Asatru Folk Assembly - Steve McNallen Ostara 1993

00:00:00.000 My name is Reinhold Clinton, and on behalf of Odin's kindred, I bid you welcome Odin, Freya, Thor, named sacred to our ancestors from the remote past.

00:00:13.860 Today, though, your Americans regard the pagan gods and goddesses of Northern Europe.

00:00:18.520 much as they do a favorite eccentric family member while they while we hold them dear to our hearts

00:00:30.820 we nevertheless do not take them seriously all this may be changing however due to the following

00:00:38.880 developments first modern physics now has for some time been informing us that the nature of

00:00:45.280 reality is drastically different than previously thought.

00:00:49.180 The idea that the universe is a gigantic web of interconnecting

00:00:53.320 divine energy lends credibility to a nature-oriented

00:00:56.960 pluralistic religion. Terms and concepts

00:01:00.300 that seek to define the existence or non-existence of deity

00:01:04.740 are now seen as totally irrelevant beyond a certain point.

00:01:09.680 It seems then that the gods and goddesses do exist

00:01:12.880 in some form if we choose to accept them.

00:01:16.900 Second, for the past 20 years, there has been a concerted effort

00:01:20.840 among a growing number of people on both sides of the Atlantic

00:01:23.960 to reestablish the ancient northern European religion of Asatria.

00:01:28.480 With its emphasis upon traditional and heroic values,

00:01:31.500 the religion tends to attract members quite unwilling

00:01:35.040 to be sheep led through the nose by a gentle shepherd,

00:01:38.560 preferring instead to forge their own destiny,

00:01:41.040 practice an ancestral faith, and find inspiration in the cold, bracing wind of the Northlands.

00:01:48.300 Bothan's kindred is privileged to have one hand today, the founder of this movement.

00:01:54.160 It is now a great honor that I introduce to you highly respected and celebrated author

00:02:00.220 and seminal thinker, Mr. Stephen McNally.

00:02:09.200 Thank you.

00:02:10.060 So, Reinhold, Kathy, Botan, Kindred, and guests, I want to thank you for two things.

00:02:17.080 First of all, for the privilege of allowing us to speak before you and to share with you some of the thoughts that we have

00:02:23.300 and some of the developments that have occurred to us and through us and with us over the many years.

00:02:29.820 And also to thank you for your hospitality, which has been very gracious indeed.

00:02:34.240 And I hope that perhaps in the next hour, hour and a half, in some small way,

00:02:38.600 we can start to repay that hospitality and to share with you some of the things that we have.

00:02:47.360 Alsatru, something very dear, certainly to our hearts, is a very broad topic,

00:02:55.860 a topic of, in some ways, a great complexity, almost as complex in its own way

00:03:01.240 as the serpent that we see here behind me.

00:03:04.120 But in other ways, it's as straightforward and simple as the thrust of a spear.

00:03:08.760 And I hope that I can convey it that easily, that simply, that straightforwardly.

00:03:16.560 In my comments on Alsatru, I would really like to approach it from three different directions

00:03:21.000 or to include three major aspects of it.

00:03:23.680 I would like to start off with a sort of an overview of what our traditional religion was in the past,

00:03:29.320 a quick survey of our gods and goddesses that are close to our heart,

00:03:33.400 a quick look at the myths,

00:03:35.500 and perhaps even a somewhat more prolonged look at the values

00:03:38.780 that animate our religion and that give it the life

00:03:42.020 and the vitality and the relevance to today that is so very important.

00:03:47.020 I would like also to talk about the revival of Al-Satru in the 20th century,

00:03:52.020 how this has happened, how it's come about,

00:03:54.120 not only in the United States, but in other countries around the world.

00:03:57.180 share perhaps a few anecdotes of our own related to that because we were sort of on the scene of

00:04:03.460 the crime as that occurred. And then finally, we'd like to take a look at the future of Al-Satru.

00:04:10.100 Does it have a future? And if so, what is that future going to be like? What is the potential?

00:04:14.760 What sort of obstacles will have to be overcome to allow us to realize the true potential

00:04:19.760 of this ancient way, yet ever new way, of being and thinking and acting.

00:04:29.640 Well, the old saying is to start at the beginning,

00:04:31.800 and so we're going to start, if not at the beginning, at least an awfully long ways back.

00:04:36.420 Let's go back through the mists of time a little bit, as they say.

00:04:40.160 Let's take a look at Ausatru.

00:04:43.060 The word, of course, comes from the Old Norse, the language of the Vikings.

