Asatru Folk Assembly - September 22, 2023


Becoming a Whole Person (from VNS Episode 3)

Topics
baby naming ceremony
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Skald
You're in a Cult？ (from VNS Episode 2) We Don't Take This Seriously？ (from VNS Episode 4)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

130.32

Word count

791

Sentence count

17


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the importance of a baby naming ceremony, the purpose of such a ceremony, and what it means to be a child of Midgard. We also discuss the benefits of having a community around a child naming ceremony.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 we've got a tip from caesar leo appreciate you thank you for for the the tip and he comes with
00:00:13.680 a question he wants to know if we can explain how a baby naming ceremony works uh yeah i so
00:00:22.080 Okay, so there's the purpose and the mechanics. In, I don't know, in the condensed version, I suppose, the purpose is that when that new baby comes into this world, into Midgard, there's a time where it's becoming a whole person.
00:00:46.380 and to fulfill its soul complex and to set that baby's identity not just as an individual but as
00:00:57.080 a part of a bigger whole that is our folk and specifically that is our AFA family there in
00:01:04.020 front of the gods and in front of our folk we affix the name that the parents have chose for
00:01:10.720 the child and from that moment on that that child is a full is a full uh full person with their soul
00:01:19.280 complex um some of that evolves from a time where infant mortality was very high and so before we
00:01:31.200 fully invest that child with the finishing touches of of that folk soul we want to make sure that
00:01:38.400 the child is viable and and physically healthy to to have a have a good start in life and so i think
00:01:48.880 that's part of that usually it's done you know at least nine days after the birth um in this day and
00:01:54.640 age you know stuff comes up and sometimes people will hold off until there's a a gathering in their
00:02:00.080 area so it's sometimes a little bit more than those nine days um one thing that's an afa tradition
00:02:08.000 that uh i do and that now the afa does is uh you know if you have time the night before
00:02:15.440 if you get to meet the child meet the family um i draw runes and i uh i ask each of the
00:02:24.400 each of the norns to give that child a blessing and a rune to to set their course and to kind of
00:02:31.680 inspire and instill gifts to them. And so a rune for Urdh, Verdandi, and Skald.
00:02:43.040 Yeah, so I draw those and I read those to the child and the parent and my interpretations
00:02:49.620 of those blessings to them. And we affix those with mead, drawing those runes on the child's
00:02:56.540 forehead. And then when we give them their name, we splash them with water as our ancestors did
00:03:02.040 to imbue them with that name and announce them in front of the folk. And when we do that,
00:03:08.200 we also drink toast to that child, into that family. And as a group, we make commitments to
00:03:14.600 be there for, to protect, to help provide for, to help raise that child in a way and really welcome
00:03:21.360 into them, into our, into our faith community. And so that's really special. That's probably
00:03:27.220 my favorite thing I get to do as a, as a Goathe. Svon, do you have anything to add on, on that
00:03:32.860 ceremony? Yeah, I'm, I'm a particular fan of your formulation of our, our, our current and
00:03:43.340 way that we fasten names to babies. I think, you know, a long time ago, people did them
00:03:49.240 certain different ways. They had like locality traditions, things that they would do in order
00:03:55.200 to affix names, things that maybe if they weren't able to get to the Hoffs, or back then there were
00:04:04.120 no Hoffs. So, you know, one of my children, we were lucky enough to have great grandmother
00:04:11.900 and grandmother and mother all there with the baby holding the baby while the name was being
00:04:19.280 you know fastened and sprinkled and that was done you know at the house because
00:04:24.920 you know especially for my my first boy there were no temples then so yeah I think that there's
00:04:32.480 a lot of beautiful things that can be added or done but when you have a community and you have
00:04:39.980 a priesthood that you can now kind of rely on or ask for help or uh seek guidance or or you know
00:04:47.180 even to wait or some people do like they'll name fasten their child at home but then they'll wait
00:04:52.780 to the next event and they'll come and introduce them and do a name fastening ceremony at the
00:04:57.660 temple and get a chance to uh introduce them to all the folk i i think it's beautiful it's a it's
00:05:04.200 a huge and momentous evolution that's happened in such a short period of time from having nothing
00:05:11.640 to now you have Hoffs and Gosar that can perform the ceremony and join in with the parents
00:05:19.540 and introducing the child to the folk.
00:05:34.200 We'll be right back.