00:00:24.940Yeah, because obviously there are, it seems there's like a wide range of paganism, obviously,
00:00:30.000Obviously, there's no kind of, I don't know, authority saying what is and isn't paganism.
00:00:37.400But my perspective from a total lay perspective is that there do seem to be some, I don't know, occult or witchcraft, wicca, that kind of thing.
00:00:49.480I mean, that's what a lot of people think of when they think of paganism.
00:00:54.260Well, it's, I suppose you could say that's paganism, but it's really quite different from what we do.
00:01:03.360I see, first of all, I seldom use the word pagan to describe what I do, actually.
00:01:09.000The word pagan comes from the Latin and means paganos, if I'm saying that right.
00:01:15.400I'm afraid my altar boy Latin is pretty corrupt.
00:01:18.700But it referred to people in the countryside, the pagos.
00:01:22.520And in the north, up in Scandinavia, around in there, the word would have been heathen because of the people of the heath, the people who lived out in the sticks, so to speak, you know, out beyond the reach of the established system sometimes.
00:01:37.880So some people call what we do heathenry.0.91
00:01:40.060I don't use that word myself because to me the word heathen, at least here in the States, connotates someone who's ignorant and unwashed and unkempt and not very bright.0.83
00:01:51.100and I think that's not us at all. So it's a drogatory term. Right, you know to me I0.89
00:02:00.280think I think of Al-Satru in particular as an indigenous religion just as there
00:02:05.800are native religions in in say Asia and in Africa and that you know the American
00:02:11.840Indians have their own native religion and so forth this is the historical
00:02:16.860religion of the people of one of the religions of the people historically in northern europe
00:02:22.740and it reflects us it reflects our inner being it reflects all of our ancestors it reflects the way
00:02:31.340that we have looked at the world as a people for thousands and thousands of years it's sort of
00:02:37.240uniquely tailored to us as i believe all natural religions are yeah i've heard some speculation
00:02:44.480that there's been a lot of, well, historically, there was a lot of interaction between
00:02:49.600Europeans and perhaps Indians, and perhaps the East as well. And perhaps some people have even
00:02:59.340suggested that there might be, you know, teachings in those religions that were wiped out in Europe
00:03:07.100and kind of attempting to revive some kind of indigenous belief
00:03:44.460I believe you had a guest on previously who had talked about those sort of things a bit.
00:03:48.740And so that's sort of your first resource when it comes to putting together and reconstructing and trying to work with a religion of this sort.
00:03:57.840So after the original sources, you want to look at parallel things in other related cultures.
00:04:06.180For example, there are tremendous overlap between the old Celtic beliefs and the old Germanic beliefs and the old Slavic beliefs.
00:04:14.620Because the Celts, the Germans, and the Slavs all are ultimately descended from what we call the funnel beaker culture that existed before any of those branched off and became distinct.
00:06:34.960And one of them was the winning of the Mead of Inspiration, in quotes.
00:06:41.040And in Old Norse, that would be something like,
00:06:44.700or that which, the inciter to higher evolution, really, the way I look at it.
00:06:54.760And in that story, Odin turns himself into a serpent, climbs up into a mountain.
00:07:01.960And up in that mountain, there's a female character who's described as a giantess, although she has a Valkyrie name, but that's a whole other subject.
00:07:12.940And he spends three nights with her, and she lets him drink from the elixir of immortality, and then he transforms into an eagle and flies off.
00:07:27.840So, you know, we have to keep that in mind.
00:07:30.220But then we look at, say, the Kundalini tradition in India, where you have the serpent power at the base of the spine, which is brought up from chakra to chakra, when in the Ajna chakra, you have the union of male and female principles.
00:07:49.120The Amrita or the Soma is produced, which is transformative. It's the elixir of immortality, transforms the individual into a higher being.
00:08:01.180And I think it would be highly unusual for those similarities to be just coincidences.
00:08:10.900I think that there was an ancient tradition of religion or a tradition of spiritual evolution in Northern Europe that probably has been largely overlooked by scholars.
00:08:21.060And it's one of the many facets of Al-Satru that interests me, in addition to all the other stuff that there is in our religion.
00:08:29.060But yes, I think that there is a connection between various cultures and ours.
00:08:36.800And with judicious use, we can examine those other cultures and see what they tell us about ours.
00:08:45.280We can look at ancient India and maybe cautiously and with good judgment say, okay, so our ancestors, our direct ancestors might have done such and such.
