holdout of of lore and um

02:26:03.680 cultural information and that was one of the cool things it was stored so well in scandinavia and

02:26:12.720 then it was codified and preserved and like ingrained and institutionalized at least

02:26:20.320 academically and poetically in iceland that made it to us today in the form that we have

02:26:26.560 of when simender rode back to iceland on a seal and uh and did his work there um and to be clear

02:26:40.420 just to respond to what was said no absolutely the balts continued practicing their religion

02:26:46.320 longer don't get me wrong but we don't have a baltic poetic edda yeah we don't have a baltic

02:26:54.220 snorri starlson we don't have baltic sagas we don't have this body of literature that we can

02:27:01.800 use to act as not quite a revelation but a a textual bridge to the divine so another thing

02:27:10.580 that i want to add in here as part of the part of the mix it's not just an accident of history that

02:27:18.980 just that's how it ended up working out

02:27:21.420 there is a

02:27:23.660 combination

02:27:26.780 of

02:27:28.080 which heroes

02:27:31.340 consistently

02:27:34.160 won the favor of the gods

02:27:37.660 and how the gods

02:27:39.760 best directed

02:27:40.980 that their stories

02:27:42.740 and that their

02:27:44.000 relationship with our folk

02:27:47.580 be developed

02:27:48.360 But we have to, as people of faith, believe that the gods back and celebrate their champions

02:27:57.260 and their heroes, and that it's not an accident that that's where the best preservation of

02:28:03.940 our Lord ended up, that that's where the best stories and depictions, the most complete,

02:28:08.900 the most accessible, and with the best remains of tithing were recorded in the Norse.

02:28:15.800 And I think that that's something, you know, not every, there are poems in the Eddas that are clearly pious, that are clearly religious in nature. There's also some comedy and other things that, you know, poems that are less overtly pious in those works.

02:28:31.860 So it didn't escape the same kind of development that we saw so early on in Greece and in Rome, but we were able to capture it before it got so far askew to where we have these foundational texts that we would be sorely missing out if we did not have.

02:28:54.360 And luckily, it held out in the North long enough to get these things recorded in the language, to get them embedded in the poetry and the song of the courts of the aristocracy of the time.

02:29:10.400 All of those things, I think, are genuinely miraculous, but also on the backs of heroes that fought and died for our faith.

02:29:20.840 And a large number of those heroes that's names have come to us were from Scandinavia.

02:29:27.540 We will get to those in future episodes here.

02:29:31.580 And just to just to throw in real quick here to so a lot of the, as I understand it, a lot of lore that comes down to us through the Baltic or from the Baltic tradition is preserved in folk songs.

02:29:47.380 the oldest of which are actually preserved in translation into french and that introduces

02:29:54.640 interesting oddities so there will be characters that are called like saint michael and it raises

02:30:01.860 a question of were they referring to this character as saint michael in the song originally

02:30:07.380 or is that how the translator rendered this or that figure into French, right?

02:30:18.440 Whereas we just have Verluspa.

02:30:22.260 We just have Havamal in Norse.

02:30:26.940 This is something a skald stood around claiming while some scribe wrote it down. 0.99

02:30:32.900 I couldn't be 1.00

02:30:35.720 exhausted to say you don't have that

02:30:37.820 anywhere else

02:30:38.960 but in the medieval

02:30:41.820 period I don't think

02:30:43.760 you get the same preservation

02:30:45.460 that 0.96

02:30:47.120 Simon and African Snorri

02:30:49.760 preserved on

02:30:51.640 there's lots of it everywhere

02:30:53.980 but it's all a big giant

02:30:55.820 telephone game unfortunately

02:30:57.400 but this is what I'm saying you have an effort

02:30:59.940 made to this is the authentic

02:31:02.120 belief of the past generation what you have a lot of is holdover stories as you mentioned

02:31:08.800 that are altered to where the characters are no longer gods they're trolls or they're some

02:31:14.840 strange ooga booga thing woods to where they are transferred and um built into fictitious

02:31:24.580 saints or to where the story is significantly altered to become unrecognizably christian

02:31:31.960 in a lot of ways you you see that in certain text in the north but you see a notable lack of that

02:31:42.120 in the edits which you know it's easy for people to point out the cases where they want to suggest

02:31:48.600 a christian influence but they don't notice all of the ways that that's neglected it's something

02:31:54.680 spawn and i talked about recently because stories work makes a big point of like no these are the

02:32:00.920 authentic stories of the gods and we've got to remember these because that's how you develop

02:32:05.400 the poetry that's how you have your you know root mythology to build uh cannings and things from

02:32:16.840 so it's it's preserved in a really particular and special way there one really important thing that

02:32:22.760 separates um the nordic tradition from the greco-roman one is that the greco-roman one

02:32:30.200 survives through kind of sheer inertia but there's a huge amount of stuff we don't have

02:32:35.800 there are dialogues by plato that we don't have we do not have any of the dialogues of aristotle

02:32:41.720 we don't have the book that heraclitus we don't have most of the book heraclitus wrote

02:32:47.080 but in the nordic world there was this ideology of due to a combination so the in iceland in

02:32:56.600 particular due to how this the Icelandic all thing officially adopted

02:33:01.760 Christianity is the state religion of Iceland but allowed for the internal

02:33:05.760 practice of religion could be whatever the heck you wanted right it took very

02:33:11.420 surprisingly long for Iceland to be a kind of standard do what the Pope says

02:33:16.660 or we kill you type society this actually resulted in a great learning by

02:33:23.380 scandinavians of continental scribal techniques and this combined with the general assumption

02:33:32.660 that aristocrats would be passingly literate in the futhark led to this sort of very earnest

02:33:41.620 well we're just going to write stuff down mindset because it's like well

02:33:46.020 even christian scribes would have this mindset because it's like but you're supposed to be

02:33:50.820 be christian who cares if you have a book that records some ancient pagan poem christianity is

02:33:57.160 an internal matter it's not an external thing and so this leads to like um i think it's either

02:34:05.400 rigstu or hundul yoz is in a book that was written by this one of the same scribes who wrote one of

02:34:13.260 portions of the stjärn. The stjärn is the translation slash commentary slash summarization

02:34:20.720 slash explanation of the Old Testament into Norse. So this guy who was a paid scribe who was

02:34:30.020 writing down how writing down the Bible also had no problem getting paid to write down a pagan poem.

