00:08:48So if you'd like to donate, you can donate through the QR code.
00:08:53brother and uh yeah also we have kind of a store solution on that our store is
00:09:02temporarily down as we figure out our uh our payment processor which again we are well on
00:09:08the way towards resolving but in the meantime you can manually email store at roomstone.org
00:09:17tell us what you want we can finalize any cost on that and get those shipping
00:09:22So it is not as clean or as pretty as it was previously, but we are working on it.
00:09:27And in the meantime, you can still get AFA products and you can still contribute to the AstroFolk Assembly and our various fundraising efforts.
00:09:36And if you really don't like the QR codes for whatever reason, we have Buy Me A Coffee back up.
00:09:44So you can go to my buymeacoffee.com slash victoryneversleeps.
00:14:17these horsemen began to experience a great series of differentiations,
00:14:22but they do not have any rupture of continuity.
00:14:25It's like branches coming out of a tree limb, right?
00:14:29So we covered last time the Ice Age to the Indo-European Conquest.0.95
00:14:35So now we're going to go from cattle herders are in charge of Europe0.52
00:14:40to the setup for a number of previous VNS episodes we've done.
00:14:45the arminius episode the goths episode the anglo-saxons episodes i didn't intend you to
00:14:51deploy these right now nick um the upcoming scandinavian episodes we're going to start off
00:14:58around 2000 bc as northern europe is entering the bronze age where they're going to pause for one
00:15:03moment because i'd like to acknowledge jim bob who bought us a five dollar coffee thank you jim bob
00:15:09we appreciate your he says we have his support and we appreciate your support jim bob thank you
00:15:14very much. Also, Gilbert donated by means of the QR code, proof of concept. He even was able to
00:15:23get a message on there, which much appreciated. Yeah, so Gilbert donated $150 and says heal the
00:15:34gods. He'll heal to the givers and heal to you, Gilbert, for your continued donation. So him
00:15:42doing that shows that you can put a little message in the uh um in the donation at the qr um qr zell
00:15:51link which is awesome and it can put right there where you'd like the funds to go so thank you guys
00:15:58for that appreciate it and uh it works so back back to the story so we're going to start off
00:16:08around 2000 BC as Northern Europe is entering the Bronze Age. We're then going to move through the
00:16:13Iron Age up to the Roman period, the migration period, and enter into the Viking Age. This is
00:16:19going to require a bit of jumping around as we go, so please bear with me. Alright, so what does
00:16:26Europe look like at this time? So to get us to the Bronze Age, let's just do a brief rundown of
00:16:31what's happening in Europe as a refresher and contextualizer. Nick, do you want to throw up the
00:16:36overlap map all right so there are a variety of material cultures in europe which means people
00:16:45making things in a certain fashion and the two major ones are the bell beakers and the corded
00:16:52ware both of these descend from the indo-european step right these two peoples have expanded across
00:17:01europe by the end of this period they've fully and totally conquered it they've established
00:17:05alliances with farmer and hunter-gatherer populations across the continent and begun
00:17:09intermarrying with them. When the easiest fruit gets picked, people start pulling away to find
00:17:15new gains. That is, when the borders are filled in, the periphery starts pulling away from the
00:17:21center. And what's important here, remember, material cultures overlap, which is kind of
00:17:27obvious because there's that big blob that says overlap, right? But there's many, many smaller
00:17:32material cultures throughout this, right? Do you want to insert the Late Bronze Age map, Nick?
00:17:40All right, so this is what Europe looks like at the time, or rather this is what the development
00:17:46of the bell beaker and corded ware material cultures looks like. The blobs on this map
00:17:51are different material cultures, which again means ways of making things that get left behind for
00:17:55archaeologists. The Urnfield system and the Atlantic Bronze Age go on to become the
00:18:01proto-Italo-Celtic peoples, pulling away from the center in a sort of west-southwest fashion.
00:18:07This goes on to become the Halstatt and Latene material cultures. And then we've got Italy,
00:18:11which is more complicated and the intricacies of it are not really relevant here.
00:18:16In the east, there's the development of the so-called Scythian world, which means the
00:18:20Indo-Iranic peoples, including groups other than just the Scythians and Indo-Iranic peoples,
00:18:26such as the people who go on to become the proto-Baltoslavs. And of course in the southeast,
00:18:31there's the paleo-balkan world and the greek world in the north there's a poln northwards
00:18:38so what is today germany which is more or less the center of europe experiences this
00:18:44north-south split with central germany becoming increasingly vacant while concentrations of
00:18:50people begin to build up in the north and the south about what year is this this is around
00:18:56entering 2000 BC, entering 2000 BC to 1600 BC. So the southern peoples end up becoming part of
00:19:09the burgeoning proto-Celtic bloc, whereas the northern peoples end up participating in what's
00:19:13called the Nordic Bronze Age. So at this point there's two meaningful Indo-European groups in
00:19:20Europe. There are Proto-Greeks and then there's what we could call Common
00:19:26Indo-European, which means everyone on this map that isn't labeled Greek or
00:19:32Nuragic civilization. Everyone in Europe today that isn't a Greek has Indo-
00:19:38European blood descending from this singular common Indo-European population.
00:19:43The Indo-European peoples in Europe across various material cultures practice
00:19:49what is essentially one unified religion with one single culture, one single political system,
00:19:55and one single language. They become increasingly differentiated at the time, but at the start,
00:20:01they're just really one group. So the reasoning for that is that the Greeks actually enter Greece
00:20:07a little earlier. There's a lot more of Europe that isn't Greece than there is Greece. So the
00:20:14Greek popular, the Proto-Indo-European peoples that would become the Greeks entered Greece a
00:20:19little earlier and by 2300 uh proto-greek was more or less um mutually unintelligible with
00:20:26what we call common proto-indieuropean at the time do you want to say something sir
00:20:31um yeah i want to i want to point out because it needs constant reaffirming
00:20:39in order for these people to exist to have their worship clearly these people and their religion
00:20:47and their worship, which we still practice today, was existent.
00:20:53All of these people had a relationship with the Aesir.
00:21:00At this stage, they did not call them the Aesir.
00:21:04I don't believe that at this stage the names of our gods are attested in that way.
00:21:09Yet, 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.
00:21:36the gods are with all of these peoples on that map these same gods traveled with those greeks
00:21:44down there and then started you know making their wine into spritzers
00:21:49um these people all are the sons of the all father these people are all our folk
00:21:58in trough with our gods you can see a couple of different branches now starting to develop
00:23:48around, backing this up, I said we'd jump around a bit, around 2900 BC, the first herder
00:23:55Indo-European peoples start moving into Scandinavia. It is already inhabited by two
00:24:01distantly related groups, the hunter-gatherers and the farmers. The herders that move in are a
00:24:07combination of corded ware and bell beaker that gives rise to the so-called battle axe culture
00:24:11in scandinavia because of their battle axes which are you know two-headed axes so there's
00:24:18colonization of sweden and norway from germany and southern denmark but remember the bell beaker
00:24:24culture is still going on alongside the battle axe culture and everything involving material
00:24:28cultures is very very complicated throw up the pitted wear culture image nick so the hunter
00:24:35gatherers are the first people to enter this territory they are descended from that shared
00:24:41ice age population they are the pitted weir culture so-called because their wares have little
00:24:48pits on them these people engaged in the growing of crops they just didn't farm grain
00:24:53they grow root vegetables flax they eat seeds they make seed oils they have large-scale fisheries
00:24:59and deer parks these people are very sophisticated socially and technologically
00:25:04but they don't grow grain, and as such their societies don't display the characteristics
00:25:08of a grain-based hydraulic despotism. Remember, agriculture means grows grain,
00:25:15hunter-gatherer means doesn't grow grain, it doesn't mean doesn't grow animals,
00:25:21and doesn't grow plants. So the Bell Beaker peoples essentially coexist with the pitted0.96
00:25:27ware culture and mingle genetically, like hunter-gatherers and herders live in the same1.00
00:25:33spaces and hunter-gatherer men marry herder women and vice versa. These people are distantly0.86
00:25:39related to the Indo-Europeans, as I've said. In Britain, in Germany, in Scandinavia, these
00:25:44hunter-gatherer peoples are the ones that build the stone circles and the dolmens and various
00:25:50other ancient structures. They built Stonehenge, they built Newgrange. These people seem to coexist
00:25:56and integrate with the Indo-Europeans remarkably well, and the Indo-Europeans end up using a lot
00:26:02of these ancient tombs and holy sites that these Neolithic hunter-gatherer populations built as
00:26:08religious places. This isn't really co-opting because this is just two cousin populations
00:26:14reuniting as one, and one cousin says, wow, your house is amazing. Let's both live here, right?
00:26:22These two populations go on to conquer the farmers. You want to insert the funnel beaker map, Nick?0.83
00:26:33So this is the map of the funnel beaker culture, so-called because of their funnel-shaped beakers.
