Asatru Folk Assembly - July 29, 2025


Metaphorical Divinity #afa #asatru #asatrufolkassembly #shorts

Topics
directionality
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Balder Thor
Universalism #afa #asatru #asatrufolkassembly #shorts Detractors #afa #asatru #asatrufolkassembly #shorts

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

154.55

Word count

416

Sentence count

19

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

What would it look like if our gods were real? And how would that affect our understanding of the natural world? In this episode, we explore the role of our ancestors in understanding our gods, and how they relate them to natural phenomena.

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 The tone of our gods being somehow personification of natural phenomenon and like a poetic way of describing the natural world, I think when people say that, sometimes they mean something deeper.
00:00:15.080 On the surface of it, it appears to a lot of us that practice our religion in a very devotional way, like a form of atheism, like it's a suggestion that gods are not real, they're just a poetic way of describing natural circumstances.
00:00:30.000 And that's the way that scholars have traditionally related to non-Abrahamic faiths is by suggesting that our ancestors are these primitives that grunt and beat on sticks and make up magic spirits to explain things they don't understand. 0.85
00:00:47.020 Yet the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians are able to magically, you know, their God's the real one, but everybody else is just a confused savage. 0.52
00:00:56.660 And that's not the case.
00:00:57.680 our ancestors were incredibly smart people. They had the same brain capacity that we do as modern
00:01:03.160 humans. They don't need to make offerings and devote worship and temples and hoffs to pretty
00:01:11.540 ways of describing natural things. So I would challenge you to what would it look like if our
00:01:17.700 gods are real entities that have been part of the gift cycle with our folk since the dawn of time?
00:01:24.780 And if our ancestors grew to understand them by relating them to natural circumstances that highlight their power or highlight their glory in a certain way, the directionality of that's really important.
00:01:39.160 If your starting point is that the Isir must and do exist, therefore let's understand how our ancestors related to them.
00:01:46.920 Certainly, we see, like your point about Balder, we understand the similarity between Balder's return and the sun as being a beautiful expression of that. 0.79
00:01:59.120 But it's not because Balder is the sun, it's because we see that natural thing as a beautiful reminder or symbol of Balder.
00:02:10.180 Balder is not a symbol of the sun, the sun is a symbol of Balder.
00:02:13.860 And the directionality of that matters tremendously.
00:02:16.920 Thor isn't an explanation for thunder.
00:02:19.680 Thunder helps us understand the majesty
00:02:22.280 and the might of Asa Thor.
00:02:24.020 And those are the, I would like you to, if you would,
00:02:27.820 I invite you to think on the directionality
00:02:29.980 of those things.
00:02:31.100 Maybe it would inform what you do or how you think,
00:02:34.200 but I hope it would inform the way that you perceive
00:02:37.500 how we think in relation to the direction we're coming from.