02:34:40.640 We don't, and it's not to say that these people were tolerant, but it is to say that this environment where literacy and knowledge could just be taken freely and earnestly was not found in most of Europe, at least at the right time for Celtic traditions to get written down like this.

02:35:07.160 It was very inconvenient and very distant. And so it didn't have the increased scrutiny that other places have of overzealous church hierarchy and other things. This was a backwater, very distant outpost of European culture.

02:35:26.800 The first time that Iceland got a literate Catholic bishop was after World War II.

02:35:34.440 The first time it had a literate bishop was after the Protestant Reformation, just for reference.

02:35:41.000 Yeah, so all of that works in our favor.

02:35:45.480 We have some questions stacking up.

02:35:47.340 One of them came before the program on, oh, so something for everybody to know.

02:35:52.140 We will answer your questions at the end of each program.

02:35:55.640 And if they're, you know, relevant in the middle, we may answer them then also.

02:36:01.480 But you can email us questions anytime at bns at runestone.org.

02:36:09.220 And we'll answer them at our next opportunity.

02:36:12.700 And that's where this one came in.

02:36:14.480 Hey, guys.

02:36:15.100 BNS and the AFA's books have been like finding ice water in a desert.

02:36:19.840 Really appreciate this show and everything you do.

02:36:22.480 as a question, which of the gods will be associated with carpentry or construction

02:36:29.820 as a skill and craft? Is it proper to make some kind of prayer to the gods for skill and safety

02:36:38.700 before beginning the workday, or is that too casual slash common a thing to spend prayer on?

02:36:45.660 What kind of prayers or blessings might be appropriate when constructing a home or structure

02:36:51.040 for yourself or your family, kind of regards.

02:36:55.620 So,

02:36:57.360 I know that it is natural to sort the gods by occupation.

02:37:08.980 I think we all do that and have a tendency to do that.

02:37:12.680 But I want to reiterate,

02:37:14.520 that is one very reasonable way to go about it.

02:37:18.540 what God is most associated with a certain profession or a certain craft or a certain

02:37:24.480 circumstance of life. It's also a very relevant way to say, what God are you closest to? What

02:37:34.340 God do you have a relationship with best? What God, you know, do those in your family have the

02:37:40.540 best relationship with? All of those are relevant. There's not a wrong answer to your question.

02:37:47.240 if you prayed to air about it she wouldn't seem directly related to those things but it wouldn't

02:37:55.860 be inappropriate or impious i would say the most obvious choice if you're especially you're talking

02:38:05.660 about home construction if you're talking about ship construction i'd go a different way

02:38:10.300 But talking about home construction and craft, I would say also Thor would be the most obvious choice to me.

02:38:21.300 But again, I don't think there's a bad choice on that.

02:38:25.660 I was going to say Thor and maybe Frayer.

02:38:29.720 I think that your...

02:38:31.300 second well so i i think that your other your other question about you know would it be appropriate

02:38:40.340 to to do daily prayers for you know success in business or you know safety during the work day

02:38:52.040 or whatever. I think that's very appropriate.

02:38:55.580 There is a hesitancy amongst

02:38:58.260 our people for some reason

02:39:01.820 and I think it got instilled in people early

02:39:06.180 on some kind of, I don't know, aloofness.

02:39:11.560 These are your gods and you can pray to your gods

02:39:14.320 anytime that you want. I think that we know things that are

02:39:18.220 coming from a rude or a disrespectful or an impious

02:39:21.260 place those things would be inappropriate but praying to the gods for for safety and success

02:39:29.420 and you know benefit in the workplace i don't think it's a bad thing at all i think it's

02:39:35.020 certainly something that often our ancestors would do before a business endeavor certainly

02:39:41.100 before going on a trading mission or engaging in whatever their craft was i don't know about daily

02:39:49.500 but i don't think that's inappropriate i really one thing i would love to see happen more often

02:39:56.460 is like an also true business owner or craftsman or whatever it is have you know an

02:40:04.220 altar in their craft in their workshop in their place of business it's always really um

02:40:13.500 really nice to see that when you go to asian businesses you'll go to the thai restaurant

02:40:18.860 of a Chinese restaurant, you'll have an ancestral altar

02:40:22.640 behind the counter. You'll have, you know, this Thai place he used to go, he had

02:40:27.000 an altar set up for his ancestors, some kind

02:40:31.160 of, I think, Buddhist altar generally, and then a special

02:40:34.920 altar for the king of Thailand. And you could see

02:40:38.840 food and incense that had been left out as offerings. I think that's a

02:40:42.940 completely appropriate thing and something

02:40:46.860 I would love to see happen in regards to our gods.

02:40:51.040 As far as what kind of prayers or what things might be appropriate,

02:40:59.020 people get very hung up on that, and I think that giving that thought is great.

02:41:08.520 So I'm not poo-pooing the idea of it, but I do think there's too much of a worry on it.

02:41:16.080 I think crafting something that is heartfelt, that is meaningful to you, as far as that kind of an offering and that kind of a situation is a very nice thing, and I don't think you go wrong with it.

02:41:35.380 But the closest thing that I'm familiar with in that kind of a situation is, you know, when it's built, I think you can do, you know, you can do runes and things on the boards as they go up.

02:41:55.080 that's always a nice thing to do um because it's going to be covered up it's going to be just for

02:42:00.600 you to know but i think that that's a nice thing to do um maybe even writing a prayer

02:42:07.240 on the on the wood that's going to be covered up or um 0.62

02:42:13.800 bularoos for for health or othala for being you know the total property of of you and your family

02:42:21.480 but i think once it's up to do what's called a land taking or what often is we do as a home

02:42:30.300 blessing where you go through the home with um mead that you have asked the the gods to make

02:42:39.600 sacred and that you officially claim ownership of the place declare you know declare its openness

02:42:50.140 or not to the spirits

02:42:52.260 of that place. Declare

02:42:54.060 your good intentions with it.