00:26:41These are the farmer peoples. These peoples come after the hunter-gatherers. They make thatched
00:26:47dwellings and grow grain interestingly they have a decent amount of hunter-gatherer dna
00:26:52indicating that their society was probably the result of these so-called hunter-gatherer
00:26:56resurgence the big summary of that is that when the farmers um spread out through europe
00:27:05uh they quickly take over and drive off the hunter-gatherers but then the hunter-gatherers
00:27:10experience a resurgence and take power sometimes by displacing farmer populations sometimes just
00:27:17by conquering farmer populations we're breezing through centuries of very complicated history in
00:27:23a few sentences i know but we got to keep moving now this doesn't really happen in germany proper
00:27:29however the farmers were far more established in germany and then the indo-european peoples
00:27:34conquered them. So Scandinavians have a large or have a larger amount of hunter-gatherer ancestry
00:27:41and less farmer ancestry, whereas Germans have more farmer ancestry and less hunter-gatherer
00:27:46ancestry. This narrative requires a large amount of simplification, blah, blah, blah.
00:27:52Why did the herders fight the farmers, but not the hunter-gatherers? Well, they didn't think of
00:27:57themselves as herders, hunters, and farmer-gatherers or farm... you know what I mean. They thought of
00:28:03themselves as complex polities with their own histories and we're simplifying them to make this
00:28:09easy to talk about the reality would have been extremely complex and nuanced but we just don't
00:28:15really have intricate records of that reality we use the word conquer but it's also clearly
00:28:22more complicated than just ooga booga me king me kill you me take women right but the point is this
00:28:29the germ the what becomes the germanic world forms out of a single population a single language
00:28:37culture and religion which has an internal north south split of which group of outsiders did we
00:28:43conquer and absorb germans and scandinavians are thus genetically extremely closely related
00:28:49in part due to stuff that happens after this about half of this shared ancestral herder population
00:28:56that culturally wins out with the remaining half being a question of are they more farmer
00:29:01in germany or more hunter uh gatherer in scandinavia but the unity of the conquering
00:29:07peoples means that this distinction smooths out over time so a guy can move from like northern
00:29:14germany into sweden just fine if he's you know a herder all right so we leave the neolithic the
00:29:22Stone Age, and we enter the Bronze Age. Around 1700 BC, Scandinavia and Northern1.00
00:29:27Germany are part of this Nordic Bronze Age. They work bronze, they0.98
00:29:32farm, but they also herd. They have complex diets with lots of meat, lots of
00:29:37dairy, lots of fish. Genetically, the people in the north are more hunter, and
00:29:42the people in the south are more farmer, and the whole culture is Indo-European
00:29:46derived. Remember, this is all very complicated, and we're talking about
00:29:51comparatively small population numbers so there's actually keep in mind to throw in if you just look
00:29:59at the map the further you're into and even the bigger um european map that we were looking at
00:30:08you see mountains and you see stuff the people in the plains and in the green spots can farm
00:30:20and herd better with grassland and stuff the further you get north the colder it gets
00:30:28if you look at all those mountains in scandinavia especially in norway
00:30:35your farming options become much more limited your grazing options become much more limited
00:30:42so adapting to hunting um you see that in a lot of northern climates around the world
00:30:52the further you're in a fertile place to grow crops you do different stuff than when you find
00:30:57yourself in the frozen mountainous north with a much smaller growing season and much less space
00:31:04to do those things so it's just something to keep in mind there's no doubt deep cultural traditions
00:31:11on why some of these groups of people were whatever percentage they were a hunter versus
00:31:17gatherer versus farmer versus pastoral but a lot of that is dictated by culture and a lot of it's
00:31:25dictated by what plot of land and what climate you find yourself in and it's worth bringing up here
00:31:35about the the ecology of this region the last glacial maxima was about 24 000 bc
00:31:46we're at 1700 bc so we've got you know 22 000 years of time in between the ice age and now in the
00:32:00the story europe at this time becomes full of intense thick deep deep forests right so that
00:32:16map that nick put up with like the terrain that's a modern map europe is full of these extremely
00:32:25thick forests and in order to grow crops there you not only have to like not be in the frigid0.67
00:32:31mountains of norway you have to be able to cut the trees down so when these indo-european step1.00
00:32:37herders come in they light these enormous forest fires to just burn down this shockingly dense0.98
00:32:46forest right they are literally bringing with them grass in some circumstances right because
00:32:53the the forest is just too thick for grass to grow if you go and look at a real european old
00:33:00growth forest there's not many of them left they do not have grass because the trees are so big
00:33:06and thick and the leaf canopy is so dense that there's not a whole lot of light hitting the
00:33:13ground right so another point to reiterate here we often breeze through you know farmers hunter
00:33:25gatherers indo-european step herders these are complex people with their own complex internal
00:33:31political world the indo-european step herders are a lot more unified in part due to just
00:33:38They'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
00:33:59the hunter-gatherers were you know in charge of europe for like 10 000 years
00:34:06those people had extremely complex and intricate political and social worlds that we just
00:34:15are blurring over because i mean they're all closely related so i guess right when when
00:34:26we're talking about like conquest and this group and that group we are blurring lines to make this
00:34:33story easier because again we're covering thousands of years of history between last episode and this
00:34:40episode's finishing like we will have gone through you know 180 to the present like 10 times
00:34:48humans were there the entire time and had lives just as complex as ours
00:34:54right you guys understand you guys got to understand this here i want to make a point
00:35:00while we're at it first i want to make a point of saying someone bought us a coffee says helping
00:35:06you stay energized thank you someone i appreciate that um i'd also like to say directionality
00:35:14matters here a lot and it is a hard habit for us to break because any study of history or archaeology
00:35:23or sociology we come up with modern tools and tricks to help us categorize things
00:35:34In our mind, when we apply those to ancient people, there is a tendency to think that
00:35:44they thought of themselves that way, which is erroneous.
00:35:48So Cordy Ware people didn't get mad at Bell Beaker people because they made their urns
00:37:06And it becomes increasingly confusing as we go through this episode with some of the different
00:37:13groups of people, because historians throughout time, even in antiquity, would classify them
00:37:20by artificial means that were useful to the intelligentsia in Rome or in the Ivy League
00:37:29or in London or wherever the historian might be, just remember that directionality is how
00:37:38modern people, whenever you find yourself to call modern, sort data.
00:37:45It's not indicative of what the most important things were to each of these people or a
00:37:50self-identifier that meant that there wasn't overlap like this guy made his poverty wrong so
00:37:56we can't have peace or marry or we're different people i hope that makes sense but the direction
00:38:02out when you don't apply modern things as if ancient peoples are beholden to modern scholastic
00:38:09theory so if we defined things today like how we do with archaeological material cultures
00:38:17The 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.
00:38:26And 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
00:38:34But 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.
00:38:49There are two pre-Proto-Indo-European languages in Europe that are very well attested, and those are Basque and Etruscan.
00:39:01the basques and etruscans never thought of themselves as being one people
00:39:08they were their own thing with their own complex political norms and ways of doing things
00:39:15even though they do share a common ancestry far enough back we often lose the forest for the trees
00:39:26and apply ideas of, like, Westphalian sovereignty onto ancient peoples
00:39:33and do, like, the whole, oh, Britain and France are so different.
00:39:37They have nothing in common kind of thing.
00:39:39And it's like, you know, you plot their DNA and they're, like,0.98
00:39:42two points that overlap compared to the Chinese, right?0.51
00:43:58But 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.
00:44:12But these differences are due to subtle differentiation over time, not due to any sort of fundamental rupture.
00:44:19That is to say, circa 100 AD, a Celt, a Germanic, a Roman, and a Slav all perform bloke to Odin,
00:44:27and while they might differ in specific words or form of ritual, all of their words and forms of
00:44:33ritual are in a continuous lineage back to their shared ancestors. There is no cutoff at this time.
00:44:41All 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
00:44:57This is when the Iron Age starts to begin.
00:45:00We're going to come to talking about Bronze Age and Iron Age, Germanic in particular, society in a bit, comparing and contrasting them.
00:45:10So first, we've talked about Northern and Central Europe.
00:45:14We've talked about how you have like, you know, Germany,
00:45:16and then there's this sort of movement spreading them apart
00:45:21with some people wanting to go north and settle Scandinavia
00:59:32There 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.
00:59:40The problem is that pure iron is actually quite soft and rusts extremely quickly.
00:59:51Iron oxides form very fast and then they are hydroscopic.
00:59:55So 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?
01:00:17Now, 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.