00:08:59.060um yeah i'm just wondering actually if for you is it more about the kind of historical
00:09:06.180value or are you like seeking uh spiritual truth what's what's your main motivator
00:09:12.420uh absolutely both absolutely both um my interest in in also true arises first of all because it
00:09:22.260It just seems so right and so natural to me.
00:09:25.900It is also valuable to me because I believe that it is important to our people, to the European descent of people, because I believe that in a way, our race has become lost.
00:09:40.080We've sort of lost our soul in some respects.
00:09:42.920In tribal societies, when someone displays unusual symptoms or is acting a little strange or maybe they're sick, they go and they see someone who is adept in the shamanic arts.
00:09:55.100And that the shaman will typically go into the, quote, other world and recover the person's soul.
00:10:04.280Is that that person's soul, quotation marks, has gone wandering.
00:14:41.000And in fact, what I'm wearing is what we call Thor's hammer.
00:14:47.580In the mythology, of course, Thor wields this big hammer in which he defends the realms of the gods and the realms of humankind against the giants.
00:14:56.960And we think of this as defending against stasis, against stagnation, against the forces of entropy, versus the living, developing, growing, changing way of our group, of ourselves.
00:15:16.140and um and you you've got that you know oh then you've got four you've got odin's various and
00:15:22.800sundry sons you've got the the the goddess uh uh frigga odin's wife who is she's a mother figure
00:15:30.480but so much more than that she is a worthy counterpart for you know odin she is wise in
00:15:36.720her own right she is powerful in her own right and then the other family is the the vanir and
00:15:44.480the Vanir are typically more associated with fertility, with growth, with subsistence, with
00:15:51.120sexuality, and so forth. The two principal deities among the Vanir are Freyja, the goddess. She's
00:15:59.780called a goddess of love, and that's true, but she is so much more because, for example, in the
00:16:06.240mythic lore, she has first choice of the fallen warriors. Everybody knows about Uthin taking the
00:20:31.880It's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell.
00:20:38.020And it shows how when Christianity came into Northern Europe, it first of all tried presenting Jesus as as as pretty much the stereotype, you know, you know, peace, love, good vibes and so forth.
00:20:55.160And, you know, my Christian friends, please forgive me for oversimplifying there.
00:21:00.660But and people in the north weren't having it.
00:21:49.660If you start off with Constantine, say, in Italy, against the Italic pagans, and on up over the years, across the centuries, up painstakingly through Germany, France, modern-day Germany, modern-day France, and all of those countries in Central Europe.
00:22:10.600Finally, up into the north, it wasn't until, say, 1300 or so that the last public practice of paganism was eradicating.0.61
00:22:24.580About a thousand-year war, our ancestors did not succumb easily to Christianity.
00:22:31.700And in the north, in the sagas, the Norwegian King's sagas in particular, we have evidence time and time and time and time again.0.91
00:22:40.160People being martyred for the old faith, for the old pagan gods.
00:24:17.200You have the thing, that's T-H-I-N-G, which is the old assembly.0.99
00:24:22.140You had the assembly in Isle of Man, all of which predate Christianity.0.99
00:24:27.940by a long shot. If you look at the construction of the Germanic tribes, the archetypal,
00:24:35.200typical, vanilla-flavored Germanic tribe had three main components. You had the chieftain
00:24:42.660most of the time. You didn't always have a chieftain. I think the Saxons only had a chieftain
00:24:47.840when they went to war, and then they elected somebody to take care of all of that.
00:24:52.300But typically, you had the chieftain, you had an assembly of leading men, sort of intermediaries that kind of kept a check on the leader and kept him from just doing whatever he wanted.
00:25:05.880They had to ensure that he stayed within the bounds of the law.
00:25:09.380And the law was set by the freemen in the assembly.
00:25:12.280So what you had was actually very parallel to, say, in the United States, where you have the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.0.56
00:25:24.740It was democracy in its purest and least corrupted form, unlike what passes for democracy today, which is absolutely obscenity.
00:25:35.180So all I'm saying is people underestimate the way of our ancestors.0.55
00:25:40.240If people want to be Christians, hey, I support you.
00:25:43.880I will fight shoulder to shoulder with Christians, with atheists, with agnostics, with theosophists,0.57
00:29:04.880We're talking the world of legends here.
00:29:07.260You know, there's a few things that relate to him historically, but not a lot.
00:29:14.160And people don't think about what religion Holger might have been.
00:29:18.720They would have thought, well, he must have been a Christian.
00:29:21.460But actually, since he was supposedly Danish, and he fought with Charlemagne long before Denmark became Christian.