02:42:57.680 Welcome 1.00

02:42:58.360 the Aesir into 1.00

02:43:00.200 your home and into 1.00

02:43:02.140 your family for perpetuity

02:43:03.880 and ask that they bless

02:43:06.220 your home and fill it

02:43:08.100 with happiness or whatnot. I think that

02:43:10.080 those are really good things to do

02:43:11.760 and AFA

02:43:13.960 Gothar would be really happy to help you

02:43:16.000 in those processes when that comes

02:43:18.160 time if that's something you're interested in uh chris did you have thoughts i just thought of

02:43:24.400 additional one i just thought of was uh describing a prayer to scene on the threshold

02:43:31.120 that's a very good idea specific threshold things to see well done nick i think that's a great idea

02:43:38.720 i think um just a genuine openness and request for the gods to guide you

02:43:48.160 you know um if it's something as specific as like a prayer before going to work it's like i i don't

02:43:55.200 know that this specific trade or vocation well enough to humor anything more than that um

02:44:03.280 i think asking the ice here to

02:44:07.520 reveal their will to you to to give yourself over to them they know best you know

02:44:14.000 that's all I've got there alrighty what did our ancestors do when they have a

02:44:22.640 lot of questions about the nature of reality given that there were given

02:44:29.540 there were no definitive sources so I saw that the chaplain question got asked

02:44:38.940 They would ask their priests. They would ask the Gothar. I think they would also certainly ask their elders.

02:44:47.920 I think that these stories told by the bards and the skulls and the storytellers of their time, depending upon what era of our ancestors were talking about, would paint pictures for them that helped them understand the context of the world that they lived within and the relationship that they lived within, within their tribe, within their community.

02:45:17.920 community, within their kingdom, and within their relationship to the divine and to those

02:45:25.320 beyond the veil that had come before them.

02:45:28.300 I think that's where the root of all of that traditionally has been and kind of, in large

02:45:35.420 part, continues today.

02:45:37.880 There's certainly more resources and you can Google stuff and you can whatever, but I think

02:45:43.560 spill when we're looking for the really deep meaningful uh things we go to we go to the

02:45:49.640 clergy we go to our elders and we harken back to the stories and tales told to us since our youth

02:45:59.640 that orient us to uh what's in not only the world around us but our place in it and what's important

02:46:06.280 to guide us through it chris do you have thoughts no i mean it's religion and philosophy seem a

02:46:15.320 pretty constant through human life two things people turn to when they don't know what what

02:46:20.680 else to do they turn to the people who know about either of those things what that looks like

02:46:27.960 depends on the place and time you know question for both of you gentlemen which era of our

02:46:36.040 people's history is your favorite chris what era of our people's history is your favorite

02:46:47.800 i can't pick um

02:46:50.280 um i like anything to do with the germanic tribes i like uh ancient greek stuff i like

02:46:58.780 rome um as far as the stuff that i've

02:47:03.180 done recently for the afa etc i have to say the goths athanaric was the hero that doing research

02:47:15.840 for that opened my mind the most i guess you could say looking at him in a more religious light

02:47:24.160 was a really fun experience for me it's like you know if a genie was like you know do you want to

02:47:33.680 know more about ancient greece do you want me to give you access to like the lost library i'd say

02:47:38.400 of course right but um it does bother me that we know so little about the goths and

02:47:46.640 it it bothers me because you can see how similar they are to the norse and yet we know so little

02:47:51.840 still you know you'd think their similarity would make them a little clearer but then it's not you

02:47:59.200 know um i know i'm not i'm not i'm not giving a fun answer like oh this specific year is the best

02:48:07.920 right but that's my answer well so i know i shouldn't have done it i've taken the first

02:48:16.560 couple questions first but i threw this one to you first and stole my answer um

02:48:22.640 so that was

02:48:27.360 and for interesting reasons and it's hard because you asked what my favorite was so don't hold me to

02:48:31.760 this is a hard thing i get over analytical and i could sit here all night trying to tit for

02:48:37.680 tat like which is actually my favorite but the like high civilization period of the goths

02:48:50.560 is really interesting to me i think some of it is because it's not something that i

02:48:57.200 you know feel like i've always had a lot of knowledge about i don't think it's something

02:49:01.440 that there's that much knowledge to get you got to work for these nuggets kind of picture of it

02:49:08.320 but early on i forget who did this lecture series it was written a written down lecture series

02:49:21.040 by okay so the more i try to get the answer on this something nick made google through it on the

02:49:27.120 side book called the lecture series called the roman and the tuton and it talks that was the

02:49:34.320 first time i heard about thaneric and the gothic struggle against christianity it was fascinating

02:49:44.880 it's one thing i read early on when i came home to alsatru

02:49:50.000 history's always been really interesting this is a period of history that is was just not very

02:49:54.560 well known to me at the time um so i uh yeah that's fascinating the all of the little teasers

02:50:06.240 in that of what that society must have been like what that leadership structure and the

02:50:11.920 civilization level of that must have been like it's really really intriguing their migration

02:50:18.400 from southern sweden is very interesting um so yeah and i also also because it's kind of obscure

02:50:26.960 that's one of the little books by uh stephen flowers um that i really liked and got a lot

02:50:34.240 out of was his mystery of the goths and i read that way back when as well so sure i will say

02:50:41.360 that just for the time period certainly of our people during antiquity

02:50:55.280 i'm trying to sort because we did go through a couple of these during the show

02:50:58.960 um chris how do you feel genetics is affecting archaeological theories about migrations

02:51:07.440 i think i think that's a big question because it depends on which theories um

02:51:15.440 it certainly adds an interesting it's interesting to see which which theories and historical

02:51:24.100 hypotheses and the like it bolsters and which it does away with um

02:51:30.960 I think that you have to be very careful with archaeogenetics as it's coming out live because it inevitably uses extremely small sample sizes.