00:04:46.920 it's usually translated as something like those true to the gods or even the

00:04:53.180 belief of those true to the gods that's rather much the way we think of it today

00:04:57.960 and yet we don't mean to be limiting by that we understand that the Vikings as

00:05:02.160 dramatic as they were as outspoken as they were despite their wonderful

00:05:08.680 vitality and the wonderful image that they give us they were not the whole of

00:05:13.600 the Teutonic world. There were the continental Germans, there were Teutons flung far and wide

00:05:18.600 across Europe. And this too is, in essence, their religion, their spirit, their way of looking at

00:05:26.060 the world and of approaching it. Nor do I mean to imply that Al-Satru is isolated off by itself,

00:05:35.360 off in a little compartment, kind of sheltered away. It's not that way at all because Al-Satru 0.53

00:05:40.760 is really a part of the broader Indo-European family.

00:05:44.280 It has all the usual parallels that you might expect

00:05:47.700 with, for example, the Celts,

00:05:50.380 who, although different in some details of culture,

00:05:54.460 were biologically the same folk,

00:05:58.340 culturally very similar,

00:05:59.840 and with an inner psychology

00:06:02.180 very much like that of the Teutons.

00:06:05.220 It correlates as well with the early Romans,

00:06:08.380 the early Greeks,

00:06:09.380 and, yes, even the very early Indians of Vedic India.

00:06:14.480 So that from virtually from the Ganges to Germany to Iceland

00:06:20.200 to now the western coast of the United States,

00:06:23.560 we have a continuum, a continuity,

00:06:25.940 representative of the Indo-European peoples,

00:06:28.760 the Indo-European traditions and thought and way of perceiving the world.

00:06:33.040 And Al-Satru is a valid summary for all of that.

00:06:37.280 You don't have to be a Viking. 0.72

00:06:39.380 to be an Alsaman or an Alsawoman.

00:06:43.160 You don't have to be someone with an uncle living in the Schwarzwald.

00:06:49.700 You can still be an Alsaman as long as you're a part of that broad spectrum.

00:06:54.860 This is your home. This is your spiritual garth, 1.00

00:06:59.640 your enclosed area, your protected area, the area of our folk.

00:07:09.380 Well, so much, perhaps, for the broad outline, the historical background,

00:07:14.360 a quick span of a few thousand years and quite a number of thousands of miles.

00:07:18.320 Let's hone a little bit now in on the content of our religion.

00:07:23.600 What do we see when we look there?

00:07:26.280 Well, an outsider, particularly when they look at Alcetru,

00:07:30.060 when they look at our native belief,

00:07:32.520 one of the first things they're going to see are these peculiar to them myths,

00:07:37.280 these stories.

00:07:39.380 and if they are of somewhat typical mind,

00:07:43.740 if they're like the average person on the street,

00:07:45.680 they're going to say,

00:07:46.720 a myth is a fable.

00:07:49.500 A myth is a made-up story 1.00

00:07:51.500 conjured up by primitive men and women 0.95

00:07:54.500 who had no other way of explaining the universe. 0.98

00:07:57.500 It's nothing more than a collection of rumors,

00:08:01.800 misinformation, it has no validity, no truth to it.

00:08:05.640 We know now, of course, that that's false.

00:08:08.940 it's not true. Myth is much more important than that. Myth is much more significant than that.

00:08:15.360 Myth is something very special indeed, and it took a long time for people in the 20th century

00:08:21.800 to start realizing that. Individually, each of us is carrying around a psyche with a couple of

00:08:30.580 major divisions in it. We've got this very above board, obvious, conscious self. Operates

00:08:38.700 up here, oh about this level actually, right up in the light, easily accessible. It's rather

00:08:43.440 linear, it's rather logical, it follows some rules that we can more or less predict and

00:08:49.200 we can more or less get a handle on what happens here. It's right there. But by no means is

00:08:56.100 it the whole story. There's all the rest of us that's kind of tucked away down here in the unconscious, as Jung called it. It's the part of us that's not quite so accessible, not quite so visible, not quite so open to daylight. And there's all sorts of things down in there. There's everything from personal memories that kind of filtered down, they dropped down out of the conscious level here and they got sealed away down here somewhere in the unconscious.

00:09:26.100 And there are more peculiar things, too. There are other memories. There are memories, not of us personally, but memories of our ancestors lying down there, waiting to be tapped, waiting to be discovered.

00:09:40.080 There are powerful instinctive urges welling up, things that we've inherited from our far distant past over tens of thousands of years of evolution and selection and strife and struggle.