01:00:40like a human body has nickel and vanadium and weird things like cobalt in it and you know
01:00:46carbohydrates or carbon so in theory you could make like steel from a human uh very heavy metal
01:00:53but not really something that an iron age warlord no i i guarantee you there were iron age warlords
01:00:59who thought this would be the coolest idea ever i don't know how many of them succeeded though
01:01:03that's the real question um so speaking of warlords any warlord who can make a hill fort
01:01:11and some furnaces can have his own iron working operation because again if you really really
01:01:16really want iron you can just chuck dirt in a furnace for weeks and weeks and weeks on end
01:01:21and you will eventually get iron iron is extremely um common there's big brain physics reasons for
01:01:31for why iron is is so common it's not not worth getting into you want to throw up the hill fort
01:01:38image nick do i have to i'm looking up research on blood swords okay so this is a hill fort when
01:01:53you hear about like the neolithic barrows or like you know earthen works this is what we're talking
01:02:00about. This is a hillfort. It houses a warlord and his retinue and their private village.
01:02:07It's basically a private town for producing weapons and food. When you read about Odysseus'
01:02:14Ithacan estate in the Odyssey, this is actually what they're referring to. He lives on an island
01:02:21in one of these. When we talk about warlords here, we're talking about guys who have private
01:02:27villages funding them arming them and funding and arming arming their bully boys and these these
01:02:34typically have um i don't know if you can see it all well but there's like a wooden palisade on
01:02:39this one on top of several layers of trenches and earth hills some of these hills were artificial
01:02:46so the warlord got enough people together to like build a hill for him to build his company village
01:02:55on top of for the purposes of extracting wealth from other nearby villages and retreating to this
01:03:02in the k in the inventive invaders this is the precursor to the castle
01:03:07in a lot of ways did you want to say something else here you go these are
01:04:43Fun 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.
01:05:05Celts mentioned. So that is theorized to come from the Proto-Indo-European word
01:05:12which means blood. Proto-Indo-European distinguished two words for blood
01:05:24is the word that means um blood inside the body whereas is the word that means blood outside of
01:05:38the body if you lick iron like a piece of iron it tastes like blood does the taste of blood is
01:05:47because of the iron and the hemoglobin which is to say that you know which is to say the number
01:05:56of men in the iron age who thought about it'd be cool if i had a sword made out of blood is not
01:06:01single digit but it is it's it's actually something that was noticed relatively early here celtic
01:06:09smiths noted the similarity between metallic iron and human blood right like everyone bites their
01:06:17tongue at some point in their life and knows what blood tastes like so around
01:06:231200 BC to 600 BC there's this collapse of the Bronze Age and we enter this
01:06:31period of darkness where Anatolia just lose the entire Anatolian
01:06:35civilizational complex just dies out the people don't go away but Anatolia never0.99
01:06:41recovers scratch that anatolia loses predominance from 1200 bc to like 1080 when the turks show up
01:06:53but i digress the greeks lose writing most of the mediterranean world enters a period of darkness
01:07:02the egyptians the pharaoh manages to hold everything together by the skin of his teeth
01:07:06so for this iron age in the north in northern europe to start you have to remember here
01:07:13they basically lose the ability to import metal like they were a neolithic people making hose and
01:07:21axes out of stone bronze comes in rich people can make swords out of bronze the bronze goes away
01:07:29like i don't even know what an american equivalent would be other than like
01:07:34imagine if we could no longer import semiconductors we can't make this stuff
01:07:39in-house and we don't have the time to pivot to figuring out how to make it in
01:07:45house so everything just goes kerplot so around 600 BC this period called the
01:07:53Nordic Iron Age starts this is when North Northern Europe gets good at making
01:08:01iron i want to digress it's not a digression it's the point of this episode but i want to i want to
01:08:07talk a bit about what happens to the culture and the religion and the society of europe
01:08:14when this collapse in between the bronze and iron ages happens because surely the ancient
01:08:22equivalent of no longer being able to make semiconductors would be a big deal so bronze
01:08:29Age Europe was ruled by central leaders who embodied a solar character. Literally. They
01:08:36bedecked themselves in sun imagery. They are the center of their society, and their society's
01:08:43political conflicts are characterized by highly ritualized duels between competing elites.
01:08:50But there's little open warfare. Society is largely the extended household of the Bronze Age
01:08:57king who parcels out land, women, cattle, and gold to his retainers, and is attended to by a vast
01:09:04personal household bureaucracy. In Greece at this time, we know about this quite a bit because we
01:09:11have Homer and Linear B. Homer tells us this beautiful poetic description of the Bronze Age
01:09:18world and then linear b like writes up there are like tablets found in these ancient palaces
01:09:26with linear b writing on them talking about like the number of boar tusk helmets that the king
01:09:32owns homer talks about men wearing helmets made of boar tusks in the iliad right in greece at this
01:09:40time, this position of this solar king, this is the Wanax. That term is used for three men,
01:09:49or I guess two men and one male figure, in the Iliad. Agamemnon of the Greeks,
01:09:56Priam of the Trojans, and Zeus of the Olympians. Just to give you an idea of how important
01:20:32I 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.
01:20:49um you see that displayed throughout you know throughout the medieval period you see it in a
01:20:57lot of different times but this idea of champion versus champion amongst heroes
01:21:04is carried on even out of its um necessary historicity into you know well into the saga
01:21:15age when you see heroes square off against hero i don't think you know in anywhere it's more
01:21:29in uh in the various conflicts in the trojan war
01:21:35like achilles and hector you see hero versus hero in a really specific and particular way
01:21:41and um it's worth remembering here like we're talking about like the introduction of mass
01:21:53warfare and stuff this idea of our champion sallying forth to fight for us continues for
01:21:59quite a long time until like even into the invention of firearms right duels like i demand
01:22:05unsatisfaction, pistols at dawn kind of stuff, is fundamentally this same sort of phenomenon, right?
01:22:13What makes the Bronze Age special here is not that they're doing this kind of champion warfare,
01:22:20it's that society is set up such that there's such a great importance on champion warfare.
01:22:27You 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?0.94
01:22:39Their societies in the Bronze Age are set up in such a fashion that it doesn't really make sense to not have a champion.0.97
01:22:47And in absence of one, your faction has just completely crumpled.
01:22:54Society 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.
01:23:15People that they're increasingly related to, by the way.
01:23:20Now, interestingly, there's a lot of solar imagery in the Nordic Bronze Age.
01:23:25It's recognizably about the sun and what the sun does.
01:23:29There's the sun boats, there's sun chariots, there's sun wheels, there's people praising the sun.
01:23:35There's people doing all sorts of stuff with the sun.
01:23:38but then there's this massive volcanic winter that happens and the sun cult goes away
01:23:45the the volcanic winter is three years long by the way so like it's actually winter for like
01:23:53three years right that happens in the middle of the bronze age collapse in in northern europe
01:23:59um which did not probably pretty clearly did not help the the case for the continued reign of the
01:24:06sun-worshipping aristocrats right the symbols remain in usage but they become cool doodads
01:24:13and not imagery of a cult and when i say cult i don't mean in the pejorative sense of like
01:24:21you know the the yoga guru molesting people or whatever i mean this in the sense of like
01:24:26an organized why are we doing things the cultic aspect is to say the aspect of religion of like
01:24:34There is a coherent mythos that results in behaviors and rituals, and it communicates via symbols.
01:24:42The 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.
01:24:57Bronze Age Europe seems to have had a religious characteristic largely concerned with the mediation of cosmic order and natural law
01:25:05via central patriarchal authority figures who were the contact point for the divine.
01:25:10It should be underscored here that this does not mean that these people were monotheistic,
01:25:14or that they were entirely defined as people by their kings.
01:25:19It means that the king was the central, the center of their life.
01:25:25and it was the king and his center that had the biggest say in their relationship with the divine.
01:25:32Linear B texts in Greece, from this time, from this same religious mode, are absolutely polytheistic,
01:25:42and the continuity of religion between Iron Age Indo-European cultures goes back to the Neolithic.
01:26:32But the king's household is full of people.
01:26:35So too is the Sky Father's household full of gods.
01:26:39The household of the king is the mediating mechanism for man's interactions with the divine.
01:26:44But it's not the entirety of it, it's just the majority of it.
01:26:49A way of thinking of it in today's language, the household of the king is the church.
01:26:55Like the literal household, like where he lives, right?
01:26:59The Iron Age, meanwhile, seems to break that up.
01:27:02And religion becomes a lot more internally diverse in what it's trying to achieve.
01:27:07It also becomes a lot more egalitarian in a sense, you could say.
01:27:12Religion, in any sense, is done by more than just the leader, it's done by everyone in some capacity.
01:27:17Men now have personal relationships with the divine, in addition to those mediated by the priests and the nobility.
01:27:24Burial traditions become very diverse, and religious items proliferate.
01:27:28Everyone can participate in a religion now, so everyone does.
01:27:34From what we can tell, religion seems less focused.
01:27:38There seems to be this transition from religion being a lot about ensuring and controlling cosmic order and more about living in accordance with it.
01:27:50The king cannot control the sun, so man must live in accordance with the sun.
01:27:56This amounts to a variety of interlocking, interweaving cults.
