Asatru Folk Assembly - March 04, 2021


Asatru and Myth (2012)


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

124.39

Word count

697

Sentence count

40


Summary

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

Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly explains why we don't need new myths, and why the old ones are irrelevant to modern men and women. He argues that there are more to genuine myths than meets the eye.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly, bringing you the latest on the revival
00:00:13.240 of the ancestral faith of Northern Europe, and the awakening of the European descended
00:00:18.680 peoples everywhere.
00:00:20.960 The gods and goddesses never went away.
00:00:24.020 They are with us always, and now they stir, and we reclaim our spiritual birthright.
00:00:32.360 A glorious dawn awaits.
00:00:35.040 Hail our awakening, and hail Asatru rising.
00:00:42.160 A question arose on an Asatru group recently.
00:00:46.420 Does our religion need new myths?
00:00:50.080 Are the old ones irrelevant to modern men and women?
00:00:54.940 I think it's good to ask questions like this.
00:00:58.100 We need to challenge our own ideas from time to time,
00:01:00.980 and there's a lot of room for free inquiry in a faith such as Alsatru.
00:01:05.220 So, when the suggestion of new myths was posed to me, I gave it serious thought.
00:01:12.120 Here's where I ended up.
00:01:14.100 We can make up new stories, but we cannot make up new myths.
00:01:19.060 Myths are not casual tales composed on the spot to make a moral point, or to entertain, or to amuse.
00:01:28.420 They are not the products of rational thought, consciously imposed on a particular subject matter, in this case the activities of the gods.
00:01:37.000 They speak the deep language of the unconscious, and the more profound levels of our own being respond to them, often entirely bypassing conscious awareness as they do so.
00:01:49.060 The mythic motifs found in the northern lore are often consistent all across the Indo-European world, and in some cases even beyond.
00:01:59.340 They are created not by the conscious mind, but by the unconscious, one could even say by the gods, and then emerge to consciousness.
00:02:09.560 To sit down and deliberately compose modern myths would completely reverse this process, moving from the conscious to the unconscious, rather than the other way around.
00:02:22.940 This doesn't mean the old stories can't be paraphrased.
00:02:26.860 Accurate retellings retain the essence of the myth and also stimulate an interest in the original manuscripts.
00:02:33.200 But modern, consciously devised sermons, posing as myths, do not have this power.
00:02:44.180 There is more to genuine myths than meets the eye.
00:02:49.100 Both the poetic edda and the prose edda contain many layers.
00:02:53.620 Take the half a mile, for example, or in English, the words of the high one.
00:02:58.140 On the surface, most of the poem is made up of nothing more than prudent advice for living.
00:03:05.040 However, there are deeper aspects to even this apparently straightforward poem.
00:03:10.720 Elements that, as Jim Chisholm has shown, are met as a guidebook for higher spiritual evolution.
00:03:16.880 Similarly, the story of the Theft of Mead by Odin in the Prose Edda contains specific information on techniques for attaining godlike consciousness and power.
00:03:31.400 To cast aside this hidden material, or to claim that a modern homily-motivated myth is just as good as the original, well, that would be a colossal mistake.
00:03:41.980 Asatru's myths were written for several
00:03:46.700 purposes beyond setting good examples for daily behavior.
00:03:51.380 We've seen that Halfomao is not only a practical
00:03:54.480 guide for the conduct of one's life, but also
00:03:58.500 an encoded handbook for higher evolution. What about
00:04:02.540 that other pillar of the poetic edda, the Folospau, or the
00:04:06.480 prophecy of the seeress? Scholars tell us that
00:04:10.120 Folospau is a didactic poem, meaning that it is
00:04:14.020 designed to teach the lore. But I think that
00:04:17.980 Folospau is just what the title says. It is a prophecy,
00:04:22.480 a vision of things to come, considered so
00:04:25.680 important that it was specifically included in the poetic
00:04:29.380 for our benefit. No pseudo-myth
00:04:33.720 that we can make up can come anywhere close
00:04:37.720 to this. In short, here's my position. We can't make up myths to replace the old ones or to put
00:04:47.200 alongside them on an equal basis. Yes, the myths are ancient, meaning they were written a long time
00:04:55.260 ago and recited orally long before that, but in a more important sense, the myths are timeless.
00:05:04.200 they express as someone once said
00:05:08.460 that which never happened
00:05:10.320 but is always true
00:05:12.720 this has been Steve McNallan
00:05:18.940 of the Asatru Folk Assembly
00:05:20.400 www.runestone.org
00:05:24.280 thank you for listening to this particular episode
00:05:26.960 of Asatru Rising
00:05:28.220 and we hope you'll be with us next time
00:05:34.200 You