02:51:44.360 we only have so many bodies right um and the the science is very complicated and

02:51:53.460 it's a relatively easy for bad actors to engage in seemingly innocuous

02:52:01.480 calculations and the like that actually are carefully calibrated acts of 0.98

02:52:07.220 deception you can see that with a lot of the Anatolian or you know Caucasus

02:52:13.400 hypotheses about or alternate hypotheses about the indo-european or highmont where they're kind

02:52:19.500 of playing around with uh genetics with playing around the numbers um i think it's a very useful

02:52:29.700 tool and i think it's one of those things where it's like it's best to whenever some new piece

02:52:36.120 of information comes out rather than readjusting your entire understanding of the world based off

02:52:41.640 of it kind of give it a little bit to see where it goes because i've seen quite a few of these like

02:52:47.160 this is groundbreaking everything changes and then it turns out that no it's not or there was

02:52:52.460 a mistake in the lab or they did this with this and that with the numbers and blah blah blah um

02:52:58.140 so i i really like it i i like that they do it i really like archaeogenetics but i do think that

02:53:05.920 it is a part of the understanding not the whole of it because if you you know like the the seven

02:53:14.640 wise men describing the elephant you know like archaeogenetics is the guy tugging on the tail

02:53:21.140 you can say a lot of things just from tugging on an elephant's tail if that makes sense

02:53:25.620 it does also for you hey Chris in your opinion what was the biggest change between the bronze

02:53:39.240 going into the iron age in particular its shift in religion and language and how it affected the

02:53:46.560 course going forward it's hard to say I think it's hard to say what the single biggest would

02:53:54.720 be in that regard because there's so many things um i think the most interesting is the idea of

02:54:02.720 a shift a shifting of priestly authority in terms of religion i think the most interesting is the

02:54:11.520 shifting of priestly authority from the you know being shared with the elites the with the military

02:54:20.580 capital the shift of priestly authority being moved away from something that is shared with

02:54:26.620 military authority and held by the elites towards increasing it seems idea of

02:54:34.700 the priest as more than just a ritual technician right like for comparison if you look at the

02:54:42.860 really early rigvedic era kind of brahmin stuff they're very much the guys who have memorized the

02:54:48.740 Vedas and can do these rituals perfectly, but they don't necessarily have authority until the Sramana

02:54:55.120 period where that's kind of built up. And the Vedic peoples don't go through the Bronze Age

02:55:01.200 and the Iron Age the same way Europeans do, which is an important distinction here. 0.88

02:55:06.000 In Europe, it seems like the Iron Age is when... it's a step towards what we today would recognize

02:55:14.580 as a religion where there is somewhat of a separation between religion and politics

02:55:18.740 it's not as clean as like modern ideas of separation of church and state lead it to be

02:55:24.820 but there does seem to be a movement towards the religious as something somewhat separate

02:55:33.460 from the political not not entirely right um i don't know how much the shift from the bronze

02:55:43.360 age to the iron age impacts things because it's sort of like well people get more hose

02:55:50.160 so now they can grow crops better that has important effects but it's kind of pedestrian

02:55:57.760 i think almost right how much more can you talk about people getting more up

02:56:04.800 yeah i realized at the moment i said that um

02:56:07.360 do you have anything to answer

02:56:12.300 no but your depiction may get us in more nevers on this i do know just knowing the question asker

02:56:21.540 and how nerdy he is um he also included a bit in there about the change in linguistics is there

02:56:27.620 much of that in there that we know or that you know on i don't know if the bronze because that's

02:56:33.640 the question of does the change do the linguistic changes happen while this stuff is going on or is

02:56:39.140 there some kind of uh or is there some kind of effect that like the change in society results

02:56:46.480 in i don't i don't know i think the problem is we have so little the only european language

02:56:53.460 that is attested in the bronze age is greek right that gives us a relatively small sample size

02:57:00.560 And I don't know if there were any changes between Mycenaean Greek and Iron Age classical Greek that could be attributed to, like, the change in metallurgy or something like that.

02:57:15.520 I don't know if... I would separate the linguistics out from the general history here, because it's just kind of going on in parallel, in my opinion, right?

02:57:27.840 Like, I don't think some of these things could have been stalled, except in as much maybe population changes would impact certain things, like maybe Proto-Germanic wouldn't have formed if the Germanic world hadn't kind of split off into its own little blob there.

02:57:46.400 But that had been happening for quite a bit before the Iron Age anyways.

02:57:49.680 that the nordic bronze age had that gap between it and the urnfield system i imagine once that

02:57:56.240 happened things were just set i would almost imagine geography played more into linguistic

02:58:00.440 changes there than like uh material technology i'm sorry i know you wanted me to like make

02:58:07.180 laryngeals and talk about grammar but all right so also we'll start with you on this one this

02:58:14.700 What are both of your thoughts on the usage of B.C. and A.D. versus B.C.E. and C.E., especially in relation to our church?

02:58:26.280 Which thoughts, Chris?

02:58:28.260 Well, I know I've vexed the Altair Yoli in the past with my opinions about how we should date things from the fall of Troy.

02:58:37.780 But I'm actually okay with A.D.

02:58:41.200 It is the year of our Lord.

02:58:42.700 1 A.D. is when Arminius attains manhood and goes abroad to learn wealth and glory.

02:58:48.140 It is when he becomes the Lord.

02:58:51.440 Hermannas Cunigas Arminius Dominus.

02:58:55.700 I thought of that on the fly.

02:58:58.260 No, I sent the, dude, 1 A.D. is when Arminius goes off to war thing to the altar ago a while ago,

02:59:05.280 but I didn't really have anything more with it.

02:59:07.400 I do like that you brought that one up, Svon.

02:59:09.880 I think if we're being more serious, the problem with changing the calendar era is that it makes it hard for people to engage with when things happen.

02:59:23.140 Like if you look at Islamic years or Chinese years or Zoroastrian years, like, oh yeah, it's 80 minus 52.

02:59:32.820 That just makes everything incomprehensible, right? 0.62

02:59:36.720 If we are moving the era, I do think the fall of Troy is useful because it kind of, you know, everything after the Bronze Age collapse is like one period.