00:09:54.220 All of this is there. All of this is real. All of this is important. Not only to the individual, but to the group. Just as the individual has this upper and this lower, the conscious, the unconscious, the somewhat rational and the mysterious and symbol-using unconscious, so does the group.

00:10:16.900 the culture, the tribe, the race as well

00:10:21.240 has this collective unconscious

00:10:23.240 as Dr. Jung called it

00:10:25.100 and it is within that collective unconscious

00:10:28.700 that we find those wonderful archetypes

00:10:31.400 that are our gods and our goddesses

00:10:34.320 so myth serves a function of communication

00:10:40.380 myth is the way that that hidden part of us

00:10:44.400 that unconscious part of us

00:10:46.160 communicates with the conscious part. It's a sort of code,

00:10:49.860 it's a sort of language, and it's not always obvious, it's not always easy to

00:10:53.880 figure out, but it's there

00:10:55.300 and it speaks to us. If only we will learn to listen, if only we

00:10:59.060 tune in and get on the right frequency, spiritually speaking,

00:11:03.540 we can pick up that wisdom, that knowledge, that insight

00:11:07.400 that lies hidden within us. In the individual

00:11:12.320 A parallel process, perhaps, is dreaming. People have dreams, people have made, I'm sure, vast amounts of money writing books on dream analysis, and there's a certain amount of validity to all of that.

00:11:25.860 In a way, what a dream is to the individual, the myth is to the group.

00:11:33.780 It's as though the whole culture, the whole tribe, the whole race dreamt.

00:11:40.960 And that is their product.

00:11:43.120 That is the content of that part of them that is not obvious.

00:11:48.980 One way of looking at myth, then, is that it is something which is true,

00:11:52.820 but not necessarily true in an obvious sense.

00:11:56.620 It contains truth, but it is not literal truth.

00:12:00.320 A myth is true on the inside, but false on the outside.

00:12:05.640 The stories themselves contain a lot that we need to see

00:12:09.180 and a lot that we need to know,

00:12:11.740 but it's not to be taken literally.

00:12:14.100 It's to be taken figuratively.

00:12:19.260 The important thing about myth

00:12:21.100 and the thing that produces so much confusion

00:12:23.340 is the idea that history and myth are one.

00:12:27.740 They're not, clearly.

00:12:29.640 But people of many religions get their myth mixed up with their history.

00:12:35.720 And they start taking it all very literally.

00:12:38.720 They don't realize that myth describes a landscape on the inside of us,

00:12:44.660 an interior landscape of the spirit and the soul.

00:12:48.700 And history describes a landscape that's configured by the mountains and the valleys

00:12:54.820 and all of the things on the outside that we know, the material world.

00:12:58.940 And that's an important difference.

00:13:00.840 Many Christians, unfortunately, get their own mythology mixed up with their history,

00:13:06.420 and then they start having problems.

00:13:08.420 You have problems with things like fossils, for example.

00:13:10.820 You have problems with the physical world.

00:13:13.220 You have problems dealing with science because, oh my goodness, how in the heck are we going to explain this?

00:13:17.500 They don't realize if they would just relax and consider it myth, they'd be on a lot firmer ground.

00:13:22.940 But they insist on making it history.

00:13:25.980 They run afoul of reality.

00:13:28.280 Well, we try not to do that.

00:13:30.560 We understand that the myths are allegories, they're symbols.

00:13:34.040 Useful, true in a sense, real in a sense, but not physical reality.

00:13:42.500 Well, okay, so much for the myths.

00:13:46.420 We've got all these neat stories.

00:13:47.880 We'll assume they mean something.

00:13:49.380 Fine.

00:13:50.040 How about the participants in the midst?

00:13:51.600 How about the players in the midst?

00:13:53.640 How about all of these gods and all of these goddesses

00:13:57.480 and giants and dragons for crying out loud

00:14:01.840 and the Midgard serpent and all of these?

00:14:04.440 What about them?

00:14:06.980 Well, we take a similar approach in regards to them.

00:14:11.000 Yes, there is a reality there.

00:14:14.000 No, it is not reality in the ordinary or mundane sense.

00:14:19.380 But that doesn't mean that the gods don't have a reality.

00:14:24.560 Most Christians, thank goodness, are not at a level where they believe that their god is literally an old man with a beard and a long flowing robe,

00:14:35.580 and he's sitting on this chair, probably made out of gold, and it's up in the clouds somewhere.

00:14:40.400 They've gotten beyond that a bit.

00:14:42.260 Well, so have we, obviously.

