Asatru Folk Assembly - January 31, 2021


Matt Flavel 2018 Northwest Forum


Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

181.89

Word count

3,486

Sentence count

139

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how I got into Odinism and how I became a member of the Odinist movement. I also talk about the history of the movement and how it came to be. I hope you enjoy this episode and I look forward to doing more in the future.

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 .
00:00:00.000 All right. Well, first, thank you guys very much for having me. Mr. Johnson, CN, our hosts here.
00:00:16.760 Everybody's acting like I'm doing them some huge favor, filling in a spot and talking. I was just
00:00:20.860 planning on showing up and being with you guys. So getting the opportunity to speak is a tremendous
00:00:24.360 opportunity, and it's an honor to do for you guys. I don't know about the billing filling
00:00:29.720 in for mike enoch i didn't sign on for that so so bear with me and i've known about this since
00:00:35.240 thursday so a lot of it's off the cuff and i'm going to rely on some audience participation i
00:00:40.200 think my q a is probably going to be a little bit longer
00:00:45.240 so uh mr johnson just asked me like all right what's the theme of your talk and i hadn't even
00:00:49.640 considered a title of what the talk should be so i'm like uh introduction to ostrich i think that
00:00:54.760 that I'd rephrase that and I'd call it Ausatru, a white man's religion. There's a couple of
00:01:01.020 questions as far as suggestions. How many of you are familiar with the basic idea of what Ausatru
00:01:06.540 is? All right. Well, for those of you who aren't, it's an Icelandic word that basically means true
00:01:16.060 to the gods and it's a it's a worship of the pre-christian gods of Europe and that may sound
00:01:27.260 odd to folks and it may dream you know conjure up images in your head of folks dressed like
00:01:33.780 vikings and acting silly and you know larping and that's not at all what we do
00:01:39.080 The Ausatru Folk Assembly, as we practice Ausatru,
00:01:44.860 it's not a reenactment of something our ancestors did
00:01:49.120 in the past.
00:01:50.520 It's an enactment of a living faith within our lives
00:01:53.600 and within our communities.
00:01:55.300 It's very much modern, and it's very much catered
00:01:58.540 towards the needs of our people,
00:01:59.860 just as in our ancestors' time,
00:02:02.080 it was catered to the needs of their people.
00:02:05.580 You know, the Vikings didn't go out
00:02:07.380 and get their loincloths and atlatls to be more spiritual,
00:02:10.700 and us today don't need to, you know,
00:02:12.560 LARP something that was done a thousand years ago.
00:02:15.060 But the divinity that spoke to our people in those times
00:02:18.020 speaks to us today.
00:02:19.820 Whether we realize it or not, it's within all of us
00:02:22.500 in what we like to refer to as our folk soul.
00:02:25.380 There's a tie that binds everyone in this room,
00:02:27.740 and we come from a common heritage,
00:02:29.880 a common background, and common ancestors.
00:02:32.240 That bonds us together, and it speaks to something
00:02:34.520 very serious within our soul.
00:02:36.040 And that's kind of the basis of what Ausitru is about.
00:02:41.720 I was given a couple, you know, prompts of things that you folks would like to hear today.
00:02:46.600 And, you know, one of them is basically how I came to practice Ausitru.
00:02:53.440 I was always a very spiritual person growing up.
00:02:56.200 You know, I was spiritual, but my family wasn't religious.
00:02:59.160 So I didn't really know what to do with it, but I knew it was there.
00:03:01.880 I knew, you know, when I needed help on a test or something, I'd pray to God, and somebody would hear me, and I felt better, and I was a spiritual person that way.
00:03:10.760 I didn't really have a name for it and know what to do with it.
00:03:13.840 So, you know, growing up as a young man, that wasn't enough.
00:03:18.240 I needed something.
00:03:19.400 So as a white man in America, I thought, you know, what do we have? 0.96
00:03:22.980 And boom, well, you're, you know, you're not an Indian, so you're not a Hindu. 0.91
00:03:27.960 you know i'm not a jew i'm not you know an arab so i can't be a muslim so what you got you got
00:03:33.240 christianity okay let's do this and let's do it right my aunt was a jehovah's witness so i'm like
