Asatru Folk Assembly - December 16, 2023


AFA Asatru is Asatru： ＂I Wanna Own That＂ (from VNS Episode 17)

Topics
inner guard
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Steve McNallan Alexander Rudd Mills Allfather Kurt
4 Hofs, 4 Murals： The Real Story (from VNS Episode 17) Baldr, Heimdall, and other Gods of our Folk (Academy Storytime)

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

142.79

Word count

2,173

Sentence count

129

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I address the question, "If it's not AFA, it's Not Also True?" and explain the history of the Also True Folk Assembly and how it came to be what it is today.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So Kurt asks, one question, one question, why have I heard a number of times, if it's not AFA
00:00:18.720 also true, it's not also true. I am folkish and have been all my life. I have a lot of brothers
00:00:25.640 and sisters that are members of the afa and i'm not well so i want to step up and i want to own
00:00:32.520 that and i want to address that the best i can and this isn't meant offensively it's just being frank
00:00:39.320 and i think it is what it is i think for a very long time there is an endless cycle of everybody
00:00:51.960 doing their own thing and nobody wanting to have hierarchy or any kind of orthodoxy on their
00:00:59.360 practice. And just everybody do whatever you want. Do as you will. That's the whole of the law. And
00:01:05.420 I think a lot of people in also true circles, we're doing that for a very long time. And
00:01:13.260 the truth of it that I believe in many cases, and anything I'm going to say here isn't 100%
00:01:20.180 for every single practitioner, obviously. But I think the tendency to reject authority
00:01:26.060 hasn't been because of some religious purpose. Deep down, it's been because people don't want
00:01:33.160 anybody to tell them what to do. They want to do whatever they want and be able to justify it
00:01:38.260 however they want, as opposed to being held to a standard by something external from themselves.
00:01:44.660 And now we've seen that a lot. You know, there's a lot of people that instead of being part of the
00:01:49.360 AFA that's moving our faith forward. They want to stay by themselves or in their small backyard
00:01:55.680 kindred. And then they can be the king of the five fat dudes in camp chairs arguing over the
00:02:02.920 big piece of chicken instead of just being a member of the AFA where we're actually moving
00:02:09.940 ALSATRU forward. When the statement that if it's not AFA, it's not ALSATRU, I don't apply that to
00:02:20.040 anybody over 70. There's people that were practicing ALSATRU before the modern version
00:02:28.040 of the AFA that was established in 1995. And I don't take anything away from those people.
00:02:33.520 But for all the folks now that just don't want to join the AFA, very seldom is it from a sincere
00:02:39.380 religious difference. It's because they just want to be these rugged individuals. And the thing is,
00:02:48.580 and I hate that I even have to think this way, but in the world that we live in today, we couch
00:02:53.580 things in qualifying statements in order to seem super humble with it. And I'm just going to be
00:03:00.880 real. We've established, first, Steve McNallan is the man that established Ausitru in its modern
00:03:07.920 continuous context. There were people before him that started and there were starts and stops.
00:03:15.020 There was people like Alexander Rudd Mills that started something and then it stopped and died
00:03:20.300 out. Or Meister von List that started something that was kind of a proto-Ausatru and then it
00:03:29.360 it died out and lost momentum. But our founder, Steve McNallan, in 1968, started what we call
00:03:38.900 modern house of truth. There was a couple of people independent of him that started at a
00:03:43.600 similar time. And I am aware of that. And I respect that. But everything we do today is
00:03:49.860 because of the relationship that he started in 68 with the Allfather and the way that it's 0.84
00:03:56.180 developed since then. This, that relationship, even his enemies admit that that relationship
00:04:03.980 existed, exists, and has moved also true to where it is today. We've been the steady thing in also
00:04:16.520 true. First, Steve was that steady thing, and he made his way through life as a man with starts
00:04:22.540 and stops but settling down to the also true folk assembly in 1995 we've been here we've been here
00:04:30.780 consistently and we've been moving forward steadily and consistently for almost here in about two
00:04:37.500 months we will have been doing this for 28 years and i say we that's long before i joined the afa
00:04:43.980 but we in a collective asa true folk assembly sense
00:04:49.420 everybody wants to make this about them and everybody wants to quit and reinvent the wheel
00:04:55.660 and build their own asa true in their own image and these starts and stops have really limited us
00:05:01.820 as a folk the afa has been the torch bearer of the icer the standard bearer this entire time
00:05:10.700 since like i mentioned since 1995 always moving forward and continuing that gift cycle with our
00:05:17.340 gods building those relationships we are the only people that on the level of legitimate houses of
00:05:26.220 worship have established four temples to various isere we've built temples we've established
00:05:35.180 temples to our gods we've continued moving this forward we have a decades long almost
00:05:42.460 three decades long gift cycle relationship with our gods built upon a almost 53 year
00:05:52.460 um almost 54 year relationship that steve has built with y'all father
00:05:59.260 there's a time where you have to draw a line in the sand and say this is this and that is that
00:06:07.020 and we're we're at that time where the afa is the voice of also true in the world are we perfect no
00:06:14.020 not at all but are we getting closer to perfection every year yes are we doing our very best to serve
00:06:22.200 the Aesir? Yes. Are we the one organization that's been around for reasonable amounts of time
00:06:30.560 that stays loyal to the Aesir? Yes. And I believe with all my heart that we have the authority
00:06:37.340 to speak with their backing and to build Ausitru with their approval.
00:06:46.740 Uh, our gods have poured out their blessings with that understanding. And, uh, I would never want to, to presume anything, anything that we're not do. And so I feel very caught. I want to be cautious saying that, but I believe very strongly. This is also true. We are doing it. We are building it.
00:07:10.780 and other people. And don't get me wrong. It's not completely impossible for you to build some
