Asatru Folk Assembly - February 01, 2021


Focus on the Folk part 2 October 2007

Topics
folk building program
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Helga McNallan Osatru
AFA Great Northwest Freyfaxi 2014 Twelve Days of Yule Day 10 December 2008

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

141.51

Word count

1,305

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the future of Asatru and what it means to be a heathen in the 21st century. We talk about how we can continue to grow as heathenry continues to grow, and what we need to do in order to do so.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Stephen, what do you think?
00:00:04.000 Well, growth is very, very important to the folk,
00:00:08.000 but as Helga said, you know, quality is
00:00:12.000 I think to be maintained over quantity, and I would rather
00:00:16.000 have a small group of dedicated heathens than
00:00:20.000 a group of eclectics who mix a little heathenry 0.99
00:00:24.000 with a little Native American religion, with a little Wicca, with a little 0.64
00:00:28.000 Celtic with a little whatever, whatever the New Age flavor of the week is.
00:00:37.980 I think that the growth of our folk is important.
00:00:45.100 It's important that we continue to network.
00:00:48.320 In the AFA, we have a folk building program.
00:00:51.100 And what this does is we have folk builders all across the United States.
00:00:55.380 and a person from, let's say, Missouri will contact us.
00:01:01.000 We can direct the local folk builder to get in touch with this person 0.82
00:01:04.320 and put them in touch with the local heathen community. 1.00
00:01:08.220 But now we have the Internet, which is unbelievable.
00:01:17.820 When I got into heathenry, we did not have the networking capabilities that we do now.
00:01:23.860 I mean, this is unbelievable.
00:01:24.600 We can carry on conversations with people in Europe and for free.
00:01:30.660 We can start fights with people in Europe.
00:01:32.120 Oh, boy, that's a whole different subject.
00:01:35.520 But we have the ability now to network, and this network ability is going to help us grow,
00:01:41.260 is going to help us get the word out.
00:01:43.040 So many people say, when I start telling them about Ausitru,
00:01:47.480 I've been looking for this.
00:01:48.880 I didn't know anything like this existed.
00:01:51.040 and that to me just blows me out of the water
00:01:56.480 because I'm thinking, how can you not know about it?
00:02:00.160 And so it's important that all of us as Ossetruers are ambassadors 0.62
00:02:07.160 and wear your hammer, wear your hammer out
00:02:11.220 and if people ask questions, be forthcoming, invite them to what's going on.
00:02:18.100 And it's important to let people know that we're out there and we exist.
00:02:22.820 And that's how we'll grow.
00:02:25.540 Mr. McNallan, what kind of organizational structures do you think our folk needs
00:02:30.260 to advance its interests in the years ahead that we don't already have?
00:02:34.820 Well, I think we've actually got a good start.
00:02:36.940 I think, like, for example, the clergy program that we've got rolling is one thing
00:02:40.480 and the folk builder thing that was mentioned a moment ago.
00:02:43.740 I think that others will evolve.
00:02:45.480 I think that we need to consider things such as economic networking for our people.
00:02:51.220 We need to be helping each other get jobs, jobs that work.
00:02:54.220 We need to be pushing the idea of education.
00:02:56.860 You know, are we thinking about engineers in the generations to come
00:03:00.980 and, you know, other things of significance.
00:03:04.100 We need to be looking at networking on a broad level,
00:03:08.660 at overcoming the geographical distances that separate us,
00:03:12.880 trying to actually weld a community that is not just a cyber community but a community of flesh
00:03:17.820 and blood. Helga, what do you think? As someone who lives in Nevada where our numbers are fewer
00:03:25.740 and more spread out, I think one of the keys is creating things that bring people from further
00:03:33.400 geographic areas to physically meet and network with each other, as he was saying.
00:03:42.880 I also think that, and this is the hard part a lot of times with Asatru, having organizations that we can all agree on a set of rules that does not restrict anyone's practices or beliefs,
00:03:57.960 but gives us a common ground that when people ask us questions about,