00:29:33.520Holger Dotsko would have been a pagan.0.52
00:29:36.140He would have been a follower of the old ways, but apparently he had the vision and the foresight to understand that he had to ally with a Christian king, despite what the Christians had done to his related peoples, in order to stop something that was truly alien and truly hostile to the very way of Europe.0.76
00:29:57.460And in that spirit, today, as we speak, and for years, ever since all the—I'm certainly not excusing the globalist wars, but in defense against or in combat against the forces, you know, the radicals and the various and sundry, not very pleasant types running around in the Middle East,0.77
00:30:22.140Many, many Al-Satruar, many, many pagans of the northern variety have fought against these guys.
00:30:32.600You know, I've gotten tons of friends in the military who have fought against the radical Islamists, for example,
00:30:42.420who are, you know, in their way of doing their best to serve that cause.
00:30:47.320And that doesn't mean those wars are wise.
00:30:51.020I mean, I think those wars have been a horrible boondoggle, but nevertheless, there are young men wearing Thor's hammers around their neck with some with with also true on their dog tags, as I had, who are who are fighting against that very force.
00:31:06.700yeah that actually uh reminds me of the issue um with some of the some of the eastern religions um
00:31:16.840kind of they preach almost well in some instances pacifism and uh we've seen a lot of those
00:31:24.680countries that did follow um uh you know native eastern religion eastern religions actually just
00:31:33.820get taken over uh for example um pakistan obviously i'm assuming that was kind of once
00:31:41.120part of india but now it's it's a muslim country and also the muslims are kind of going into india
00:31:47.680and trying to take over there as well and uh when you've got a pretty pacifist worldview i suppose
00:31:54.460that makes you susceptible um and i guess that's not the case with paganism well certainly that's
00:32:02.360not not our case um i know i know i know many men who look forward to fighting in battle and going
00:32:10.980to valhalla which is you know one of the afterlife concepts that we have in our faith are there any
00:32:17.460particular ethical kind of or moral teachings within paganism from your perspective oh absolutely
00:32:25.520You mean in that specific regard or just in general?
00:33:09.220Now, also true, was founded as a as a folkish religion in the United States.
00:33:14.240In 1972, I set up what became the first organization dedicated to Al-Satru in the United States. And from day one and for the next 15 years, everybody that we had was somewhere conservative to right wing, the whole gamut in there.
00:33:35.700And it was only much later that there became people practicing Al-Satru from a very liberal left way that was not specifically connected to our people.
00:33:49.740To me, Al-Satru inherently means our people.
00:33:56.500But, you know, there's a lot of people today in our corrupt age that don't believe that.
00:34:01.560No, I think that some of the moral standards, the moral values that Alsatruor try to practice include courage, honor, loyalty, kinship bonds, duty, cheerfulness, the ability to undergo stressful situations without succumbing to gloom and negativity.
00:34:29.240I'm not always very good at that myself
00:36:15.240And this is, right now it's not available on Amazon except at exorbitant prices because the stock has run out.
00:36:25.700I talked with the supplier and those are basically on the way both to Amazon and actually people would be able to order this from me personally.
00:36:34.800And if they'd like to do that, I'd be glad to sign up or something like that.
00:36:38.520Okay, we'll put the details in the description for people.
00:36:41.720Any copies, any version of the prose edda and the poetic edda.
00:36:46.840And those are the original sources for most of the mythology.
00:36:52.580Again, with the understanding that mythology is symbolic.
00:36:56.720Mythology expresses realities of the soul rather than, say, history.
00:38:15.180And I think the answer to that is, I think the answer generally is yes.
00:38:20.200Throughout all of the existence of our peoples during the pre-Christian period,
00:38:28.020You had beliefs that were practiced, you know, five years before the missionaries showed up and converted people.
00:38:35.340And you have other things that were practiced for thousands of years before.
00:38:38.380And in between that very long pagan span, there would have been natural differences and evolutions and changes in the way that people practiced and what they thought about their religion and so forth.
00:38:51.600So it's not like we have to take a snapshot and just go with that.
00:38:57.060We have to understand that it's more like a video.
00:39:02.060And given that natural variety in time and also a natural variation in geography,
00:39:10.440you know, the people in one valley in Norway might have practiced one way
00:39:15.060and the people 100 miles away might have looked at things differently.
00:39:20.780What was important is the underlying basic factors, the basic characteristics.
00:39:25.320If we stay true to those basic principles, I think that we can produce and practice a valid form of the old paganism.
