Asatru Folk Assembly - March 03, 2021


AFA Communities (2010)

Topics
community
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Steve McNallan Mark
Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1) Asatru and Myth (2012)

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

116.94

Word count

1,569

Sentence count

86

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the importance of community within the Asatru community, and the role of the Folk Builders in building those communities. The AFA is a national organization, but it is also a local organization, and it is possible to build communities across the country and around the world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! 0.97
00:00:30.000 This is School of Navajo in the Asatun Folk Assembly, bringing you the latest on the revival
00:00:38.740 of the ancestral faith of Northern Europe and the awakening of the European descended
00:00:44.060 peoples everywhere.
00:00:46.380 The gods and goddesses never went away.
00:00:49.040 They are with us always, and now they stir, and we reclaim our spiritual birthright.
00:00:57.420 A glorious dawn awaits.
00:00:59.280 Hail our awakening! Hail Alsatru rising!
00:01:06.280 Mark wrote to say why he joined the AFA.
00:01:10.280 I have been impressed with Steve since I became awakened to my ancestral tradition.
00:01:15.280 And of the organizations out there, I think the AFA is the one that is most on target.
00:01:20.280 So, I would like to strengthen it.
00:01:23.280 Thank you, Mark. We're always trying to improve what we do.
00:01:27.280 the AFA is the work of many dedicated men and women and I am fortunate and proud to represent
00:01:33.360 them. Bethany writes to say, I have been studying Alsatru for over three years. I am tired of being
00:01:41.520 alone in my practices and beliefs and would like to become a part of something bigger than myself.
00:01:48.880 Welcome, Bethany. That's a common reaction and ties in with our theme for today, which is
00:01:54.800 Community. One can certainly be an individual practitioner of Asatru. Some people have no
00:02:03.200 choice because they don't know of anyone near them who practices our faith, and some people
00:02:08.960 just don't want to meet with others. The great majority of us, however, look forward to the
00:02:15.060 fellowship of other people who follow our ancestral religion and are greatly enriched by it. Indeed,
00:02:21.360 I believe it is possible to experience Asatru at its best only in association with a group of
00:02:28.300 like-minded men and women. And that, my friends, is what community is all about.
00:02:35.660 Now, folks who have been Asatru only for a few years may not recall that the AFA was
00:02:42.220 energetically promoting community about a decade ago. We had, or more to the point,
00:02:48.180 thought we had, a piece of land on which we could base such a community. By community, I don't mean
00:02:54.660 a commune or some inwardly turned cultish group, but rather a situation where each family would
00:03:02.020 have its own private home on its own land, but would meet several times a week on land owned
00:03:07.940 by the community to worship the gods, weed the garden, operate small businesses, and so forth.
00:03:14.820 We spoke of tribalization, a term, by the way, that I would not use today,
00:03:20.480 and modeled our efforts on the traditional structure of the Germanic tribes many centuries ago.
00:03:27.200 That endeavor fell apart over the issue of land ownership,
00:03:31.080 and I was not successful in getting strong support for the tribalist idea from the AFA as a whole.
00:03:39.060 As usual, we were just too far ahead of the times. 0.98
00:03:43.320 Now, times have caught up with us, and the idea of Asatru communities is quite popular.
00:03:51.100 The AFA is still interested in communities, and we are actively working along these lines.
00:03:57.800 We don't call them tribes anymore, because that word has a negative connotation to many of the people we want to attract.
00:04:05.880 Rightly or wrongly, they suggest isolation, cultism, and primitivism,
00:04:11.320 and none of these things are what we have in mind.
00:04:14.940 We just call what we are building communities, and they may take any of a number of different forms.
00:04:22.800 Is it possible for the AFA, which is a national organization,
00:04:27.600 to build communities across the country and around the world?
00:04:31.480 Of course it is.
00:04:32.580 Sometimes we hear the argument that communities can only be built from the ground up.
00:04:38.580 Well, yes and no.
00:04:41.580 There is no substitute for personal contact, and that implies geographical proximity.
00:04:47.580 But a national organization can provide the theological and ideological basis,
00:04:53.580 and in our case that basis is described in the Declaration of Purpose of the Asatru Folk Assembly
00:05:00.580 and in the other relevant documents of the AFA.
00:05:04.460 You see, we are not interested in just creating Asatru communities.
00:05:09.640 We are interested in creating Asatru communities with a particular outlook and a specific program.
00:05:16.960 The outlook and the program of the AFA. 1.00
00:05:20.920 This is where the folk builders come in.
00:05:24.720 Folk builders are the AFA representatives in a particular state or states.
00:05:29.380 They welcome new members, stay in contact with old ones, organize get-togethers of AFA members, and, in effect, create community in one form or another, while at the same time recruiting other interested people to become AFA members.