02:59:50.560 There's a contiguous movement from like the Greek Dark Ages to today, as opposed to Greece and Rome stuff, Greece and Rome stuff, 180, Greece and Rome stuff, Greece and Rome stuff to the present day, right?

03:00:05.740 uh the fall of troy is basically the earliest we can meaningfully date like written events

03:00:13.300 that happen in europe so it's useful in that regard because there's basically nothing that

03:00:18.940 happens before the fall of troy that isn't like high mythology kind of stuff which is important

03:00:25.840 but at the same time it's like we don't have all that much ability to say like oh yeah 500 years

03:00:34.040 before the fall of troy this event happened except through archaeology where it's like

03:00:38.300 it could be off by a year or two right what are your thoughts sir

03:00:42.060 so i uh

03:00:47.340 we have what we have i think that

03:00:55.040 If I had it all to do over again, if we were starting fresh, then sure, we'd start from

03:01:05.920 a different, we'd pick a different point to start at and to judge things either side of.

03:01:13.600 And I think that's smart because we don't know how far back into antiquity we'll be

03:01:19.520 able to find the year.

03:01:20.720 having like a this is zero year zero and there's nothing beyond it so it makes sense to have a

03:01:26.720 singular point to where you differentiate everything before this everything after that um

03:01:35.520 i wish it wasn't jesus but it is and i want to be honest i think

03:01:42.160 scholarship has moved to talking about common era and before the common era and perhaps our children

03:01:54.240 might look at this real different i'm 45 years old i'm probably going to say bc and ad because

03:02:04.640 that's how i learned all the things that i learned and it's just what's common but here's the thing

03:02:12.160 So is everybody else.

03:02:13.820 They're just pretending it's something different, and it's not.

03:02:16.940 True, it's one of our virtues.

03:02:18.280 That is the defining thing that made the difference,

03:02:22.480 that made it at that particular year is Jesus.

03:02:26.080 This is what it is.

03:02:27.840 If we were completely restructuring, and I know some people try to do that.

03:02:31.440 Chris gets cheeky with his Fall of Troy thing.

03:02:36.200 I know the Austro Alliance used to try to do the Runic Era, 0.57

03:02:40.140 which 0.99

03:02:41.900 you know they picked some

03:02:44.400 Alcintree specific date that

03:02:46.440 they based things on

03:02:47.960 I think at best

03:02:52.100 it's fun to have

03:02:54.680 you know

03:02:56.360 that run alongside of normal

03:02:58.340 stuff to where we can

03:03:00.140 you know be

03:03:01.000 highly specialized

03:03:03.820 or highly

03:03:04.920 eccentric about if we wanted

03:03:10.060 to be i don't think that's wrong but it does like chris said it makes things not making sense

03:03:16.540 we all know what ad and bc is certainly in the west all of our stuff is dated to that all of our

03:03:24.780 you know you go to your mom's headstone and it's dated in those years we know what it means

03:03:32.060 and a lot of language and a lot of this is about communication, we do a less good job

03:03:41.280 of communicating when we start quoting in some strange calendar that, you know, only

03:03:46.180 a few hundred or a few thousand of us use, using the thing everybody else uses so we're

03:03:52.960 all on the same page and so there's not confusion just has such a greater utility.

03:03:57.220 But again, it doesn't bother me either way.

03:04:02.660 I think we all know what we're talking about, whether we use BCE or EC or whatever we're

03:04:08.640 doing on that.

03:04:09.640 So it really isn't a huge deal to me.

03:04:11.280 I think in a perfect world, I think that the optimal is to do the BCE and the CE thing.

03:04:21.780 just came about after i you know learned all of my base in history that it's it didn't though

03:04:28.900 it's like 400 years old yeah but nobody does that like you know college

03:04:38.260 yeah but like learning stuff in any of the sources that i learned any of the things except for fairly

03:04:44.980 nerdy stuff it's bc and ad and it's because all you're doing is taking out one word you're taking

03:04:52.180 out jesus you're still yeah and they mean the exact same on his on his life or whatever well

03:04:58.380 to be fair if we're if we're actually looking at this from a christian perspective the ad calendar

03:05:03.480 is wrong anyways jesus was born like three days three years before 180 you know like sure but

03:05:10.860 it's the system that we have and that's what it is meant to be representing and we all know that

03:05:17.800 and changing a letter on it i don't think really makes one know the difference the other and

03:05:23.400 somebody did mention this in the chat i think there's a long-standing resistance to it because

03:05:29.900 of degenerate forces that are aligned with all of the things that are contrary to our values

03:05:40.620 like to do that because they're inherently anti-religion and anti-tradition and you saw

03:05:47.260 movements with that you saw a attempt at restructuring that during the french revolution

03:05:54.620 when again the very extreme forces of chaos and disorder tried to remove any spirituality

03:06:02.300 any religion from public life you see that when there's the secular forces of degeneration and

03:06:12.380 chaos that try to take over and I think there that has bred in a natural resistant to it too 0.57

03:06:19.280 um but again I don't think just to throw in here real quick um

03:06:24.660 the Roman calendar is actually kind of goofy this way if you spend too much time looking at it

03:06:31.920 um the the modern calendar system we use is the roman calendar system right and it is just a

03:06:39.080 series of band-aids band-aid fixes that became permanent solutions band-aids held down by

03:06:48.620 band-aids right and what ad is really fixing is the lack of a fixed uh year so romans would date

03:07:01.080 They varyingly between ab urbe condite, from the founding of the city, or they date from, like, Romulus' ascension, or from the establishment of the Republic, or, like, in the year of consul, whatever.

03:07:17.980 And this made it really hard for the Romans in Rome to know how many years ago most things happened, because, you know, there's just disagreement, right?