00:14:44.360 We don't have to conceive of Thor as literally being a power lifter with a flowing red beard

00:14:50.960 who rides around, he's got this big hammer, and he's got these goats,

00:14:55.060 and they pull this wagon of his.

00:14:57.620 We don't have to operate on that level.

00:15:00.900 The pictures that we have of the gods, the images that we have of the gods,

00:15:04.620 are ways by which we can approach the reality of the gods.

00:15:09.120 They are tools.

00:15:09.980 You might even say they're clues as to the nature of the reality, which is Thor, or Odin, or Balder, or Tyr, or any of the other deities of Alsatür.

00:15:26.980 These are things that help us tune into that reality. It helps to describe them.

00:15:30.980 It helps us, with our human understandings, to get closer to them and to figure out what is going on with these particular deities.

00:15:39.980 Well, with that said, let's take a quick stroll through the gallery of gods and goddesses.

00:15:48.980 We've got our hall here, our hall of fame, our god and goddess hall of fame,

00:15:53.980 and we'll check out some of the portraits that are hanging on its walls.

00:15:58.980 Well, here we come to a rather foreboding figure. Notice the one eye.

00:16:04.980 He gave up the other one because he had to give it up in order to drink from the well of wisdom.

00:16:10.980 This is, as you can tell, Odin himself, a rather patriarchal-looking figure.

00:16:16.980 Notice the spear off which the sunlight is glinting.

00:16:19.980 And in the background you can see his two wolves and you can see those ravens.

00:16:24.980 Odin, god of mystery, a god of magic, a god restless, always traveling between the worlds,

00:16:33.980 the worlds, trying to find out more lore so that he can use that lore for the use of gods and of

00:16:40.540 the humans. He's quite a foreboding figure. Maddy and I like to think of Odin also as a god of

00:16:48.480 upward evolution, one who's always striving, reaching for the higher, reaching to go beyond.

00:16:54.920 well he's quite a

00:16:58.040 quite a fellow

00:16:58.940 he of course belongs to the family of gods

00:17:02.500 known as the Aesir

00:17:03.900 and the Aesir are a family

00:17:06.220 that is more oriented towards

00:17:08.300 the realm of things like

00:17:10.240 conquest

00:17:11.900 warfare, politics

00:17:14.260 dealing, trying to make the world

00:17:16.400 safe, the worlds safe

00:17:18.080 from the onslaught of the giants and the other

00:17:20.100 forces that would destroy it

00:17:21.400 always fighting against entropy

00:17:23.880 They're keeping the spirit of life going in the many worlds.

00:17:29.480 You'll meet a different family of gods in a moment.

00:17:32.060 But let's take a look next to Othin here.

00:17:34.540 We have his wife. 0.93

00:17:35.420 We have Frigga.

00:17:38.200 Now, Frigga, you can tell by that wise look in her eye, knows a lot.

00:17:43.680 And she has the ability to see into the future, but she doesn't tell what she sees.

00:17:49.540 She's very wise.

00:17:50.700 And just from this snapshot, this frozen glimpse of her, you may think that there's not a lot there, but you're wrong, because she's really very assertive.

00:17:59.980 And more than once, she has crossed wills and words with her one-eyed husband. 1.00

00:18:04.840 Ask the Longobards. They'll tell you all about it. 1.00

00:18:08.880 Next to them, of course, is their blustery son, Thor. You all know Thor. Everybody knows Thor.

00:18:13.860 Thor is strong, lusty, blustery, energetic, fun-loving, I think, rather a friendly sort of god.

00:18:27.380 That hammer he's got there, he uses on the Midgard serpent and upon the giants as well.

00:18:35.740 He's sort of the enforcer of the gods.

00:18:38.180 He takes care of business, keeps the giants at bay, protects the walls, metaphorically speaking, of the realm of the gods, of Ausgard, as well as the realm of humankind, or Midgard.

00:18:51.180 Ah, okay, here we come to Sif, who's Thor's wife.

00:18:56.780 Don't have an awful lot of stories about Sif.

00:18:58.920 We've got a little wisdom of her, a little knowledge of her. 0.69

00:19:01.540 She has this wonderful golden hair, which you can see in this picture here.

00:19:04.940 only thing is it's not real

00:19:08.220 it's gold

00:19:09.140 you see Loki

00:19:10.780 Loki the trickster

00:19:12.840 the less said of him the better

00:19:14.120 was responsible for it all getting cut off

00:19:18.320 and so it got replaced by real gold

00:19:21.180 so there's a whole story behind that

00:19:23.680 that you'll have to check up on

00:19:24.780 if you're not already familiar with it

00:19:26.200 but she's quite a lady in herself 1.00

00:19:29.300 she'd have to be 1.00

00:19:31.000 to put up with four 0.97

00:19:32.180 okay

00:19:34.660 Next in line, we're switching over to another family of deities now.