01:28:01You have your personal relationship, you have your familial relationship, you have your clan's relationship, you have your tribe's relationship,
01:28:08You have the relationship between you and the local priesthood as mediating your interactions with the divine.
01:28:14You have your relationship with the king as mediating your relationship with the divine.
01:28:18It's all very complicated, and there's a lot of overlapping, interweaving, interlocking layers.
01:28:26As opposed to the strict pyramidality of the Bronze Age.
01:28:32Now, 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.
01:28:46The gods have a relationship with my family.
01:28:49That'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?
01:29:01Last episode I mentioned the possibility of an Aryan Genghis Khan figure, that's Conan of course, who, or maybe a few figures like that,
01:29:12who lived around 3500 BC-ish, leading the initial push out of the steppe,
01:29:20and this being an explanation as to why we see such a tight cluster of paternal male, paternal male, paternal lineages in the genetic record.
01:29:30The Bronze Age collapse and the rise of the Iron Age is when this system really0.71
01:29:38starts to fall apart and the Aryan aristocracy that rules over Europe1.00
01:29:45starts to collapse. But it's not that they stop being Aryan. The Iron Age is1.00
01:29:50when everyone starts becoming an Aryan. And by this time, Europeans had been1.00
01:29:56genetically homogeneous for quite a while. These aristocrats were
01:30:02genetically and increasingly culturally homogeneous with the people they ruled
01:30:06over. This is where Europe, as we understand it today, really comes about
01:30:13in the Iron Age. This is where our politics, our culture, our religion, our
01:30:20our societies really come from. Once the Iron Age starts, a lot of things get set. So circa 3000 BC,
01:30:32the idea of like, you know, milk drinking, horse riding, Aryan steppe warlords ruling over a
01:30:40captured farmer and hunter-gatherer population is a gross oversimplification of reality, but it's not
01:30:47a lie. It's just overly simplistic. By, you know, 1000 BC or so, there increasingly stops being a
01:30:59meaningful distinction between these aristocrats and the people they're ruling over as far as the
01:31:06dead bodies are concerned. The Iron Age introduces a further degree of egalitarianism in that now
01:31:13you can own things made of metal without being an aristocrat without being like rich right
01:31:22this isn't to say that it's like a communist utopia as much as it is that now people can
01:31:30engage in effort to acquire things whereas once before they were in many ways locked out of
01:31:37material goods and religious and political processes by accidents of their birth and this
01:31:42is something that shows up in Homer where more than once some guy is like, hark, my name is
01:31:48Prestigbluthocles. Who are you? And the other guy will say, I'm such and suchocles. I don't know
01:31:56my great-grandfather's name. And then the first guy is like, you don't even wear a cuirass of
01:32:02bronze. Die, peasant. And then just like stabs him unceremoniously. And this is a kind of,1.00
01:32:10homer tells jokes right like there will be people who named like farsighted who get shot in the eye
01:32:17with an arrow and then homer as like the omniscient god-like narrator will just say and so
01:32:22farsighted went off to hades bet he didn't see that coming like he made the iliad begins with
01:32:31like a this black humor portion where um uh crises the father of christias goes to get his daughter
01:32:43back because christias had been captured by the greeks and taken as a sex slave and he goes and
01:32:50he's like all right greeks you win you are the superior aristocrats i am just a humble just a0.87
01:32:55humble sacrificer. I submit myself to you. Please give me my daughter back. And then Agamemnon like
01:33:02laughs at him and practically has like one of the other Greeks like get on his knees kind of behind0.78
01:33:09the guy. And then so Agamemnon like pushes him. So the dude like tumbles over and then they like
01:33:13laugh at him while he leaves. And then he like crawls out onto the beach, you know, sobbing with
01:33:19age and demands apollo to help him out because he's been such a loyal worshiper apollo so apollo0.71
01:33:26like rains down plague arrows upon the greek camp so you know it seems almost kind of dishonorable
01:33:36for to us today to hear about like an aristocrat just unceremoniously offing a peasant for daring
01:33:42to get up in his face but it is a reality of the bronze age right do you want to say anything about
01:33:52the this here sir um no other than that's fascinating and interesting um but i also do
01:34:05want to say that steve bought us six coffees for thirty dollars thanks steve there's a question
01:34:10ask what's wrong with the website um stores down while we process uh we're working on fixing our
01:34:17payment processor there's a problem we're trying to get it addressed payment processor moves slower
01:34:23than we'd like them to in the meantime the qr code that we have up there is a zelle link if
01:34:29it looks confusing that's because when you both bring up the qr code you've got to like find your
01:34:35bank and then it'll give you the then it'll set you up to sell money into the afa's account if
01:34:41that's how you'd like to donate to us anybody who does want to donate we appreciate your your
01:34:46contributions as always but yeah it's in the works everything else functionality should be fine if
01:34:51you want to make a store purchase and you know what you want um go ahead and email us and get
01:34:56you set up on the back end and figure out a workaround for you that's not a problem
01:35:00but we apologize for any inconvenience while you guys while we're getting on the other side of it
01:35:05it and we appreciate you guys um wanting to be generous to us and donate so thank you guys very
01:35:11much no chris you're doing awesome um yeah keep keep going we'll let you put it so by about 800
01:35:21bc we get into the warlords and the tribes by 800 bc the populations we find in europe are big enough
01:35:28and sophisticated enough that they have formed complex societies. They form tribes,
01:35:36governments where position is based on merit and status, usually led by some sort of supreme
01:35:41executive who is flanked by a trained priestly judiciary with a background legislature, if you
01:35:47will, composed of the high-ranking and elderly men and women of the polity. Some of these tribes are
01:35:53are just outright cities with written constitutions a thaneric as the fudence of the goths was one of
01:36:01these supreme executives where it's not like there was a vote but he's also not just ruling for his
01:36:08own benefit without concern for the people around him um when caesar marched into gaul the city
01:36:16states he found the opida in latin opidum means city that the romans didn't like and urbs means
01:36:27city that the romans liked he found opida with like written constitutions and the the celts the
01:36:34the gauls at the time they were writing in greek and it's not entirely clear if they were writing
01:36:39in like the greek language or just the greek alphabet um both so it's worth reiterating here
01:36:50all right europe is starting to fill in we're getting something akin to a complex government
01:36:54as we recognize it today it's more than just a warlord extracting booty from a village
01:37:01europe is in contact with europe you occasionally see people act as if like oh
01:37:07the Greeks didn't know what was going on in Denmark. The classical era Greeks imported
01:37:16iron tools from the Germanic world, including surgical apparati, while Aristotle was writing
01:37:24about how, in accordance with the will of almighty Zeus, the northern European man is quite cold and
01:37:31as such, quite slow to think. While he was writing that down, his society was importing0.97
01:37:37scalpels from Denmark because Greeks could not make blades sharp, fine, small, and high
01:37:44enough quality to perform surgery with. The Germanics, for their part, imported huge amounts
01:37:51of wine and drinking vessels from the Greek world, amongst other food ads. Glass was a
01:37:58big import uh out of italy for example um glass beads were a cute little um native uh craft that
01:38:09they did in the germanic world but glass panes and like glass cups glass sculpture that is
01:38:15something they got from abroad um europe was full of people who would travel and bump elbows with
01:38:28important people at the time the philosophers of greece held dialogue with the druids of gaul
01:38:35right we don't necessarily know what that entirely entailed but these people were not
01:45:54This specific flavor would go on to characterize the Proto-Germanic peoples.
01:45:59And so these peoples start pushing southwards, southwestwards, and northwards.
01:46:04And it's worth noting here, material cultures are either named after what amateur archaeologist Hans Hugenblindenburgen thought their things looked like.
01:46:15So bell beakers, well, some German guy thought their cups looked like bells.
01:46:22Pitted wear culture, some German guy thought that their wares looked like they had pits.
01:46:28Corded wear culture, some German guy thought that their wares looked like they were made out of cords.
01:46:34Alternatively, they are named after places.
01:50:07Augustus sets about trying to conquer it after he has assumed control of Gaul.
01:50:15So the Romans referred to Cisalpine Gaul, which is actually that green area, the Insubres, the Boyi, the Senones.
01:50:26And then there's trans-Alpine Gaul, which is southern Germany, that Hallstatt blob, into what we today call France.
01:50:38So Augustus has absorbed France, Spain, a part of southern Germany, and Italy at this time, right?
01:50:46And he looks north to Germania and says, let's go get them next.
01:50:51augustus sets about trying to conquer germania he fails that failure is the arminius episode
01:51:02that we did you want to throw that up now there we go arminius's actions created a separation
01:51:08between southwestern europe and northeastern europe or just we you know southern and northern
01:51:14which in turn keeps the Germanic peoples as a sort of semi-unified block, which is important for later.
01:51:22So the Romans enact this process of managed chaos, essentially trying to pit Germanic tribes and warlords against each other.0.94
01:51:32But to do so, they have to give them stuff.0.81
01:51:34This results in the Germanics becoming increasingly hired to fight for Rome.0.70
01:51:39As 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.