03:07:27.260 um even the 12 months of the year are a band-aid fix the number of days in the month is a band-aid

03:07:36.380 fix yeah it's kind of silly and i guess sort of embarrassing that like fixing the calendar year

03:07:44.040 to this rabbi's birth is the band-aid fix that got done for the era year but it's no more silly

03:07:51.540 than like you know julius caesar giving three months to worship him because he's so cool like

03:07:59.020 why is july called july after this random roman warlord right why is august named after

03:08:06.720 his nephew that inherited his regime like it doesn't why is october the 10th month when it

03:08:14.020 means eight right exactly like you know you can have your nerd fun trying to come up with a better

03:08:21.300 calendar, but past a certain point, the AD, the Roman calendar we use, is the calendar of measuring

03:08:29.680 time as best we can for the purposes of just being maximally correct about the time in between

03:08:38.200 events. Because if you look at other calendar systems, like the Chinese calendar, the Jewish 0.66

03:08:42.360 calendar, the Islamic calendar, the Zoroastrian calendar, they're doing things and they're not

03:08:47.100 necessarily trying to be able to say it has been exactly 50 years, 326 days, 17 minutes,

03:08:54.380 three seconds between these two events. They're trying to do other things, and whenever I see

03:08:59.860 people try to sponsor a relevant relation to our church, just as an example, whenever I see people

03:09:07.000 propose alternative calendar systems for Western religious purposes, they don't really seem to have

03:09:15.480 a reason for not just using ad like to go back to the ostrich and reliance's runic year it's just

03:09:22.320 ad plus 250 and then they renamed all of the months to like merry moon and hay moon it's like

03:09:29.180 but why not just use ad if you if it's just about the renaming thing compare the islamic calendar

03:09:38.840 where no it it does have to be in different increments and use different years because

03:09:44.680 they're they're measuring something different than just you know rotations around the sun

03:09:51.600 between events right and i don't see a reason if we're being honest given that we in the west

03:10:00.640 only ever use the calendar for angular rotation of the sun between events i can't see a reason

03:10:10.420 other than like the sheer nerd thrill of changing it you know yeah it's fun to edit out all the

03:10:18.340 christian elements of stuff i get that and i it's not that there's not even value to it and honestly

03:10:24.320 if everybody started doing it 100 years from now i'd probably feel really different when everybody

03:10:29.780 adjusted to it but in the meantime it becomes something that is an impediment to people

03:10:34.460 understanding what you're talking about and i think that's kind of why we don't go with something

03:10:39.700 else but i think that you know changing it over to the secular common era as opposed to

03:10:46.020 year of our lord is just a linguistic habit that i'm not used to because of how i was raised and

03:10:52.420 when i you know the books and material i consumed at the time i consumed it um one more real quick

03:10:59.140 on calendars being dumb in the 1600s they realized that the leap year system even though it's a

03:11:06.740 a band-aid it needed a band-aid so they added the we skipped the leap year every 400 years

03:11:13.720 but when they did that in order to align things properly they had to remove 10 days once so every

03:11:23.060 country had to decide when they were going to do that so countries calendars got shifted and off

03:11:29.540 so like one country decided to do it this year the other country decided to do it like three years

03:11:34.180 later um poland wouldn't didn't do it till like the 1700s so they were like 10 days off from

03:11:42.580 england for like 40 years but russia didn't do it till the 1917 so for literally 350 years russia

03:11:54.380 was 10 days off from england and other countries to the point where because it was almost 400 years

03:12:01.280 passed they were actually 11 days off instead of 10 now so they had to just one day you wake up and

03:12:08.160 it's october 2nd the next day you go to bed and you wake up the next day and it's october 13th

03:12:14.720 there was some olympics if uh we can move on from this i just want to say this fun fact

03:12:19.840 there was some instance of the olympics where the russians

03:12:23.200 showed up like 10 days late for the race because of the calendar difference

03:12:31.280 it's unfortunate um we're asking embla created within germanic europe or where they created

03:12:40.820 elsewhere and their ancestors migrated into germanic europe so

03:12:46.900 it's a historical because they were created well before

03:12:53.840 the word or concept of Germanic Europe existed, but geographically, I don't think we truly

03:13:04.980 know.

03:13:06.680 They are, that period of history is at least as far back as the Ice Age, but I think it

03:13:12.880 is before that.

03:13:13.840 There's this period of time that, you know, jokingly kind of refer to as the Age of High

03:13:19.740 adventure because it's that you know mythological period of time before the receding ice age where

03:13:28.860 you know conan and stuff takes place there's this whole prehistory in the deep deep deep antiquity

03:13:38.780 that human life has been on earth for a very very very incalculably long time doing things

03:13:47.980 every now and again we get you know glimpses of it in strange and obscure things and it's so elusive

03:13:56.380 and so so little to work with that we don't have much to go on so the exact moment of old

03:14:06.460 and billy and they giving the gifts of life and consciousness and divinity to our people

03:14:13.980 like divine spark to our people at least as far back as the ice age wherever that location tends

03:14:22.460 to be we started this series in like the caspian step kind of area because that's

03:14:29.260 the best farthest back we have to trace our race linguistically um

03:14:37.660 but again, I've always been a fan of the idea of a polar origin. There's infinite mystery

03:14:48.700 about that, and I think we do ourselves a disservice trying to plot that and pretending

03:14:54.320 that we know accurately where that took place or what time that took place, but it took

03:15:00.000 place at the very beginning of our race, and it certainly had taken place by the time this

03:15:05.600 series started with our the receding glaciers and our people on caspian step largely the pockets

03:15:14.080 were distributed other places at the receiving ice age um just to throw this out here real quick

03:15:20.320 if you look at the the texts what they say is odinville and vey were walking along the beach

03:15:26.400 and they happen upon driftwood and then they make uh oscar and embla from this driftwood

03:15:35.280 their names are ash and elm right so if we presume that they are ash tree and elm tree driftwood

03:15:43.920 if you go back to the ice age the most likely spot for that to be where you could find again

03:15:51.360 this is this is more literal than i think the text should be taken but it's just kind of a fun

03:15:56.000 little exercise um this i talked about this in the last episode in this series um the balkan refugia

03:16:06.080 where the ice age you know non-conifer trees could still grow um did have sea access so like