00:03:39.640 all right let's do this they like their bibles they know their bible's good so if i'm going to
00:03:44.520 do it i'll give them i'll give it to them they study really hard and they know their bibles
00:03:48.600 cool let's do it let's do it authentic let's strip out everything european about christianity and
00:03:53.480 take it back to Paul's church. All right, I'll do that. So I started reading my Bible all the way
00:03:58.980 through. Some things sounded a little bit off, and I'm like, you know what? If it's my opinion
00:04:05.660 or God's opinion, I'm probably the one who's wrong, so okay. I tried to do this about two or three
00:04:10.240 times, and I came to the conclusion that divinity as described in that book, everything that my
00:04:20.680 heart was set upon. Everything that I felt was right in this world and honorable to do was contrary
00:04:26.360 to what I read that that book told me was, you know, the appropriate thing to do. Everything I
00:04:30.800 wanted to do that I felt was noble was sinful. So I got to this kind of a scary precipice. I didn't
00:04:36.860 know what else was out there, but I'm like, if this Middle Eastern tome is all that there is, 1.00
00:04:43.740 and this is, you know, this is God and on the other side is damnation, I'm gonna have to choose 0.97
00:04:49.600 the latter because I can't be a hypocrite and support something that, in my view, is evil and 0.97
00:04:55.320 dishonorable. And it was scary because right then I had nothing. And it's like my feet were out from 0.86
00:05:00.180 under me. But I'm like, what should we do? I was very aware of history at the time. And I was also
00:05:06.120 very aware that I was a white man. I wasn't as aware of things as I am today. But, you know,
00:05:12.880 I was about 21 year old. I was, what should I do? Well, what did our ancestors do before we had
00:05:18.520 Christianity before this outside Middle Eastern religion came to to the shores of Europe what did 0.68
00:05:24.380 we have so I started researching and I started looking for things I'm like what do I do and I 0.98
00:05:29.680 thought I was the only guy like by myself you know in my backyard doing some some ritual to Odin and
00:05:34.820 Thor and I felt like a weirdo I'm like nobody else does this but I started looking and googling
00:05:40.220 things and I came to uh this this weird group of folks called the Alistair Folk Assembly and
00:05:46.080 And I saw these videos by this guy, Steve McNallan, and they made a lot of sense.
00:05:52.040 And I started looking and, you know, hey, there's other people that do this.
00:05:55.740 You know, this is a thing.
00:05:57.460 Like, other people actually do this in this day and age.
00:05:59.920 At the time, it was 2001.
00:06:01.700 Like, this actually happens.
00:06:03.720 Okay.
00:06:04.140 And from then, I was kind of hooked.
00:06:06.240 And I found one of the slogans of the AFA back then and to this day is also true.
00:06:12.540 It's about roots.
00:06:13.480 It's about connections.
00:06:14.880 It's about coming home.
00:06:16.080 that's one of the biggest things we hear from our membership is like wow I really
00:06:20.520 felt like I came home you know come to one of our events and like I just felt
00:06:24.420 at home it just felt right in my soul and that's what I meant earlier when I
00:06:28.860 spoke about folk soul there's something about the practice of Ausatru that
00:06:33.780 resonates within us because it comes from us and it flows through us
00:06:38.640 throughout time so another question that that was posed to me is you know what
00:06:50.400 what specifically is the Astro Folk Assembly and how is it different than
00:06:53.760 other faiths it's a it's what we call a folk religion and in this context it's
00:07:00.840 you know some evil racist contraption but every place else in the world it's
00:07:06.540 It's a celebration of your cultural heritage and it's praised.
00:07:10.720 Pretty much any, I say any and there's bound to be an exception, but I think those exceptions
00:07:14.920 prove the rule. 0.86
00:07:16.200 Any faith that isn't an Abrahamic faith tends to be specific to a people, to a group of
00:07:21.140 people.
00:07:22.140 You know, we had to come up with this Icelandic name meaning true to the gods because in this
00:07:26.600 day and age it's a question, but if you asked our ancestors what religion are you, they'd,