00:19:38.820 We're going to have Frey.

00:19:40.960 Frey is a member of the Vanner.

00:19:43.580 The Vanner are a family of gods much more concerned with fertility,

00:19:49.140 with the creation of life, with the increase of life,

00:19:53.540 with prosperity and joy and pleasure,

00:19:57.140 all of these earthy kinds of things.

00:20:00.840 You'll notice that Frey is wearing a bit of jewelry.

00:20:04.660 Now, that kind of ties in with his emphasis on prosperity and plenty and doing well in the material world.

00:20:13.280 You can tell by that gleam in his eye that he's got a lot of energy.

00:20:17.660 He's quite a fellow, I'll pray.

00:20:20.440 And he definitely does what he can to enforce the idea of fertility

00:20:26.960 and to keep increase and growth and procreation happening throughout all the worlds.

00:20:34.660 Well, let's see. Who do we have next? Naturally, it would be Freya, his sister. She also, of course, is of the banner. I don't need to really drive home the point that she's the most beautiful of the goddesses. I think that's obvious to any of us who see her.

00:20:52.660 She's stunning, but don't be deceived.

00:20:57.660 This is not a 10th century version or even a 20th century version of a fold-out queen. 0.96

00:21:06.660 She's beautiful, but she's dynamite. Don't mess with her. 1.00

00:21:10.660 You'll wish you hadn't because she's very assertive. 1.00

00:21:13.660 She's very aggressive. She's hardcore. 1.00

00:21:16.660 She takes half of the fallen warriors, half of them, who fall in battle, go to her. 0.85

00:21:23.640 The other half go to Odin.

00:21:26.620 Hard to say who has the better lot, eh?

00:21:29.500 No, Freya, strong, assertive, willful, and again,

00:21:33.880 and deeply involved with this idea of creativity, of fertility, of continuing life.

00:21:42.300 Well, we have some more here. Back to the Aesir for a moment.

00:21:45.140 the one-handed god here

00:21:47.320 that's Tyr

00:21:48.480 he only has one hand

00:21:50.980 because he lost the other one

00:21:52.200 he gave it up

00:21:53.160 so that the Fenris wolf

00:21:54.660 could be bound

00:21:55.440 so we think of Tyr

00:21:57.300 as really summarizing

00:21:59.940 the warrior virtues

00:22:00.940 and in particular

00:22:01.920 the warrior's duty

00:22:03.780 to sacrifice

00:22:04.600 for the good of his people

00:22:05.920 because that's what he did

00:22:07.720 of course

00:22:08.040 when he gave up his hand

00:22:09.060 so Tyr

00:22:10.900 is a warrior god

00:22:12.280 he's also associated

00:22:13.500 with justice

00:22:14.300 He's associated with the thing, the meeting place, and with the right relationships amongst people.

00:22:22.760 The beautiful one here, Balder, Odin's brightest sun, most beautiful sun.

00:22:30.160 Yes, yes, beautiful god, Balder.

00:22:33.040 It's too bad that he's slated to be killed by a thrown dart of mistletoe.

00:22:38.300 setting into reaction all of the events leading to the Ragnarok,

00:22:44.260 the great battle at the end of time.

00:22:47.060 Well, look, we could go on and on.

00:22:48.580 There are other figures down there.

00:22:49.840 You can see their outlines a little faintly,

00:22:51.780 but they're a little faint to scholars as well,

00:22:53.900 and they're a little faint to some of us.

00:22:55.600 And it'll be time before we can get closer to them.

00:22:58.520 It'll be time before we can know these gods and these goddesses better than we do.

00:23:03.460 There's a lot to be done there.

00:23:04.740 We have many centuries that we have neglected our gods and goddesses,

00:23:09.700 and we have to rediscover them in a whole new way.

00:23:12.500 And that's a wonderful adventure.

00:23:14.240 But we don't really have time to walk down that corridor now.

00:23:17.060 It's time to perhaps turn our thoughts to other things.

00:23:20.940 It was a very quick survey of the gods and the goddesses of Al-Satru,

00:23:25.460 but one which I hope was illustrative at least of the basic ideas

00:23:28.980 and the principles that are applying there.