00:05:47.020 Folk builders are the ones who make the AFA real and relevant on a local level.
00:05:52.900 But, you may say, that's fine on a local level, but how do you get those people to
00:05:59.720 feel any connection with other AFA members on the other side of the country?
00:06:04.780 How can an AFA member in New York feel close to an AFA member in California?
00:06:12.400 We have at our fingertips social media that were never available to even our recent ancestors,
00:06:19.440 much less our forefathers and foremothers in tribal times.
00:06:23.940 Now, I am the first to admit the limitations of these media.
00:06:28.480 Nevertheless, they are, number one, a great way for people to meet each other in cyberspace
00:06:34.380 in order to arrange a meeting in the real world,
00:06:37.660 and, number two, to stay in touch after they have met in person.
00:06:43.820 The missing link is the in-person contact,
00:06:47.340 and not merely contact, but significant experience.
00:06:53.300 AFA gatherings provide exactly that.
00:06:57.140 Ritual is, or should be, an intensely emotional thing
00:07:01.100 with the power to bind people together
00:07:03.300 out of all proportion to the time spent together
00:07:05.760 as measured on the clock or the calendar.
00:07:08.860 If this experience is refreshed every year
00:07:11.580 or even every few years,
00:07:13.660 powerful bonds can be created, a true community.
00:07:17.340 For example, I spoke with one of our members on the phone a couple of days ago.
00:07:24.140 We had met once before at Midsummer a little over a year ago, where I joined her and her
00:07:30.020 husband in marriage.
00:07:32.220 It was as if we had parted only last week, and I felt a very real connection with her
00:07:38.820 and her family.
00:07:40.220 Sure, it's great to see your community members every week or so, but that is not essential
00:07:45.820 for building bonds even around the world here's another example i am sure there is no former
00:07:54.540 marine in this country who if called from his sick bed would not respond to another marine
00:08:00.540 who needed him even if he had never met that individual every marine is eternally connected
00:08:07.820 to every other marine true we in the afa cannot match the experience of combat or a boot camp
00:08:14.780 but we can provide other intense experience that will bind us together.
00:08:21.420 The AFA can create community among members who are spread over great geographical distances.
00:08:29.820 Think then of the closeness that exists between members of an AFA community who are in close and
00:08:36.060 frequent contact with each other at the local level, bound by blood, by religion, by culture,
00:08:43.180 by a common folk-centered way of looking at the world and by close physical proximity they will 0.58
00:08:49.740 be tight indeed what is the road forward for afa communities how do we proceed if you are an afa
00:09:00.300 member take a look at the members forum you will find sections dealing with personal finances
00:09:06.860 fitness and health, self-sufficiency, brewing, crafts, parenting, our newsletter for children,
00:09:14.540 gardening, cooking, items wanted, items for sale, advertisements for products and services,
00:09:21.580 and much more. We have the framework for community right there, online.
00:09:29.900 At the local and regional levels, community starts with meeting other AFA members locally
00:09:35.660 and doing things with them. The folk builder for the area can initiate that, or members can take
00:09:42.220 the lead themselves. It usually starts simply, a meet-up in a pub or a coffee shop, get-togethers
00:09:50.220 at someone's home for social and religious observances, various forms of mutual assistance,
00:09:56.700 and they're on the way. They may create something they want to call a kindred,
00:10:01.900 but whatever label they hang on it, it will be made up of AFA members
00:10:06.540 and adhering to the Declaration of Purpose of the AFA.
00:10:11.160 Ultimately, the result can be that tightly knit and sizable community,
00:10:16.060 perhaps with land and places on it with which to honor the gods.
00:10:20.080 It starts simple and small, and grows to be large and all-encompassing.
00:10:26.420 Call it a tribe or call it a community, it is men and women of the AFA growing together
00:10:33.920 and helping each other.
00:10:37.140 This is the direction in which the AFA is moving.
00:10:40.520 We'll never force anyone to join such an association, and we will always respect the
00:10:45.260 privacy of the individual.
00:10:47.620 But for those members who want to join with others, we will facilitate that.
00:10:54.240 If you are ready to find your way home to the spiritual path of our forebears, the Asatru
00:10:59.460 Folk Assembly invites you to consider membership.
00:11:03.380 Please visit our website at www.runestone.org, read our Declaration of Purpose, and, if what
00:11:13.080 you see there speaks to your soul, send us a membership application.
00:11:18.360 Together, let us write the next chapter in the history of the sons and daughters of Europe.
00:11:26.640 Only when we realize we are a river will we stop drowning in puddles.
00:11:33.480 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly, www.runestone.org.
00:11:40.420 See you next time.
00:11:48.360 We'll be right back.
00:12:18.360 Thank you.
00:12:48.360 Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
00:13:18.360 Hey, hey, hey