00:39:35.820It won't be identical to what people did in Finland or in Denmark or in Sweden or in England, you know, back in the day.
00:39:45.700But it doesn't have to be because those were changing anyway.
00:39:48.880So I think it's important to identify the main principles and try to apply them intelligently.
00:39:54.260And the information that we do have, to go back to kind of what I was saying about India earlier, the first thing, you know, look for the written sources.
00:40:05.760After that, look for comparisons from groups that are closely connected.
00:40:13.580And then finally, look for other groups, other practices, other histories, and peoples that are still within the same general framework.
00:40:24.260Now, in the case of Asatru, that would mean, okay, the Elder Edda, the Pros Edda, the Sagas, and a few other pieces for the first category.
00:40:34.380And it would mean saying, oh, okay, let's look at the Celtic material and the Slavic material and the Finnish material for the second category.
00:40:42.260And for the third one, it would be, okay, now let's expand that out to the Indo-European family in general and see what, you know, compare it with Greece and Rome.
00:40:51.900And there's been a lot of very good comparative Indo-European work that provides a basis for this.
00:41:00.760The liberals can't stand this because it flies in the face of their theories about the European decided peoples and our limitations and who we were and who we weren't.
00:41:13.540But I have no problem with irritating the left.
00:45:52.560I mean, in America, I know we've had some astoundingly non-liberal environmentalists, a guy named Edward Abbey, a cantankerous old guy who wrote magnificent books like Desert Solitaire and a number of others.
00:46:09.540And he was a gun-owning, beer-drinking, hell-raising, wall-breaking, hunting environmentalist.
00:46:18.560environmentalist. You know, it's not just liberals. You don't have to live in Portland,
00:46:25.240excuse me, all you people in Portland, and, you know, wear Birkenstocks and drink herb tea to be
00:46:31.800an environmentalist. You can be a rough, tough, rugged environmentalist as well. Those are the
00:46:38.600people I like. Right. And what's your perspective on sacrifices? I think this is one of the things
00:46:45.180that comes to mind when people hear about paganism they think like you know sacrifices
00:46:50.040obviously sacrifices were part of um christianity i'm not sure actually but i know that they're
00:46:56.600written about in the bible and things like that so um what what part of sacrifices play what do
00:47:02.760they mean do you still do them that's a magnificent question i'm sitting here petting my cat right now
00:47:10.380who is not in fact a future sacrifice see our view of the gods and goddesses the holy powers
00:47:16.300is that they are two things to us they are our kin and they are our friends they're not like
00:47:23.740above us they're they are above us in magnitude but they are similar to us in fact in in in terms
00:47:32.120of soul and spirit they are identical with us just bigger like this i have the same essence
00:48:07.360We have sayings in the Edda, the same as the Poetic Edda, that talks about this.
00:48:15.540It says, you know, give gifts to your friends and go visit them often because otherwise, you know, the road between you will grow brambly and bushy and, you know, be hard to navigate.
00:48:27.420So, you know, keep those lines with people open.
00:48:30.460That's the way we see the gods and goddesses.
00:48:32.540When we quote sacrifice, it's not like, oh, we're going to give X and Y and Z to Odin so that he won't smite us.
00:48:43.680Not at all. No, he is our kin. He won't smite us.
00:48:48.800We give gifts to him and to Freya and to Frigga and to whatever, not as something given to a master from a slave.
00:51:22.840that connection with us they need our love our loyalty us standing beside them in the struggle
00:51:31.240of life they need that that sort of intangible from us it's just a symbol um so that's that's
00:51:40.140the one ritual we do the bloat or so-called sacrifice the other one is one i really like
00:51:45.760called a symbol this this can be traced back through old anglo-saxon and back to the old
00:51:52.360norse essentially this is a ritual that takes the power of the past the power of the ancestors the
00:51:58.920power of those who have gone before us the way we do it we pass it three times around and each
00:52:03.960person makes a toast in the first toast they toast a particular deity from our pantheon
00:52:10.840and in the second one they will toast an ancestor of theirs some relative some ancestor and
00:52:18.760And usually it's things like, you know, your grandfather, your mother, your uncle, or your ancestor who first came to America, or think something of that sort.
00:52:31.100And you recount that person's heroism, their intelligence, their good sense of humor, all the good things about them, because those are the traits that we're pulling up out of the past.
00:52:42.840We're pulling in that wisdom, that courage, that strength, that sense of the past to use for ourselves.
00:52:52.960And then the third time around is sort of the wild card line.