00:07:32.040 you know, they'd name what tribe they're from, like, I'm Norwegian, what do you mean?
00:07:35.860 or I'm German, what are you talking about?
00:07:38.540 Because the question itself would be baffling.
00:07:41.180 Your faith was connected to your tribe, to your ancestors,
00:07:45.880 all the way back to the beginning, to that font of Arian consciousness,
00:07:49.780 be it Hyperborea or Arya Varta, came down to our people through a line of folks.
00:07:54.640 And this is how we connect to that divine,
00:07:57.200 or traditionally how our folks connected to the divine.
00:08:02.540 That was done through, you know, a number of different ways,
00:08:05.100 but there's a powerful spirituality that the Aus True Folk Assembly embraces
00:08:09.760 that connects Aryan peoples back to our very beginnings.
00:08:14.020 And I use that word Aryan, and I don't use it to be provocative.
00:08:16.680 I use it because the word means noble and implies a shining nobility.
00:08:22.560 Like everyone in this room, we came out dressed nice.
00:08:25.560 You know, dressing nice and looking sharp is a revolt against the modern world.
00:08:28.940 We chose to hold our head up and carry ourselves with nobility.
00:08:33.060 That's why I refuse to give up the semantic ground on that word.
00:08:36.320 But there's a group of peoples, which we all came from,
00:08:40.120 that go back to this very ancient spirituality,
00:08:42.420 and you see it expressed many different ways.
00:08:45.640 Ostrich, we use a lot of the terms and a lot of the imagery that we get
00:08:48.680 in Romantic-Germanic period and in Icelandic sagas
00:08:53.260 and things that you may be familiar with with Viking things.
00:08:56.700 It's not the be-all, end-all.
00:08:57.960 That just happens to be the tail end where we had a lot of writing done
00:09:00.840 and a lot of recording done.
00:09:02.000 But spirituality is much older than that.
00:09:04.140 With the AFA, I was able to go on this trip to Denmark and meet some of our membership over there.
00:09:08.220 And they showed us all these sacred sites and these spiritually sacred places to Ausatru.
00:09:12.380 And none of them were Viking things.
00:09:14.240 They were all stuff from the quote-unquote Celtic period.
00:09:17.020 They were Neolithic stone structures where our ancestors worshipped the gods from the Stone Age.
00:09:22.960 And I was tremendously honored.
00:09:24.540 I got to stand in those same circles and worship the gods, you know, five, six years ago.
00:09:29.120 So that was tremendously important to me.
00:09:30.900 the question arises why is this in my mind the optimal faith for our folk
00:09:40.720 because it springs from us talked a little bit about this so far but that folk soul that connects
00:09:48.340 us people have a lot of we're trained by the abrahamic faiths to take religion extremely
00:09:56.380 literally, and to read things from a book, and like, oh, you believe Thor's some buff dude with
00:10:01.120 the chariot with goats riding around in the sky? No, I'm not silly, but that picture creates an
00:10:08.000 image in my mind and my soul that helps me understand what Thor is, what that force of
00:10:13.240 divinity is. So that's the thing. The myth cycle are powerful truths. They're not literal truths.
00:10:31.860 They are pathways to truth. They show us truth in ways that our mind and our soul is uniquely
00:10:37.360 capable of understanding the divine. And you find that because that's, you know, developed through
00:10:43.520 thousand years of the experience of our people. That's why I think it is uniquely suited to each
00:10:49.600 of us as people of Northern European descent, as people who trace their roots back to that
00:10:55.240 font of Arian consciousness to embrace that spirituality. And you see that expressed
00:10:59.080 throughout Europe and in, you know, little corners of the rest of the world that have 0.93
00:11:03.840 have since been diluted by by white genocide um but it's a birthright and it's something that
00:11:13.840 i guess the bigger thing i was going before i was interrupted was
00:11:17.440 with the with the imagery of thor people ask about the gods and you know some people have trouble
00:11:22.320 to coming to divinity and believe and wholly embracing it at first like do you really believe
00:11:27.120 in these gods do they really exist and they ask questions well do the gods exist external or are