01:51:59Theodosius is referred to as an Iberian. Theodosius shows up as a character in the story of Athanaric.
01:52:05what does iberian mean was he a celt living in iberia was he some kind of basque oh maybe he
01:52:14was one of the phoenician colonists maybe he was an italian colonist or a greek colonist
01:52:20we don't know he was just an iberian presumably he called himself that because his genealogy was
01:52:27actually quite complicated when we talk about multicultural romans we talk about that we're not
01:52:32as the empire goes on hey oh bada bing bada boom my father was growing grapes on this land for
01:52:40centuries kinds of romans and italians are increasingly removed from power and this
01:52:47roman imperial kind of people builds up right they aren't people tied to the land with ancestors
01:52:57in this here they're mobile they're multicultural and the Germans when we
01:53:07talk about the Germanic peoples and the Romans increasingly coming into blows
01:53:10when we're increasingly not talking about Italians ethnic Italians are
01:53:16increasingly uninvolved in the Roman polity as time goes on and this allows
01:53:24for the Germanic peoples to build up power in the Roman Empire. While this is
01:53:31going on, the Huns are slowly moving forward in towards Eastern Europe. Now0.95
01:53:38all of this results into the great treason apostasy to Christianity. It is0.94
01:53:44from this that the Franks become Christian. It is from this that we get0.69
01:53:47men like Theodoric, that we get the Ostrogoths becoming Aryan Christians and0.72
01:53:53stuff like that this here in the short term ties into our arminius episode but it also ties into
01:54:00our episodes on radbod and the loyal saxons it is this continental front this germanic tribes
01:54:08moving southwest that leads to france spain italy but also to the question of why are these people
01:54:18It 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?
01:54:35right and just while we're rambling about the roman empire remember the roman empire
01:54:42is increasingly also fracturing into an east and west block and the eastern empire is increasingly
01:54:48pitting germanics against the uh the western empire do you want to throw anything in there
01:54:55about that sir no just that i think um for people that maybe not don't have a frame of reference
01:55:03especially when you're moving back and forward between many centuries to kind of throw some
01:55:11years out i think help people to get a better situation on where we're at and the other thing
01:55:19i just want to again kind of reiterate as you mentioned as these people move into
01:55:28italy and into greece the religion deviates further and more like noticeably from the core
01:55:37religion that they brought with them because there's all of the metropolitan influences
01:55:44in the mediterranean and in the near east but again up until a lot of these divisions the
01:55:52religious culture of central eastern western northern all of non-mediterranean europe
01:56:01is still extremely similar because it's all working on the traditions of their ancestors that
01:56:11you know at this point we're talking about 180 ish so
01:56:17So 500 years previous, their ancestors were all practicing a fairly unified religious understanding.
01:56:28And, all right, 100 AD, it's relevant to the goth episode, which I'll do my bit on in a minute next.
01:56:39But, 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?
01:56:51These are Gothic leaders who have brought their military might up to the bureaucratic might of the Byzantine Empire.
01:57:01And both are trying to subsume each other.
01:57:04The 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
01:57:16But 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
01:57:26And so they want to encompass them, tame them, and use them for their own purposes.0.63
01:57:33So, 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
01:57:50Increasingly, the senate of Rome had fallen to not having any real power, right?
01:57:55But 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.
01:58:08And 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.
01:58:23And there's this confusion here, but Alaric's like a barbarian. Why is he doing this?
01:58:29It's because Alaric is trying to gain status in the Byzantine Empire by working for the Byzantine Empire.
01:58:37He is an employee of the Byzantine Empire, enforcing an ideological conflict against what the Byzantine Empire sees as a rebellious province, Italy,
01:58:49Practicing a foreign, because it's Byzantium's in Greece, right, but practicing the wrong ideology, that being Roman paganism instead of Christianity.
01:59:02And this is why he leaves the churches and the government offices alone, because at this time, churches are government offices.0.88
01:59:10In order to interface with the Roman government, you have to be Christian.0.77
01:59:14so these warlords that think they can get a fast one on the romans convert because they are actually0.96
01:59:23getting a fast one on the romans because once they're in now the bureaucrats the government
01:59:29officials the priests the eunuchs these guys have to deal with these germanic warlords right
01:59:37so you know we as a church have positions on this but it's also worth just for the sake of
01:59:46historical understanding conveying just what the heck is going on here like a gothic warlord
01:59:54converts to christianity then goes and like sacks rome and tears down temples to jupiter like what
02:00:01Huh? 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?
02:00:18So, 400 AD, the Roman Empire is crumbling. As the Roman Empire begins to experience that
02:00:29economic crumbling for a variety of reasons, it starts pulling away from its frontiers.
02:00:36One of these is Britain. The earliest meaningful inhabitants in Britain were the hunter-gatherer
02:00:41peoples, who arrived around 10,000 BC. These are the same in broad strokes, the same hunter-gatherer
02:00:48peoples who inhabit Scandinavia, Germania, Gaul, Iberia, Eastern Europe, Italy, blah, blah, blah,0.76
02:00:55blah, blah. They're the hunter-gatherers. They are our ancestors. Then they have about 6,000 years0.83
02:01:03of being in Britain. Around 4,000 BC, the farmer populations arrive. Again, these people are also0.95
02:01:12our ancestors. They also derive from Ice Age refugia populations in Europe. Then0.94
02:01:20around 2500 BC, the first Indo-Europeans arrived. Come 450 BC, Britain was
02:01:27importing goods from the Latene culture. This sets the stage for the Roman1.00
02:01:33conquest of Celtic Britain. Now this isn't about the deep history of Britain.
02:01:38when Britain becomes Celtic, blah, blah, blah. Complex stuff. 400 AD, the Angles from southern
02:01:50Denmark, the Utes, or Judas, as they're sometimes called, from northern Denmark, and the Saxons
02:01:57from northwest Germany begin sailing to Britain. This is typically called a conquest or an invasion,
02:02:04but the reality is that they were filling in an increasingly empty province that the Roman
02:02:08Empire had abandoned. There's a point in Roman Britain where statues stopped showing up because
02:02:14all of the statue makers had left, because there was no one hiring them to make this luxury good
02:02:19anymore. Now today we think statues are not all that important, but remember these are a culturally
02:02:28important luxury good. A Roman gentleman of even human status would have dozens of statues in his
02:02:35his house he would have busts of his ancestors he would have busts of the gods he'd probably have0.60
02:02:41um there was a fact there's like a trend where roman men wanted to have like a big statue of a
02:02:47god or like their wife or something in their like atrium and this was like you know part of them
02:02:53showing off that they were classy and participating in the culture by which they meant you know
02:02:58hellenistic culture because this was a greek thing to do to have a this look how look how cool i am
02:03:04look at my statue right and so not being able to have statues is an important sign of economic0.68
02:03:11decline because like bro if you're a roman you've got to have statues right you'd be like for
02:03:19americans it's like you know there's a period where the cars they stop painting them they're
02:03:24just bare metal having your car painted is a status symbol in america right like if you're
02:03:32driving down the street in Mater, that's a problem, right? So the Roman Empire is collapsing.
02:03:41In the 400s AD, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Utes start moving in. They start filling in this0.98
02:03:48increasingly empty space that the Roman Empire had abandoned. The megalithic sites, the ancient
02:03:55barrows first made by these hunter-gatherer peoples0.56
02:04:21So 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.
02:04:43the modern Englishman is the result of several waves and foldings but ultimately of the same
02:04:51stock and there is a continuity going back a long time Stonehenge had been has been a sacred site to
02:05:02the bloodlines of the of the Englishman going back to like they never when it was it made like
02:06:22So it'll say, okay, Germanic people, and also Scandinavian people,
02:06:29which come from a very clear Germanic root.
02:06:33What 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.
02:06:47They 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.
02:07:03Through all of these movements, they are circulating.
02:07:07All of these people were descendants of people who worship these gods since the very, very beginning.
02:07:15we go thousands of years of linguistic developments and different cultures you know
02:07:25staying put in different valleys or over a different mountain ridge and eventually
02:07:31names and stories of the gods take on a very individual linguistic and cultural shape
02:07:39because the relationship between that particular clan of our people,
02:07:48their relationship with the gods is defined by a different set of circumstance
02:07:53over their experience of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years
02:07:57that's different than their cousins who are over that ridge or across that river.