00:23:31.080 well let's talk for a moment about the whole lot of them

00:23:35.420 the whole lot of all the gods all the goddesses polytheistic

00:23:39.040 well you know actually I've been thinking about polytheism

00:23:42.320 and I think that on this level it does have certain advantages

00:23:45.960 that should be pointed out just in passing

00:23:47.840 first of all polytheism accurately reflects the complexity of the universe

00:23:52.640 now I understand I understand there's an underlying unity

00:23:57.100 and that all opposites can be reconciled on a higher level

00:24:00.580 you know, I know all of that, you know all of that, but right here, right down here on

00:24:04.660 the material plane where all this stuff is happening, the universe is an immense concourse

00:24:09.560 of forces. We've got countless interest groups, little eddies of will and of action moving

00:24:16.640 back and forth through the universe, through the cosmos. We have a multitude of inter-reactions

00:24:22.200 every instant. The molecules in this room are interacting furiously, more furiously

00:24:28.020 out there in the light where it's warmer and they're moving around more. But throughout the

00:24:32.460 universe, we have this action. We have this multitude of forces at work. The universe, in some

00:24:38.900 ways, is a complex place. And a family of gods surely represent that idea better than one more

00:24:47.540 abstract, more removed, more distant entity who's supposedly in charge of all of this.

00:24:52.360 the universe can be very complex

00:24:55.580 very difficult to deal with at times

00:24:57.780 any of you who have had to deal with a government bureaucrat understand that

00:25:01.360 you know the universe is a complicated place

00:25:03.740 so with a multitude of deities

00:25:06.900 we can deal with this, we can handle it

00:25:08.920 another thing I like about polytheism

00:25:12.280 is that it has goddesses

00:25:14.480 I mean, I understand

00:25:17.600 that guys like to go off and hang out with the guys

00:25:20.220 you know, where they can chew and talk dirty

00:25:22.080 and generally, you know, be guys. 1.00

00:25:25.180 And women, I'm sure, do the same.

00:25:27.440 But I don't know any man who wants to live in a men's club.

00:25:32.900 I had four years in the army, and that was more than enough.

00:25:36.420 It was time to move on. 0.85

00:25:38.920 Goddesses provide a balance. 0.99

00:25:41.520 Goddesses represent a whole other aspect of the universe,

00:25:45.380 as every 13-year-old discovers.

00:25:48.440 And, of course, without a goddess, you're halfway to atheism.

00:25:53.420 Got to remember that as well.

00:25:56.300 Third thing I like about polytheism, it has deities that people can identify with.

00:26:02.540 I, for one, cannot identify with some perfect spirit that is behind all of manifestation and makes everything happen.

00:26:13.760 Now, I understand, again, about an underlying essence.

00:26:16.380 I understand that everything can be unified in a sense, but on the other hand, when it comes down to images that I need for my personal spiritual advancement, for ratcheting up that next notch on the evolutionary scale, I need something I can see, something I can identify with, something I can say, yes, I felt like that.

00:26:39.600 yes, I've experienced that emotion, or yes, that's a strength I want, or even that's a weakness I want

00:26:47.020 to overcome, because our gods aren't perfect. They're not goody kinds of gods. They're gods

00:26:56.440 with failings, with faults. They're a bit like humans writ large, and that appeals to me. I like

00:27:02.080 that. I'm not perfect, and I don't want to be perfect in the goody-goody kind of way that some

00:27:07.700 people have a picture of that. I want to grow, to expand, to go farther, to work my way up the

00:27:13.400 evolutionary scale. And the gods and the goddesses of Alcatru are a powerful impetus for me personally

00:27:19.760 in that regard. It's something I can see, something I can feel in my heart, something I can identify

00:27:25.540 with. And I like that a lot.

00:27:31.420 Phew!

00:27:32.120 So far,

00:27:33.520 talked about myths.

00:27:36.200 Talked about gods and goddesses.

00:27:37.740 Okay, fine. Now what?

00:27:40.200 Well, okay,

00:27:41.460 the outsider would say,

00:27:43.140 what does this also-true tell you about how to live?

00:27:46.680 What are your values?

00:27:48.400 What are your virtues?

00:27:49.540 What are your vices? What's a good life?

00:27:52.160 How are you supposed to live if you do

00:27:53.700 this sort of thing. I mean, is it enough just to be kind of a wild and crazy kind of guy?

00:27:57.700 Is there more to it than that? Well, of course, although

00:28:01.700 I have nothing wrong with being a wild and crazy kind of guy either, on the other hand.