00:11:33.200 Are the gods an archetype?
00:11:35.140 Or are the gods this, that, or the other?
00:11:37.780 And what's unique and hard for us to wrap our minds
00:11:39.940 around being trained in Abrahamism,
00:11:42.740 gods are all of those things.
00:11:45.380 They are from without and helped shape us
00:11:48.020 and shape our existence.
00:11:50.220 They also speak to us from within,
00:11:51.980 from that folk soul that I spoke about.
00:11:54.820 They give you wisdom and insight from the way back
00:11:57.820 through your ancestors.
00:11:59.420 A common belief that we believe in in Ausatru
00:12:01.860 is similar to what our folks believed before Christianity
00:12:04.560 and even after they would trace royal lines back
00:12:06.960 to being the descendants of Odin or the descendants of Frey,
00:12:10.800 depending on where you were at.
00:12:12.640 That descent from the gods is something
00:12:14.540 that was held common by our ancestors
00:12:16.200 and something we believe very strongly today.
00:12:18.720 They're not just an external deity
00:12:20.320 that we get to pick and choose from a smorgasbord.
00:12:22.420 Oh, I like that one.
00:12:24.080 They're our ancestors speaking through us,
00:12:26.860 and we revere them as such.
00:12:28.860 Another thing that's very important, I feel, about Ausatru is it's a community religion.
00:12:34.080 A lot of people get it twisted and think that it's this Viking,
00:12:37.960 I'm an ideal, you know, I'm a rugged individual all the time.
00:12:41.980 Individual development is extremely important,
00:12:44.500 but our ancestors viewed their entire worth as how they fit into a community.
00:12:49.420 We've taken words like honor and we've molded it into this idea of a personal code,
00:12:55.640 but honor always meant to our ancestors. It was something bestowed upon you by your community.
00:13:00.200 You're receiving an honor. I am honored to be here. They gave me an honor by letting me speak.
00:13:07.200 The honor was something that was a value the group placed upon you.
00:13:13.400 With Abrahamism, we also have become very uncomfortable with gray areas. Just as it's 0.84
00:13:18.820 a communal faith, it's very much an individual faith. It's very much a cult of the hero.
00:13:23.220 and if we are each trying to become the hero that's why I think it's extremely important for
00:13:29.200 us today the easiest thing we can do to affect change almost all I assume all of us here see
00:13:36.660 the world outside as less than it ought to be we see things we want to see accomplished a lot of
00:13:44.140 us see things that we've lost that we want back and a lot of us see things still outside of our
00:13:49.460 grasp, that we want to reach up and conquer and achieve. That's the Faustian nature of our soul,
00:13:54.140 to do more and to be more. The one thing you can do today to affect that change is to make yourself
00:14:00.540 better, to be the hero in your own saga, to strive for your personal best. And that heroic ethic
00:14:07.100 is something that, again, through foreign faiths, I think, has been beat out of our folk, but it's
00:14:12.380 fundamental to, certainly to Ausatru, but any of our spirituality that our ancestors recognized.
00:14:17.160 And it was even carried over into Christianity.
00:14:19.280 It's one of the points that I want to, you know, reemphasize about I was a Jehovah's Witness. 0.99
00:14:26.100 The fortunate thing is they extricated all European Christianity out of it. 0.98
00:14:31.440 Christianity becomes a lot less fun when it's Paul's church and you sit around and instead of a glorious warrior heaven, 0.98
00:14:38.780 your heaven is sitting around and telling Jehovah how great he is or, you know, things of that nature. 0.95
00:14:43.700 it really puts a different perspective, because so much of what Europeans have developed as faith
00:14:49.080 and expressed through Christianity is an expression of our folk soul. 0.91
00:14:52.580 I fully believe that we would have cathedrals if we had stuck to Ossetree.
00:14:55.900 They'd just have different things on the stained glass.
00:14:59.980 One of the things about the Ossetree Folk Assembly in specific,
00:15:03.280 and I really appreciated this when Mr. Johnson opened up the conversation today,
00:15:08.260 the cool thing about the AFA, the best thing about it,
00:15:11.200 is it brings people out to have real experience it's church it's church without christianity