00:07:18.740 sort of relationship with the IC or that doesn't involve the AFA. Of course it is.
00:07:24.020 But this is the right way to go as far as the religion of Al-Satru. I'm sure there are 1.00
00:07:32.100 individuals out there that have a relationship with our gods, but this is the way to do it right.
00:07:37.880 And I speak that confidently because only unified in the AFA are we moving our faith forward to where we have something for our children, where we have something for their children, and where we're building this for our future.
00:07:54.040 Outside of that, it's just not there.
00:07:56.560 And anybody that fence sits at this point is wasting energy that could be put towards us all moving forward.
00:08:06.580 And everything else on the side is a distraction. And I don't mean any offense by that. I'm just speaking completely honestly with something that I truly believe.
00:08:18.660 Svon, do you have any thoughts on that?
00:08:21.320 Yeah, I would say troth. The idea of your troth, of your faith, of your devotion to the gods is not necessarily in question.
00:08:30.060 And the biggest important thing is understanding that when you look at our church, when you look at our folk, when you look at our people, when you look at the AFA, we have an inner guard.
00:08:47.320 No one should be surprised at that concept at all.
00:08:51.020 that that's ridiculous to say that as the organization as as this gift cycle has been
00:08:59.360 carried through decades that there is an inner guard that these folk have and if they stand on
00:09:06.640 the parapets of their inner guard and they stand on the wall and they say you can have trough out
00:09:12.140 there or you can have trough in here there's no wrong or should be no perceived kind of sense of 0.99
00:09:17.680 like, you know, those people are crazy. No, that's our inner guard. We defend it. We project
00:09:23.860 it forward. We carry it forward. We have been for doing for so long that it's kind of preposterous
00:09:30.100 to say that. So what is being said is you have trough out there in the wilds or you have trough
00:09:37.260 in the inner guard with us. And we just leave that, I think, in the open sense that you should
00:09:45.120 consider bringing your troth into the inner guard with us that we are moving forward that there's
00:09:52.080 a central point now there's a there's a center that's starting to grow and emanate and the people
00:09:59.920 that are defending it the people that are putting in the time people that are devoting their lives
00:10:04.380 to it are going to proudly say our inner guard is right our inner guard is good our inner guard is
00:10:13.140 the way for our people. And I don't think anybody out in the outer guard of that should see that as
00:10:18.780 preposterous. And there are people that I think are friendly to us. And I think there's people
00:10:23.280 that, you know, don't take that as a personal offense. Perhaps they're still working out
00:10:30.760 things in their lives. But then when they do come in, they notice there's no grievance. There's no
00:10:38.240 hatred. There's no, there's people that have, you know, that have left or people that have
00:10:43.200 encountered the AFA and say, ah, and they go off and they do things and then they come back
00:10:47.720 and they're like, ah, maybe I was wrong. And it's like, no, stop. You're here now. You're inside the
00:10:54.380 guard. Let's move forward. What do you have? What do you know? What do you possess? Where does your
00:10:59.980 trough lie? Let's expound on that. Add to the edge, add to the growth of our inner guard.
00:11:08.240 And I don't think that a lot of people realize that they have a lot of that contention because they don't pass through that threshold.
00:11:13.620 And when they do pass through that threshold, they're absolutely surprised at, you know, oh, I said this, right?
00:11:19.360 I felt a certain way. And we're like, OK, yeah, that was in the past. Now you're here. You're here with us.
00:11:25.120 Let's build a relationship inside the inner guard where it's protected and we can work at it.
00:11:29.640 We can focus on it. We could see what you bring in and we can add more to it as we grow and create more foundation.
00:11:38.240 You know, something else to be said, and this is just real. Brandt integrity is a thing. As a faith, Ausitru has to mean something. When everybody has their own little backyard version of what Ausitru is to them, we lose cohesion and we lose legitimacy.
00:12:01.540 When we're unified and when people want to know what is also true, this is what also true is. That makes us effective. And it's not just about us. That brings honor and dignity and reputation to our gods.
00:12:19.780 when our gods have followers that want to go out and, you know, just do their own thing and not be
00:12:27.480 a productive part of community and not be part of anything. That doesn't move that forward. That
00:12:33.840 doesn't build for our gods. That may help you for the way you want to live your life at the moment.
00:12:40.740 That's not building a future for our children, for our race, and for our gods. We do that together
00:12:47.480 unified under the banner of the tryhorns. We are the ones who have succeeded. We're the ones who
00:12:54.700 exist with success after all of the trying phases of Ausitru in the early days. And those folks
00:13:04.800 with 10 people here and five people there, if we all came together, we would be so much more
00:13:10.960 effective in worship and bringing dignity to our gods and bringing legitimacy to our faith.
00:13:17.480 Reputation means everything and that everything to our ancestors, whether we admit it or not, it means everything to us and our success or failure.
00:13:26.480 We succeed better together. And you mentioned that you are not a member of the AFA.
00:13:32.480 And you don't have to answer this here, but I wonder my question is why?
00:13:37.480 If there are theological differences, I would encourage you to talk to your go feet in your area and let's figure those out.
00:13:46.480 If you don't meet our membership standards, that's a different issue.
00:13:52.840 And if none of those things are holding you back, then we'd love to have you be part of what we're doing and part of moving us forward.
00:14:00.040 There's no we're not infallible. We're not perfect.
00:14:04.140 But we're trying to be perfect. We're trying to move closer to perfection.
00:14:10.000 And and I feel like we're making progress towards that.
00:14:13.120 It's a generations long, forever long process, but I think we're getting closer to our goal and we'd love to have you and everybody else of our folk to be part of moving us towards that goal.
00:14:28.260 We need you. We need all you guys.
00:14:43.120 We'll be right back.