00:04:02.540 oh, what is this Osatru you talk about?
00:04:04.980 We have something in common so people aren't getting a totally different answer
00:04:09.400 from every person that they talk to,
00:04:10.860 so that we have some sort of a folk identity as ourselves.
00:04:14.740 How do you think we would do, just how would that happen?
00:04:18.400 Oh, boy.
00:04:20.320 I told him I was going to ask difficult questions.
00:04:23.900 It's, go ahead.
00:04:25.520 No, please, Stephan.
00:04:26.460 I tell you, it's not going to happen, and I'll tell you why.
00:04:32.420 It's because people who have discovered the flavor of Asatru that they like are going to stay with that. 0.92
00:04:44.800 A lot of Asatruers began as Asatruers, then they discovered Thetism and Saxon heathenry.
00:04:54.200 some people call themselves odinus other heathens want to be called heathens and they don't want to 0.82
00:05:01.960 be called asitur because they want to separate them from that from that group so we are a living
00:05:10.380 growing movement and religion and we're just beginning I mean this is a this is a new beginning
00:05:19.580 The religion that we're practicing now is not the religion that was practiced by our ancestors.
00:05:26.460 It's close.
00:05:27.780 We worship the same gods and goddesses, but we're doing things as 21st century heathens.
00:05:33.720 And it's not going to be the way it was back then, but it's not supposed to be that way,
00:05:39.060 because we're supposed to grow.
00:05:40.820 You know, the All-Father teaches us to continue to seek out knowledge, to seek out change,
00:05:45.760 keep on moving forward until we get it.
00:05:48.300 So, we're going to basically probably have various flavors of Ossetru eventually, just the same way the Christians have Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Southern Baptists.
00:06:01.760 We'll have different flavors, all basically worshiping the same gods and goddesses.
00:06:06.420 Now, the important thing is that that be so without the conflict that is tearing the folk apart at this point.
00:06:17.920 And I blame that on the Internet.
00:06:19.860 The Internet is a blessing on one angle.
00:06:23.100 On the other hand, it's one of the worst things that could possibly happen to us.
00:06:27.360 So to actually put that down into a sentence,
00:06:30.180 I think we could say that what we're looking at is open competition in the marketplace of ideas.
00:06:36.000 You know, everyone in every group is just going to have to get out there and speak the truth that it feels.
00:06:41.400 And then from that, things will rub together and evolve, and we'll end up wherever we end up.
00:06:47.280 I don't know that we can program that in advance, really.
00:06:50.480 There may be some debate on this, but I'm going to make this statement.
00:06:55.220 I think the majority of our folk live in urban areas.
00:06:57.880 What special approaches can we take to make, as a true, relevant to where people are
00:07:03.720 and make it relevant to their lives that they have to deal with in the cities?
00:07:08.560 Do you think we should do that?
00:07:09.920 Hmm. I think one thing that we can do is to entice people who are in the cities to experience the rural, more relaxed, often more folk-related kind of life.
00:07:28.560 If you take a person who's in the city living a very stressed out, very intense 21st century high speed kind of life, not that that's all bad at all, there's some very good things about that, I think that we can use this as an enticement.
00:07:42.560 Come to the mountains, come to the forests, come and commune with nature and with the holy powers.
00:07:47.700 Another thing that we can use, I think, with people in the cities is the whole idea of the necessity of preserving our culture, our identity, in a very urban, a very metropolitan kind of environment, where every other group has got its agenda and is pushing that agenda.
00:08:07.780 And it's surely in defense, if nothing else, we're going to have to do the same.
00:08:12.540 Helga, what do you think?
00:08:13.340 I recently moved to two acres in rural Nevada and started raising livestock.
00:08:19.340 I honestly am not sure I understand the urban mind well enough to be able to draw parallels.
00:08:27.340 Do you think everybody should do that?
00:08:29.340 In my heart of hearts, yes.
00:08:32.340 But then it wouldn't be rural.
00:08:34.340 I know. But they should at least all come visit me and meet my chickens.
00:08:43.340 Thank you.