00:28:05.700 Years ago, no, not thousands

00:28:09.700 of years ago this time, but in fact only about 10 or 15 years ago,

00:28:13.700 when we were working with the Alsatru Free Assembly,

00:28:17.700 we codified

00:28:19.700 nine statements of virtues

00:28:24.160 that we thought, to us,

00:28:26.900 summarized what Al-Satru was.

00:28:30.280 And it's not cast in granite.

00:28:33.320 It's not, you know,

00:28:34.580 some tablet carried down through Revelation.

00:28:37.460 It's what we, we humans,

00:28:39.480 it's what we thought,

00:28:40.580 it's what we saw 0.99

00:28:41.460 when we looked at Al-Satru. 0.84

00:28:43.600 And I'd like to share those briefly with you.

00:28:45.320 The first one we wrote down was,

00:28:47.800 strength is better than weakness.

00:28:49.700 not exactly earth shaking is it you know that you wouldn't be here but a lot of people don't know

00:28:57.060 that to a lot of people it's not obvious the whole cult of the anti-hero in our culture today is

00:29:03.660 built around the idea that it's oh it's okay to to wimp out you know it's okay to take the easy way

00:29:09.600 it's okay to wimp and to to to kind of just you don't have to be strong all the time nobody can

00:29:16.880 be strong all the time. It's the old okay-to-cry crowd, right? Well, obviously, we disagree.

00:29:24.840 Thor here, back in our picture gallery for the moment, we open the door real quickly,

00:29:28.680 show you the photos again. Thor was not into weakness. Thor was into strength. We, too,

00:29:36.320 are to be into strength. We know that. You know that. Conan knows that. And we're all

00:29:43.700 ride on with it. Closely allied to the idea is the second thing we wrote down, which is that courage

00:29:51.740 is better than cowardice. It's better to be bold than to grovel. It's better to exhibit that grace

00:30:00.180 under pressure that Hemingway spoke of than it is to take the easy course out, the easy way out.

00:30:08.020 And yes, this too sounds obvious.

00:30:10.200 It should be apparent to us all.

00:30:11.880 But it's not apparent, I think, to the Phil Donahues of the world

00:30:15.340 or many other people who move around and get paid a very great deal

00:30:19.080 to express their opinions.

00:30:22.340 Third thing we wrote down is that joy is better than guilt.

00:30:27.500 We are made to feel guilty for so many things these days.

00:30:32.520 I don't see how people can bear up under the burden of it.

00:30:35.880 we've kind of shaken off a lot of the guilt feelings about sexuality you know there's the

00:30:42.520 old victorian prudishness that you know was way out of proportion and people have kind of swept

00:30:49.160 that out not entirely but there's huge amounts of other things that people are really eager to be

00:30:54.480 guilty about oh wow let's see this week we can be guilty because we get angry because we're not

00:31:00.680 mellow because we lose our temper even. Now, I happen to think that control of your temper

00:31:05.620 is better for other reasons. But the feeling itself, as far as I'm concerned, is okay.

00:31:12.380 There are times we need to get angry. There are times we need to let that come through.

00:31:18.080 Many of our instincts that are healthy instincts, good instincts, have been turned away with

00:31:24.060 It's sort of a new-age, crystal-clarity,

00:31:27.260 ooh-wow, we're going to be one big family,

00:31:29.960 and ooh-wow, we're just going to ever be so mellow,

00:31:33.560 and we're going to be bored to death.

00:31:38.060 Our heritage as people of Northern European descent

00:31:41.560 is something else we have been made to feel very guilty for.

00:31:45.060 Over and over and over, the media, the music,

00:31:50.260 From every end, every angle, we get the message,

00:31:54.160 what horrible people we are, how guilty we must be.

00:31:57.560 Everything in the world must be our fault.

00:32:01.420 Nonsense. Nonsense.

00:32:04.980 That's the politest way I can put it. Nonsense.

00:32:08.260 No, this kind of guilt, just like the other kinds of guilt,

00:32:11.920 all of this has got to go.

00:32:14.360 We need to experience the joy, the pleasure of self-assertion.

00:32:19.600 We need to understand that our instincts, properly used, properly controlled, are good.

00:32:25.560 We need to understand that we are not the world's punching bag.

00:32:28.960 We are not the world's scapegoat.

00:32:32.280 We are not responsible for, in any sense, the miseries of this planet.

00:32:38.860 We have a lot to offer, and we need to understand that guilt must not get in the way.

00:32:47.460 Honor is better than dishonor.