03:16:15.120 somewhere in southeastern europe croatia kind of area i was just i was picking a place you know

03:16:21.920 that is somewhere that could have elm trees ash trees and a coastline where there could be driftwood

03:16:29.540 from both so like if you had to put it but you always called it ash and elm what did the other

03:16:39.900 the goths call it what did they oh yeah yeah of course that is a fun yeah that's a fun mystery

03:16:47.760 thing to like, alright, where

03:16:49.860 could this have taken place

03:16:51.380 if the three elements in the lore were there

03:16:53.900 I do think that's fun

03:16:55.220 but again, I think that's far too

03:16:57.920 literal and I think that the idea

03:16:59.960 is there was

03:17:02.080 a proto-version of humanity

03:17:04.060 the gods

03:17:04.860 found that

03:17:07.380 they found an existing thing

03:17:10.060 and transmuted

03:17:11.840 the existing thing into 0.55

03:17:14.020 Aryan man 0.80

03:17:16.100 imbued with

03:17:17.300 with will with sacrality and with life force and those things um

03:17:26.720 those things shaped us and at that moment of time it existed in an age where we were

03:17:34.840 all one people and that people grew from then and these last two episodes with chris have been the

03:17:42.520 stories of that people and its growth and development.

03:17:49.360 And then finally for the evening, what do you think of Stephen Flowers' use of Alcitru

03:17:55.560 with the left-hand path by emphasizing self-empowerment?

03:17:59.920 Chris.

03:18:00.920 um i mean i think left hand path and right hand path are so

03:18:11.240 kind of generic that it seems

03:18:16.700 i've often wondered the validity of even having the distinction like

03:18:22.780 the left hand path has to either be so mundane as to be kind of pointless like yes i want good

03:18:30.540 things to happen, and I'm willing to do things to make them happen, or it has to be so, like,

03:18:36.380 evil, spooky at times as to be like, but no one actually does this, you know? Like,

03:18:44.900 I think there's a current of self-improvement and of gaining knowledge and of wanting good

03:18:52.240 things and working to acquire them in Asatru lore that I don't think is, like, out of line

03:18:58.560 with us to do as mortals today um i i do wonder how much that actually meaningfully

03:19:07.480 overlaps with a lot of what magic spelt with a k my chaos my left hand path my darkness kind of

03:19:17.720 stuff really entails doing right like odin when in in the stories were told of odin

03:19:28.600 most of the stuff that i've seen people attribute as left hand path to him is in the service of

03:19:35.600 order and not really that spooky when you come down to it compared to some of the stuff some

03:19:43.440 these left-hand path types posit um but i'm not super i'm not i haven't read everything by dr

03:19:51.280 flowers if he's using a different definition than what i'm thinking of and he could be then that

03:19:56.960 changes the matter so i've got a lot of thoughts on it um i specifically in dr flowers instance

03:20:10.160 and in a lot of that i think it's incredibly unhealthy if it's not balanced um

03:20:17.440 and i think that you know for anybody listening to this that may be unfamiliar

03:20:22.000 typically right hand path things are devotional religion participant participation in community

03:20:31.360 and in social order and social structure and those kind of things and left-hand path things

03:20:41.120 are individualistic um self-empowerment they tend to be edgy

03:20:50.560 spooky but that's not the purpose antinomian being they challenge social norms they challenge

03:21:04.800 the boundaries of things to prove how detached from the rules of regular people they are because

03:21:12.640 they're on this road to the self-empowerment and they don't want to be

03:21:16.420 chained in by the fuse that holds society and individuals together as part of that society

03:21:26.440 i think that there's certainly and i say it anybody who listens to the program i am very

03:21:33.540 appreciative of a lot of dr flower's work uh i think there's tremendous value in much of it i

03:21:41.060 there's tremendous value in his wooden work i think his commentary on magic and left-hand

03:21:46.420 path things is also very informative but

03:21:53.460 what is essential to outlay and i think that you pair it here with ousatru and clearly he

03:22:01.540 at least most often puts it in an ousatru context in the fact that he

03:22:11.060 recognizes alsatru cosmology or talks about odin it's not really alsatru because it's not really

03:22:19.780 about loyalty to the gods it's about emulation of odin in some way but it's not about worship

03:22:27.460 of odin it's not about being in some kind of an actual relationship with a religion it's about

03:22:34.340 within a

03:22:37.140 also true

03:22:39.860 cosmological framework

03:22:42.240 working to be your own

03:22:44.080 individuated like 1.00

03:22:45.580 Vidki Runemagus

03:22:48.260 and I

03:22:48.960 those aren't

03:22:52.200 bad if you have

03:22:54.300 right hand path

03:22:56.180 things down if you are

03:22:57.940 actively engaged

03:22:59.440 in religion in society

03:23:02.420 in a family

03:23:03.580 in these things and then you also want to enhance your experience by personal empowerment by

03:23:12.060 personal growth and development through left hand path things again it depends how you define

03:23:18.080 left hand path if it's just personal development and personal empowerment that's fine and i think

03:23:24.260 that that if it's balanced with if it's built on top of a solid foundation of being successful on

03:23:31.260 right hand path great if it is not if it's defined by a rejection of the right hand path 0.57

03:23:38.780 or by it being a standalone thing i think that it is delusional i think it's masturbatory and i think

03:23:50.060 it's um unhealthy uh mentally the people that i've seen and i am aware of who have been

03:24:01.260 primarily focused on that have been unwell because of it at best their lives have been very

03:24:08.500 unsatisfying and unbalanced but it's also very often accompanied by

03:24:14.780 very real mental illness and dysfunction we are meant to be social creatures we are meant to

03:24:23.220 function within groups and within a ordered social construct, defining your whole existence

03:24:32.480 as either being outside of or a rebellion against that tends to make very unhealthy

03:24:40.120 and unhappy people.

03:24:43.020 Just to throw in here, I apologize, guys.

