00:00:00.000um corey when you look at society do you ever think that loki is behind all of the chaos
00:00:12.160or at least enjoying it or is he still tied up with venom being dripped on him so
00:00:18.720one thing we've explained this on past episodes and i know it's a it's a difficult concept but
00:00:28.100we believe very very much that mythic time and linear or historical time are two very different
00:00:37.700things so mythic time is very often cyclical and overlapping and i know that that's hard to
00:00:51.380understand if it's not something that you're used to but we believe that the events in our in our
00:01:01.220myth cycle have happened will happen and are happening simultaneously so yes i
00:01:15.540it's hard to say I think that Loki being a force of chaos like he is I'm sure that he does find
00:01:26.840chaos to be pleasing to him and I think that he finds in a lot of ways detriment of our folk to
00:01:34.860be pleasing to him I honestly have to say that I haven't given much thought to things that Loki
00:01:42.360likes or doesn't like because we stand in opposition to to loki and and his um i don't
00:01:51.560think that he is behind all of the chaos or responsible for the chaos i think there's plenty of
00:01:57.640malevolent forces causing chaos and the vast majority of those aren't uh aren't spiritual
00:02:05.880entities. I think chaos is a natural state that exists if you don't stay beyond it and stay ahead
00:02:13.960of it. That's why I think entropy is one of the biggest problems that our gods and our folk
00:02:21.320try to overcome. I think entropy is that force that drags order down into chaos perpetually
00:02:27.520unless we're striving and trying to do, trying to succeed, trying to move forward, trying to move
00:02:34.940upward, as soon as we stop, we get pulled down, we get pulled back. And so I think that there's
00:02:42.460a lot going on that makes the world chaotic. And I don't think it's all, you know, some grand Loki
00:02:48.640plan. I don't think it quite works like that. Our understanding of the world isn't quite as binary
00:02:56.220as, you know, our gods and then Loki being, you know, our version of the devil. It's not quite
00:03:02.640that simple. Frayer asks, how does the AFA view Freya and Frigga being the same? I'm a Frigga
00:03:13.220devotee. Through my practice, I think I found that Freya is for short-term relationships and
00:03:20.300Frigga is long-term. Your thoughts? I don't think that Freya and Frigga are the same.
00:03:28.340um i think that they have very different energy on those kind of things
00:03:35.540um i some of this is fundamentally uh how the afa views our gods compared to perhaps how some
00:03:48.500other folks do um the people that i've heard that think that uh frigga and freya are the same
00:03:58.340I tend to do that from a linguistic or a scholarly background because some ancient texts merge the two or some linguistic variant.
00:04:10.980And that's not how I know our gods and goddesses.
00:04:15.880That's helpful and that gives us a place to start.
00:04:19.100but building relationships with our gods and goddesses through worship over time and through
00:04:26.240being in that gift cycle you get to interact with them in a in a personal way um
00:04:35.420they're not a math problem to solve with enough you know nerd study you're going to somehow
00:04:43.480unravel the mystery it's something that you build a relationship through the exchange of gifts and
00:04:49.880the exchange of energy um i think that freya tends to be more for so
00:05:02.280there's a concept in uh arian mythos in general of of horse goddesses and of cow goddesses and
00:05:11.480And meaning the horse goddess is more wild and untamed and represents the unmarried women and women in a more raw elemental context, often a more sexual context.
00:05:27.700And the the cow goddesses are goddesses that are more about the home and the hearth and the raising of children and women in relationships as as wife, as mother.
00:05:43.140And I think you see Freya and Frigga as as exemplars of this dichotomy.
00:05:51.180But I don't think that those things don't overlap and I don't believe that our gods or our goddesses are one dimensional.
00:05:57.700You know, Thor's not just strong. He's other stuff, too. Freya's not just sex and magic. She's other things as well. So I don't view our gods as archetypes and I don't view our gods as the result of linguistics. I view our gods as actual spirit persons.
00:06:18.800And one thing that I will say, I understand that if we go back, there are undoubtedly, if we take all of the continental sources, all of the British Isles sources, all of the Scandinavian sources, I'm certain that there are some deities and some personages that overlap or that are a confusion of one or the other.
00:06:47.300But when practicing religion piously, I would much rather err on the side of worshiping two different aspects of a God as two separate things than mistakenly assuming that they're the same God and only worshiping one and excluding the other.
00:07:09.160um at the end of the day if one of our gods happens to be worshiped under two different names
00:07:17.100in two different ways they still get that worship and that relationship still exists
00:07:22.700if i make the mistake and only worship the one and not the other if i'm wrong one of our gods
00:07:31.660doesn't get that worship that they're entitled to and doesn't get that uh love and worship from
00:07:37.380from their folk. And I would never want that to happen. I think it would be impious. So that's
00:07:42.560why we tend to err on the side of always assuming that they're distinct and different, even when
00:07:48.680sometimes that may or may not be the case.