02:08:02but all of their great-grandparents stood in circle raising horn to
02:08:12the all-father and to the striker and to our guys um and this is this is kind of the theme
02:08:24that I want to reiterate on this these people come from a shared culture a shared religion
02:08:31these people's religious developments all trace back to the same gods who birthed our folk it's
02:08:40very easy to confuse that when you come from you know modern day and you look back at a snapshot in0.99
02:08:49time well you know these people seem really different than viking people and they do vikings
02:08:56seem really different than us but again all of our ancestors stood together worshiping the gods
02:09:03that formed our race and this is the reality of i think if people are looking at these things
02:09:09abstractly as these snapshots it's hard to see the connectivity what chris is doing a masterful job of
02:09:17is weaving the connectivity for us to where it's self-evident and we see that our very
02:09:25real gods shaped our most distant ancestors in the beginning of our race
02:09:32we have been defined by our relationship with these gods in you know whatever those contexts
02:10:10thread that leads to our lore and the nomenclature we choose to use to understand our gods in
02:10:18the best context for us, but all of these threads go back to the same source, to the
02:10:29same spool, to the same ur font of divinity that have been with us since the first things
02:10:40that since before the first people that chris spoke about a month ago and are with us through
02:10:47the time period that he's speaking about through all of these different tribes even though some
02:10:52of them have gone all the way to the edges of europe and now slosh back up towards the middle
02:10:57and are coming up you know buddy heads with their brothers their sisters their cousins
02:11:04that either stayed put or are at a different speed of migration.
02:11:12So then there's the northern frontier of Germanic expansion in southern Sweden.
02:11:21Scandinavia isn't really touched by the upheavals on the continent,
02:11:24so Sweden and Denmark just increasingly sort of fill in.
02:11:27At 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.
02:11:41Sometime around 1 AD, the Goths sail southeast, landing on the Baltic coast.
02:11:47From 180 to 280, the Goths migrate southeast, eventually coming to the borders of Thrace.
02:11:53so if you've got like greece thrace is this area around greece the area beyond greece
02:12:03away from the sea it is here that our episode on the loyal goths takes place the goths move
02:12:11from southern sweden out of it into eastern europe actually through eastern europe all the way into
02:12:19southern europe or southeastern europe gothic is very closely related to norse then but they
02:12:27actually split off before a number of sound shifts happened and around the same time like 500 ad
02:12:36there's a uh there were two spears that were found by archaeologists and both of them were named
02:12:43or maybe equipped with the same magic spell i don't know it's not it doesn't really matter
02:12:48um the same thing in norse and gothic in uh norse it was it's like brauner and in uh
02:12:57in gothic it's like ronias or something like that both of them mean tester like
02:13:05find out get it it's a spear so when we think about the goths it's important to understand0.64
02:13:14these people are swedes like there's a set number of generations between a thaneric and his
02:13:23ancestors living in sweden right like accountably finite and as a germanic man of standing a thaneric
02:13:31might have been able to tell you the precise number of ancestors it took to get from sweden to
02:13:36him right go on sir so i just want to interject this and this isn't like the right time for it
02:13:42whatever but it's related and it i remember it now also talking about modern people's misconceptions
02:13:50so they think that also true is a scandinavian thing where it is in fact a all white people thing
02:14:00um but they also with this because they have a scandinavian fetishism
02:14:09may think that scandinavian people are more entitled to it than american people that don't
02:14:16live in scandinavia what they don't factor in is that there's the exact same number of generations
02:14:25between my ancestors that worship the icier and their ancestors that worship the icier the fact
02:14:32that they stayed home and mine went and colonized and conquered and explored doesn't trace an any
02:14:42closer distance chronologically they're you know roughly a thousand years removed from their
02:14:50ancestor who their last ancestor that did look to odin and so am i and you know maybe chris is one
02:15:00generation further removed because he's younger but within within three generations it's the same
02:15:08distance and that's an important thing to track on this just like he's saying about
02:15:12thaneric being able to talk about when they were hanging out in sweden so through my paternal
02:15:21grandmother my father's mother i have the great luck of being a pomeroy which means
02:15:29that I can actually give you some firm data on this.
02:15:33I am 11 generations removed from Eltweed, Eltweed Pomeroy,
02:15:39who arrived on this continent 1630s August 8th,
02:15:44and I am 55 generations removed from Odin,
02:15:49because Eltweed is himself a descendant of Alfred the Great.
02:15:53Um, eleven generations in about the same amount of time it took a Thanaric's ancestors to go back to Sweden.
02:16:53The Slavs engage in a massive migration of their own and are free to expand into previously occupied territory0.85
02:17:01that 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.
02:17:10The Balts, who are related to the Slavs, had been an established people for some time,
02:17:16and after the Goths moved through the Baltic coast, the Balts actually become far more organized,
02:17:32So when the cattle-rearing horsemen of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Avars, Huns, and Goths,
02:17:37because, remember, much to the bafflement of academics,
02:17:42the Goths actually rode horses and herded cattle.
02:17:47When the cattle-rearing herdsmen start to fall back and lose prominence,
02:17:52There'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.
02:18:05Many years prior, just to fill in, sir, did you hear me say my genealogy there?
02:18:16Okay. Many years prior, the ancestors of the Baltic and Slavic peoples were the eastern end of the Indo-European Iron Age and Bronze Age.
02:18:26So 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.
02:18:36the balts and slavs typically don't show up in the vns episodes we've done thus far
02:18:43but it's important to remember they are in this european block as well they are the eastern end
02:18:51of it in a certain sense because you know once you go east of the the baltic and the slavic world
02:18:58you run into like you know ugrics and tatars and turkmans and things like that right but they are
02:19:06part of it. There are Latene and Hallstatt goods in the Baltic world, in the Slavic world, imported
02:19:14through trade networks that stretched from Iberia all the way to what is today Estonia and Lithuania.
02:19:23Right? And now we come to the final frontier of the Germanic world,
02:19:29one that we have only passingly covered and that is scandinavia proper we will be moving forwards
02:19:36with hero episodes on our scandinavian heroes or more of them we've done we've done some episodes
02:19:42already on the latter day heroes if you will now that we've set some theological and historical
02:19:47context for it we can go into scandinavia right looking at all of these various frontiers of
02:19:56Germanic expansion, you'll see that the Scandinavians are the ones that remained true to the
02:20:01Aesir the longest. It is partly for this reason that our religious tradition today begins with
02:20:06this Nordic heritage. They were simply the ones to keep doing this in the best attestation the0.98
02:20:11longest. But it is also because they had seen the slow, gradual destruction of the Germanic world.0.96
02:20:18Do you want to throw up the Germanics map now, Nick? Sweet. Some academics are baffled at how0.99
02:20:26the Goths, the Anglo-Saxons, the Continental Germanics, and the Scandinavians could all have
02:20:31such similar culture, language, customs, genetics, and religion. Their shared origin in the Jasderf
02:20:36culture is why this is the case. The Anglo-Saxons, the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the0.76
02:20:42Goths, all descend from this singular shared populace that develops in northern Germany,
02:20:49Denmark, and southern Sweden. The great similarity of their material cultures is because they all
02:20:55descend from this chaster of material culture. The great continuity of this cultural body from0.98
02:21:00roughly 500 BC to 1280 is due to the near constant contact and interconnectedness of these people's
02:21:07lives. Beowulf returns to Denmark from Britain to handle his inheritance, but Beowulf was not a
02:21:13Viking conqueror in the Danewa, or rather a Germanic man in the 500s AD. That's when the
02:21:18story takes place in-universe, so to say. A man of his standing could move from Britain to Gothia,
02:21:25speaking one language, practicing one culture, and performing one religion,
02:21:29and fit in amongst all of the peoples of the Germanic world.
02:21:32Because up until quite late, these were all literally one single people.
02:21:37And they were, like, Scandinavians were still saying that there was just one Germanic language into, like, the 1200s.
02:21:44There was a debate about how best to Latinize the Norse language,
02:21:49and one faction wanted to just crib Anglo-Saxon's orthography entirely because, well, they speak the same language as us.
02:22:00The Viking Age begins around 700 to 800 or so AD and is characterized from the continental Christian Roman European perspective
02:22:10as the time when Scandinavian pirates, merchants, and fishermen descended upon Europe.
02:22:16But 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.
02:22:34That 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
02:22:45And 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
02:23:02It 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.
02:23:16What 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.
02:23:34At the periphery, some split off going their own way.
02:23:37But at the center, amongst these competing bodies, one will come to dominate the others.
02:23:43It will not then exterminate them, but rather come to characterize them.
02:23:47And so uniformity gives way to plurality, which gives way to uniformity.
02:23:51Amongst the various contests and challenges and games that history plays,
02:23:56we see our folk compete internally, not for who will survive, but for who will lead.
02:24:03This is the second reason why we start at the Nordic tradition and not the Greek or Roman or Celtic ones.
02:24:13But 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.
02:24:24And 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.
02:24:46and that Steve McNallan would know who had reached out to him
02:24:51and to whom it was that he would give his loyalty and devotion.
02:24:56And it is for that reason that we begin with the Nordic tradition
02:24:59and not the Greek one or the Roman one or the Celtic one.