03:24:46.060 By the time the questions roll around, it's past my bedtime, so I don't have a prepared

03:24:51.540 stuff to say so i'm kind of groggy here um it's worth remembering too that when we are told of

03:24:58.400 odin and he's described as like this wandering wizard feature this wandering wizard figure

03:25:03.280 seeking wisdom odin is also the cosmic king who rules the universe from a throne atop his fortress

03:25:12.780 in the highest on the highest place in the cosmos right odin you know the the glorious dead or the

03:25:22.680 einherjar who are chosen for their loyalty and devotion and great individual prowess and virtue

03:25:28.180 but also in the context of being part of their society not for being separate for it we're never

03:25:35.800 told of a rune wizard who you know goes away into a cave and escapes society and is rewarded for

03:25:44.240 that in fact that sort of thing seems to be something that scandinavians medieval scandinavians

03:25:49.420 looked down upon quite greatly the the in european folklore outside of scandinavia the witch as like

03:25:58.200 the bad woman in the woods practicing magic is in the woods she is dangerous and she's outside

03:26:05.740 of the norm she's not in society participating in it even improperly she's not participating

03:26:14.360 in it at all she's preying on it from the outside a lot of left-hand stuff seems like an attempt to

03:26:23.260 get out of society to pray on it from the outside and it doesn't seem to be what our lore

03:26:31.020 what even even in simple terms wants us to do and it doesn't seem to be what the gods do

03:26:37.740 thor goes off and fights giants then he comes back home where he's part of a group

03:26:45.580 yeah it's there's a lot of dysfunction there there's a lot of

03:26:49.180 trying to self-identify with the bad guy for whatever reason. I think a lot of it is useless

03:27:01.060 and delusional and just an excuse to not have to follow rules, to not have to conform,

03:27:10.300 and to not have to act right. But I think that there's also a very legitimately powerful

03:27:17.020 component to that i don't propose that um legitimately adept left-hand path practitioners

03:27:26.860 aren't magically efficacious i i think that they are and they can be i don't think that

03:27:35.580 good mental health necessarily is a sign of magical potency or not i think very often people

03:27:42.060 who are poorly adjusted miserable people on the outside of society who are also largely crazy

03:27:50.540 also are powerful magically i think there's a similar brain mechanism that has madness and

03:28:03.500 wizardry attached to the same kind of brain chemistry sometimes and i've seen that plenty

03:28:09.100 of times so i don't think we should discount it as just something silly i don't think i think that

03:28:16.540 it often is that because people that can't get along with other people right in society use it

03:28:23.740 as an excuse but i think other people who are very serious about it um can become very self-adept at

03:28:35.980 um metaphysical things i don't discount that at all i don't think it is healthy i don't think it's

03:28:44.460 the right way to do those things and again an unbalanced sense it's such a broad term and i

03:28:51.180 don't it's easy to offend people when in the end we may be talking about two very different things

03:28:57.900 You can be functional in society and include some left-hand path kind of self-empowerment and that be just fine. It's when one rejects the right-hand path and is just the left-hand path and then embraces antinomianism, which is an essential part of a lot of people's left-hand path practice.

03:29:24.400 but we're way out in the weeds on it i just wanted to clarify again there's

03:29:29.840 plenty of good things to be learned from left-hand path practitioners

03:29:36.240 but i think you pick and choose out of that what's useful to supplement a successful life

03:29:43.040 that you're already living as opposed to an escape from it or a way to like a shortcut

03:29:49.520 to spiritual evolution outside of society or or worse trying to find some kind of

03:30:00.960 secret power because if we're being mean you're a loser in the society that would expect you to

03:30:08.880 follow the right hand path and that this is your only option given your inability to

03:30:14.880 simply put conform to the norms and customs and practices of your society which i'm not

03:30:21.360 saying that cold-heartedly but it is kind of like but why do you need the magic

03:30:27.840 well you know here's the other thing there are people

03:30:33.140 i have seen within altitude very often people want to skip right to the magic they want

03:30:42.520 they want they don't want to do the hard work to condition themselves to be useful in that way

03:30:51.040 they want to skip ahead and feel special and feel outside the box because they don't need

03:30:57.980 to listen to anyone because they're a self-appointed wizard of some kind

03:31:03.680 I think that often those people are buffoons. I think that it tends to metastasize and many of

03:31:12.720 them become degenerate and dangerously perverse. I think a lot of those things occur. I don't think

03:31:21.180 that's the case with everybody. That's way too broad of a brush. There's some left-hand path

03:31:26.360 practitioners i have a great deal of respect for and think are very powerful um but most of the

03:31:33.600 time it's people that are oddballs that are socially odious and can't function within

03:31:43.120 normal groups and so they choose to wear their inability to conform as some kind of badge of

03:31:52.080 honor, and I think that is very dangerous and not something to be

03:31:56.020 annihilated. That's all I got

03:31:59.980 for this evening. Chris, that was amazing, and I think everybody learned

03:32:04.040 a lot. I know everybody looks forward to your history episodes, so thank you very

03:32:08.040 much for bringing that to us tonight.

03:32:12.340 Nick, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you to the people that

03:32:16.000 donated tonight. I know it's been a little bit different story. I know going to the

03:32:19.840 Zellin stuff at the QR code link is a different way to do stuff, but I appreciate the people

03:32:26.280 who participated.

03:32:28.040 Hopefully, we'll have payment processing back to where it should be by the next time we

03:32:32.200 talk to you, but praise that ice when it's crossed.

03:32:38.080 Yeah, I'll go ahead and close out, and after I close, we'll take a final moment of silence

03:32:49.820 in remembrance of Bradley Hewitt.

03:32:53.940 Until next time, he'll be ASEER,

03:32:56.220 he'll be FOLK, he'll be AFA,

03:32:57.840 and remember, victory never sees.

03:33:00.880 Hail.

03:33:19.820 Transcription by CastingWords

03:33:49.820 We'll be right back.

03:34:19.820 Transcription by CastingWords

03:34:49.820 Thank you.

03:35:19.820 Thank you.

03:35:49.820 We'll be right back.

03:36:19.820 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - August 13, 2026

8⧸12⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 214 - Völkerwanderung

Episode Stats

Transcript