00:15:18.540 but it's that community and that structure that our people built society around
00:15:24.120 people come out just about every weekend around the country in many different you know different
00:15:31.340 areas and different places to honor our gods to celebrate our ancestors and to get together and
00:15:36.840 share with one another one of the cores about ostrich to understand is the idea of communion
00:15:40.680 and not in the in the wafer catholic sense but our worship of the gods is always done through
00:15:46.500 sharing we've got two big rituals one's called bloat and one's called stumble in bloat it
00:15:52.440 basically it's a word that means blood and it comes from the old times where more were always
00:15:57.800 it would be a blood sacrifice but the sacrifice wasn't you know offering up everything in whole
00:16:04.240 to the gods it was a communal meal where we all shared a meal together just like you go to your
00:16:08.240 you know go to thanksgiving at your grandparents house and you'd share a meal with them and that
00:16:12.640 communal eating that communal sharing is what we do with our gods in a bigger sense assemble is
00:16:17.920 like that but it's a drinking ritual with the people who are there or we make toast to heroic
00:16:23.440 deeds to our ancestors to our gods and again we share a horn we share we pass around and build
00:16:28.400 that community so the afa is really structured around community and we're really thriving that
00:16:32.880 that way.
00:16:33.480 We're bringing people out to meet face to face and
00:16:35.440 interact and do things.
00:16:37.720 Another thing that previous Beaker brought up was
00:16:44.660 longevity with our movement and things that we do.
00:16:47.060 We've seen tremendous increase in just the last
00:16:51.100 couple of years.
00:16:52.100 We've all watched it just explode with people that
00:16:54.000 get it, people that come out to things like this,
00:16:56.000 people that are becoming politically active.
00:16:58.380 We've also noticed how much we have so many young
00:17:02.040 people involved in order for it to be sustainable and something worth doing
00:17:07.500 after it becomes not trendy and when you know the winds of change occur is to
00:17:12.960 have something that we base it around have something about this that we're all
00:17:17.820 here for in this room that we come together and celebrate on it on a
00:17:21.540 internalized level that's part of who we are and what we do that's part of our
00:17:25.140 community and we can't exist in opposition to all the things we don't
00:17:29.880 like around us we have to exist about the things we love about us and the things that we cherish
00:17:35.400 about who we are it's really potent right now because they're under attack so we're all coming
00:17:41.240 out to defend them and fight for them but we got to keep that going when they're not under attack
00:17:46.200 we got to build up we got to not always think about how we're fighting off our enemies
00:17:50.920 what do we do if we didn't have enemies what can we build what can we do i believe that
00:17:55.800 that Alistair Troop provides something to build that around. It provides a basis for a community
00:17:59.400 to build that around. You may ask yourself, well, why do you need religion to do that?
00:18:03.540 You know, I've got some atheist friends that bring that up. Well, we could just get together
00:18:07.220 as a social club and do stuff too. But yeah, but you don't. When was the last time you did? Well,
00:18:12.880 but we could. But you don't. When was the last time people got together and went to church on
00:18:17.020 Sunday? They do that every Sunday. You know, what happened in this world that's great that didn't
00:18:22.920 involve religion and there's him and Han and communist purges I guess other than 0.97
00:18:35.240 that most of the great accomplishments certainly of Western civilization have
00:18:39.660 been based on faith based on our folk reaching out and trying to touch the
00:18:44.560 divine also true I believe is the most direct the most honorable the most
00:18:50.520 fulfilling to our soul way for Aryan man to reach out and connect and touch that divinity.
00:18:58.160 And so I guess that's what Ausatru is about and what the AFA is about in specific. And I'd like
00:19:05.320 to ask you guys now, if you guys got questions, is there anything that you want to ask? Yes, sir.