02:27:48But we have to, as people of faith, believe that the gods back and celebrate their champions
02:27:57and their heroes, and that it's not an accident that that's where the best preservation of
02:28:03our Lord ended up, that that's where the best stories and depictions, the most complete,
02:28:08the most accessible, and with the best remains of tithing were recorded in the Norse.
02:28:15And 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.
02:28:31So 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.
02:28:54And 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.
02:29:10All of those things, I think, are genuinely miraculous, but also on the backs of heroes that fought and died for our faith.
02:29:20And a large number of those heroes that's names have come to us were from Scandinavia.
02:29:27We will get to those in future episodes here.
02:29:31And 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.
02:29:47the oldest of which are actually preserved in translation into french and that introduces
02:29:54interesting oddities so there will be characters that are called like saint michael and it raises
02:30:01a question of were they referring to this character as saint michael in the song originally
02:30:07or is that how the translator rendered this or that figure into French, right?
02:31:02belief of the past generation what you have a lot of is holdover stories as you mentioned
02:31:08that are altered to where the characters are no longer gods they're trolls or they're some
02:31:14strange ooga booga thing woods to where they are transferred and um built into fictitious
02:31:24saints or to where the story is significantly altered to become unrecognizably christian
02:31:31in a lot of ways you you see that in certain text in the north but you see a notable lack of that
02:31:42in the edits which you know it's easy for people to point out the cases where they want to suggest
02:31:48a christian influence but they don't notice all of the ways that that's neglected it's something
02:31:54spawn and i talked about recently because stories work makes a big point of like no these are the
02:32:00authentic stories of the gods and we've got to remember these because that's how you develop
02:32:05the poetry that's how you have your you know root mythology to build uh cannings and things from
02:32:16so it's it's preserved in a really particular and special way there one really important thing that
02:32:22separates um the nordic tradition from the greco-roman one is that the greco-roman one
02:32:30survives through kind of sheer inertia but there's a huge amount of stuff we don't have
02:32:35there are dialogues by plato that we don't have we do not have any of the dialogues of aristotle
02:32:41we don't have the book that heraclitus we don't have most of the book heraclitus wrote
02:32:47but in the nordic world there was this ideology of due to a combination so the in iceland in
02:32:56particular due to how this the Icelandic all thing officially adopted
02:33:01Christianity is the state religion of Iceland but allowed for the internal
02:33:05practice of religion could be whatever the heck you wanted right it took very
02:33:11surprisingly long for Iceland to be a kind of standard do what the Pope says
02:33:16or we kill you type society this actually resulted in a great learning by
02:33:23scandinavians of continental scribal techniques and this combined with the general assumption
02:33:32that aristocrats would be passingly literate in the futhark led to this sort of very earnest
02:33:41well we're just going to write stuff down mindset because it's like well
02:33:46even christian scribes would have this mindset because it's like but you're supposed to be
02:33:50be christian who cares if you have a book that records some ancient pagan poem christianity is
02:33:57an internal matter it's not an external thing and so this leads to like um i think it's either
02:34:05rigstu or hundul yoz is in a book that was written by this one of the same scribes who wrote one of
02:34:13portions of the stjärn. The stjärn is the translation slash commentary slash summarization
02:34:20slash explanation of the Old Testament into Norse. So this guy who was a paid scribe who was
02:34:30writing down how writing down the Bible also had no problem getting paid to write down a pagan poem.
02:34:40We 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.
02:35:07It 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.
02:35:26The first time that Iceland got a literate Catholic bishop was after World War II.
02:35:34The first time it had a literate bishop was after the Protestant Reformation, just for reference.
02:39:11These are your gods and you can pray to your gods
02:39:14anytime that you want. I think that we know things that are
02:39:18coming from a rude or a disrespectful or an impious
02:39:21place those things would be inappropriate but praying to the gods for for safety and success
02:39:29and you know benefit in the workplace i don't think it's a bad thing at all i think it's
02:39:35certainly something that often our ancestors would do before a business endeavor certainly
02:39:41before going on a trading mission or engaging in whatever their craft was i don't know about daily
02:39:49but i don't think that's inappropriate i really one thing i would love to see happen more often
02:39:56is like an also true business owner or craftsman or whatever it is have you know an
02:40:04altar in their craft in their workshop in their place of business it's always really um
02:40:13really nice to see that when you go to asian businesses you'll go to the thai restaurant
02:40:18of a Chinese restaurant, you'll have an ancestral altar
02:40:22behind the counter. You'll have, you know, this Thai place he used to go, he had
02:40:27an altar set up for his ancestors, some kind
02:40:31of, I think, Buddhist altar generally, and then a special
02:40:34altar for the king of Thailand. And you could see
02:40:38food and incense that had been left out as offerings. I think that's a
02:40:42completely appropriate thing and something
02:40:46I would love to see happen in regards to our gods.
02:40:51As far as what kind of prayers or what things might be appropriate,
02:40:59people get very hung up on that, and I think that giving that thought is great.
02:41:08So I'm not poo-pooing the idea of it, but I do think there's too much of a worry on it.
02:41:16I 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.
02:41:35But 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.
02:41:55that's always a nice thing to do um because it's going to be covered up it's going to be just for
02:42:00you to know but i think that that's a nice thing to do um maybe even writing a prayer
02:42:07on the on the wood that's going to be covered up or um0.62
02:42:13bularoos for for health or othala for being you know the total property of of you and your family
02:42:21but i think once it's up to do what's called a land taking or what often is we do as a home
02:42:30blessing where you go through the home with um mead that you have asked the the gods to make
02:42:39sacred and that you officially claim ownership of the place declare you know declare its openness
02:44:07reveal their will to you to to give yourself over to them they know best you know
02:44:14that's all I've got there alrighty what did our ancestors do when they have a
02:44:22lot of questions about the nature of reality given that there were given
02:44:29there were no definitive sources so I saw that the chaplain question got asked
02:44:38They would ask their priests. They would ask the Gothar. I think they would also certainly ask their elders.
02:44:47I 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.
02:45:17community, within their kingdom, and within their relationship to the divine and to those
02:45:25beyond the veil that had come before them.
02:45:28I think that's where the root of all of that traditionally has been and kind of, in large
02:56:12no but your depiction may get us in more nevers on this i do know just knowing the question asker
02:56:21and how nerdy he is um he also included a bit in there about the change in linguistics is there
02:56:27much of that in there that we know or that you know on i don't know if the bronze because that's
02:56:33the question of does the change do the linguistic changes happen while this stuff is going on or is
02:56:39there some kind of uh or is there some kind of effect that like the change in society results
02:56:46in i don't i don't know i think the problem is we have so little the only european language
02:56:53that is attested in the bronze age is greek right that gives us a relatively small sample size
02:57:00And 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.
02:57:15I 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?
02:57:27Like, 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.
02:57:46But that had been happening for quite a bit before the Iron Age anyways.
02:57:49that the nordic bronze age had that gap between it and the urnfield system i imagine once that
02:57:56happened things were just set i would almost imagine geography played more into linguistic
02:58:00changes there than like uh material technology i'm sorry i know you wanted me to like make
02:58:07laryngeals and talk about grammar but all right so also we'll start with you on this one this
02:58:14What 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?
02:58:58No, I sent the, dude, 1 A.D. is when Arminius goes off to war thing to the altar ago a while ago,
02:59:05but I didn't really have anything more with it.
02:59:07I do like that you brought that one up, Svon.
02:59:09I 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.
02:59:23Like if you look at Islamic years or Chinese years or Zoroastrian years, like, oh yeah, it's 80 minus 52.
02:59:32That just makes everything incomprehensible, right?0.62
02:59:36If 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.
02:59:50There'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?
03:00:05uh the fall of troy is basically the earliest we can meaningfully date like written events
03:00:13that happen in europe so it's useful in that regard because there's basically nothing that
03:00:18happens before the fall of troy that isn't like high mythology kind of stuff which is important
03:00:25but at the same time it's like we don't have all that much ability to say like oh yeah 500 years
03:00:34before the fall of troy this event happened except through archaeology where it's like
03:00:38it could be off by a year or two right what are your thoughts sir
03:04:11I think in a perfect world, I think that the optimal is to do the BCE and the CE thing.
03:04:21just came about after i you know learned all of my base in history that it's it didn't though
03:04:28it's like 400 years old yeah but nobody does that like you know college
03:04:38yeah but like learning stuff in any of the sources that i learned any of the things except for fairly
03:04:44nerdy stuff it's bc and ad and it's because all you're doing is taking out one word you're taking
03:04:52out jesus you're still yeah and they mean the exact same on his on his life or whatever well
03:04:58to be fair if we're if we're actually looking at this from a christian perspective the ad calendar
03:05:03is wrong anyways jesus was born like three days three years before 180 you know like sure but
03:05:10it's the system that we have and that's what it is meant to be representing and we all know that
03:05:17and changing a letter on it i don't think really makes one know the difference the other and
03:05:23somebody did mention this in the chat i think there's a long-standing resistance to it because
03:05:29of degenerate forces that are aligned with all of the things that are contrary to our values
03:05:40like to do that because they're inherently anti-religion and anti-tradition and you saw
03:05:47movements with that you saw a attempt at restructuring that during the french revolution
03:05:54when again the very extreme forces of chaos and disorder tried to remove any spirituality
03:06:02any religion from public life you see that when there's the secular forces of degeneration and
03:06:12chaos that try to take over and I think there that has bred in a natural resistant to it too0.57
03:06:19um but again I don't think just to throw in here real quick um
03:06:24the Roman calendar is actually kind of goofy this way if you spend too much time looking at it
03:06:31um the the modern calendar system we use is the roman calendar system right and it is just a
03:06:39series of band-aids band-aid fixes that became permanent solutions band-aids held down by
03:06:48band-aids right and what ad is really fixing is the lack of a fixed uh year so romans would date
03:07:01They 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.
03:07:17And 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?
03:07:27um even the 12 months of the year are a band-aid fix the number of days in the month is a band-aid
03:07:36fix yeah it's kind of silly and i guess sort of embarrassing that like fixing the calendar year
03:07:44to this rabbi's birth is the band-aid fix that got done for the era year but it's no more silly
03:07:51than like you know julius caesar giving three months to worship him because he's so cool like
03:07:59why is july called july after this random roman warlord right why is august named after
03:08:06his nephew that inherited his regime like it doesn't why is october the 10th month when it
03:08:14means eight right exactly like you know you can have your nerd fun trying to come up with a better
03:08:21calendar, but past a certain point, the AD, the Roman calendar we use, is the calendar of measuring
03:08:29time as best we can for the purposes of just being maximally correct about the time in between
03:08:38events. Because if you look at other calendar systems, like the Chinese calendar, the Jewish0.66
03:08:42calendar, the Islamic calendar, the Zoroastrian calendar, they're doing things and they're not
03:08:47necessarily trying to be able to say it has been exactly 50 years, 326 days, 17 minutes,
03:08:54three seconds between these two events. They're trying to do other things, and whenever I see
03:08:59people try to sponsor a relevant relation to our church, just as an example, whenever I see people
03:09:07propose alternative calendar systems for Western religious purposes, they don't really seem to have
03:09:15a reason for not just using ad like to go back to the ostrich and reliance's runic year it's just
03:09:22ad plus 250 and then they renamed all of the months to like merry moon and hay moon it's like
03:09:29but why not just use ad if you if it's just about the renaming thing compare the islamic calendar
03:09:38where no it it does have to be in different increments and use different years because
03:09:44they're they're measuring something different than just you know rotations around the sun
03:09:51between events right and i don't see a reason if we're being honest given that we in the west
03:10:00only ever use the calendar for angular rotation of the sun between events i can't see a reason
03:10:10other than like the sheer nerd thrill of changing it you know yeah it's fun to edit out all the
03:10:18christian elements of stuff i get that and i it's not that there's not even value to it and honestly
03:10:24if everybody started doing it 100 years from now i'd probably feel really different when everybody
03:10:29adjusted to it but in the meantime it becomes something that is an impediment to people
03:10:34understanding what you're talking about and i think that's kind of why we don't go with something
03:10:39else but i think that you know changing it over to the secular common era as opposed to
03:10:46year of our lord is just a linguistic habit that i'm not used to because of how i was raised and
03:10:52when i you know the books and material i consumed at the time i consumed it um one more real quick
03:10:59on calendars being dumb in the 1600s they realized that the leap year system even though it's a
03:11:06a band-aid it needed a band-aid so they added the we skipped the leap year every 400 years
03:11:13but when they did that in order to align things properly they had to remove 10 days once so every
03:11:23country had to decide when they were going to do that so countries calendars got shifted and off
03:11:29so like one country decided to do it this year the other country decided to do it like three years
03:11:34later um poland wouldn't didn't do it till like the 1700s so they were like 10 days off from
03:11:42england for like 40 years but russia didn't do it till the 1917 so for literally 350 years russia
03:11:54was 10 days off from england and other countries to the point where because it was almost 400 years
03:12:01passed they were actually 11 days off instead of 10 now so they had to just one day you wake up and
03:12:08it's october 2nd the next day you go to bed and you wake up the next day and it's october 13th
03:12:14there was some olympics if uh we can move on from this i just want to say this fun fact
03:12:19there was some instance of the olympics where the russians
03:12:23showed up like 10 days late for the race because of the calendar difference
03:12:31it's unfortunate um we're asking embla created within germanic europe or where they created
03:12:40elsewhere and their ancestors migrated into germanic europe so
03:12:46it's a historical because they were created well before
03:12:53the word or concept of Germanic Europe existed, but geographically, I don't think we truly
03:24:46By the time the questions roll around, it's past my bedtime, so I don't have a prepared
03:24:51stuff to say so i'm kind of groggy here um it's worth remembering too that when we are told of
03:24:58odin and he's described as like this wandering wizard feature this wandering wizard figure
03:25:03seeking wisdom odin is also the cosmic king who rules the universe from a throne atop his fortress
03:25:12in the highest on the highest place in the cosmos right odin you know the the glorious dead or the
03:25:22einherjar who are chosen for their loyalty and devotion and great individual prowess and virtue
03:25:28but also in the context of being part of their society not for being separate for it we're never
03:25:35told of a rune wizard who you know goes away into a cave and escapes society and is rewarded for
03:25:44that in fact that sort of thing seems to be something that scandinavians medieval scandinavians
03:25:49looked down upon quite greatly the the in european folklore outside of scandinavia the witch as like
03:25:58the bad woman in the woods practicing magic is in the woods she is dangerous and she's outside
03:26:05of the norm she's not in society participating in it even improperly she's not participating
03:26:14in it at all she's preying on it from the outside a lot of left-hand stuff seems like an attempt to
03:26:23get out of society to pray on it from the outside and it doesn't seem to be what our lore
03:26:31what even even in simple terms wants us to do and it doesn't seem to be what the gods do
03:26:37thor goes off and fights giants then he comes back home where he's part of a group
03:26:45yeah it's there's a lot of dysfunction there there's a lot of
03:26:49trying to self-identify with the bad guy for whatever reason. I think a lot of it is useless
03:27:01and delusional and just an excuse to not have to follow rules, to not have to conform,
03:27:10and to not have to act right. But I think that there's also a very legitimately powerful
03:27:17component to that i don't propose that um legitimately adept left-hand path practitioners
03:27:26aren't magically efficacious i i think that they are and they can be i don't think that
03:27:35good mental health necessarily is a sign of magical potency or not i think very often people
03:27:42who are poorly adjusted miserable people on the outside of society who are also largely crazy
03:27:50also are powerful magically i think there's a similar brain mechanism that has madness and
03:28:03wizardry attached to the same kind of brain chemistry sometimes and i've seen that plenty
03:28:09of times so i don't think we should discount it as just something silly i don't think i think that
03:28:16it often is that because people that can't get along with other people right in society use it
03:28:23as an excuse but i think other people who are very serious about it um can become very self-adept at
03:28:35um metaphysical things i don't discount that at all i don't think it is healthy i don't think it's
03:28:44the right way to do those things and again an unbalanced sense it's such a broad term and i
03:28:51don't it's easy to offend people when in the end we may be talking about two very different things
03:28:57You 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.
03:29:24but we're way out in the weeds on it i just wanted to clarify again there's
03:29:29plenty of good things to be learned from left-hand path practitioners
03:29:36but i think you pick and choose out of that what's useful to supplement a successful life
03:29:43that you're already living as opposed to an escape from it or a way to like a shortcut
03:29:49to spiritual evolution outside of society or or worse trying to find some kind of0.97
03:30:00secret power because if we're being mean you're a loser in the society that would expect you to0.94
03:30:08follow the right hand path and that this is your only option given your inability to0.90
03:30:14simply put conform to the norms and customs and practices of your society which i'm not
03:30:21saying that cold-heartedly but it is kind of like but why do you need the magic
03:30:27well you know here's the other thing there are people
03:30:33i have seen within altitude very often people want to skip right to the magic they want
03:30:42they want they don't want to do the hard work to condition themselves to be useful in that way
03:30:51they want to skip ahead and feel special and feel outside the box because they don't need
03:30:57to listen to anyone because they're a self-appointed wizard of some kind0.99
03:31:03I think that often those people are buffoons. I think that it tends to metastasize and many of0.59
03:31:12them become degenerate and dangerously perverse. I think a lot of those things occur. I don't think
03:31:21that's the case with everybody. That's way too broad of a brush. There's some left-hand path
03:31:26practitioners i have a great deal of respect for and think are very powerful um but most of the
03:31:33time it's people that are oddballs that are socially odious and can't function within
03:31:43normal groups and so they choose to wear their inability to conform as some kind of badge of
03:31:52honor, and I think that is very dangerous and not something to be