00:32:50.560 The heroes of the sagas, the gods themselves, are modern-day heroes,

00:32:56.060 people not afraid to take a stand, people not afraid to put it on the line,

00:33:00.700 people not afraid to face their Urlog, their fate,

00:33:06.100 people willing to accept misfortune, to accept even if necessary a death when that is called for.

00:33:14.100 These are people who understand the importance of honor,

00:33:16.960 people who will take the right course of action

00:33:20.720 the right action in a particular circumstance

00:33:24.880 as determined by the interactions of the norms

00:33:28.000 this is important

00:33:29.580 and it is something that our modern world

00:33:32.180 seems sadly to have forgotten

00:33:34.320 freedom is better than slavery

00:33:38.100 and nice easy slogan

00:33:40.760 anybody can use it

00:33:42.040 too bad most people think they're free

00:33:44.760 there's a couple of different kinds of slavery

00:33:48.260 there's the very obvious slavery

00:33:49.960 there's the slavery of people

00:33:51.440 who do have chains on their wrists

00:33:53.880 there's the gulags of this planet

00:33:56.620 in so many different countries

00:33:58.880 yes there are secret police

00:34:00.940 that knock on your door in the middle of the night

00:34:02.540 yes there are

00:34:06.000 prisons that people are thrown into

00:34:08.420 and they never appear from 0.99

00:34:09.980 that's true

00:34:10.760 yes all that's slavery

00:34:12.120 or unfreedom if you will

00:34:14.600 but how about the other kind

00:34:17.600 how about the kind of slavery

00:34:19.240 of people who sit on their sofa

00:34:22.020 and watch their television

00:34:23.560 and believe they're free

00:34:24.980 oh they're free

00:34:26.580 they're free to buy things

00:34:28.420 they're free to consume

00:34:30.580 they're free to go and work themselves to death

00:34:34.520 and then spend themselves to death

00:34:36.520 trying to meet the standards

00:34:38.320 that they are told

00:34:39.360 that they have to follow

00:34:41.160 sometimes freedom

00:34:44.220 is not easy to find in a world where slavery comes with velvet chains. 0.94

00:34:57.200 Kinship is better than alienation. 0.67

00:35:00.020 We live in a world, again, where not only are we not free, 0.64

00:35:03.360 but we are atomized in our slavery.

00:35:06.140 We are split apart from each other.

00:35:08.540 We have come to think of ourselves as nothing more than little produced-consumed units.

00:35:13.320 We're all interchangeable, and we all fit in wherever the system wants to put us.

00:35:20.200 But we're separated, often from our immediate family, from our extended family, from our co-religionists,

00:35:28.800 from other members of our broader folk outside us.

00:35:31.860 We have no identification with anything except an atomized individual.

00:35:38.240 And it's not that the individual isn't important.

00:35:40.380 The individual is very important.

00:35:42.160 but that individuality often can best be maintained

00:35:47.120 and interreaction with the web, the network

00:35:50.720 of like-minded individuals, of blood relatives, the folk.

00:35:58.760 Realism is better than dogma.

00:36:02.700 This goes back to what we were saying about myth and history earlier, actually.

00:36:08.760 Al-Satru doesn't wear blinders.

00:36:12.160 Al-Satru doesn't deny the material world, it doesn't deny science.

00:36:17.340 We can deal with fossils, unlike members of some other

00:36:20.960 religions. We can deal with quantum physics. We can deal

00:36:25.260 with the realities of the modern world. We're not going to be locked into the

00:36:29.020 ninth century or the tenth century. 0.98

00:36:30.780 We want Al-Satru in the 20th and the 21st and the 25th and the 30th century. 0.99

00:36:35.160 We're not blinded, we're not dogmatic. 0.87

00:36:38.340 There is no room in Alsatru for dogma. There is no Pope of Alsatru, and there never will be.

00:36:45.980 We think free. If we disagree, we say so.

00:36:50.960 If evidence comes along and we need to change our minds, we change our minds.

00:36:55.720 We don't insist that the world is really flat, and there's a dwarf literally on each corner, north, south, east, and west.

00:37:03.320 The times change, but we're on top of that.

00:37:06.280 We're in charge of it.

00:37:07.500 We're not locked into the past.

00:37:09.720 We deal with the present.

00:37:11.240 We turn it to our advantage and to our will, and we work with it.

00:37:17.800 Vigor is better than lethargy.

00:37:22.140 Vigor is how we express our will in the world.

00:37:26.680 Vigor is the energy, the power pack, the propulsion unit that lets us work our way, work our will.

00:37:36.180 Without it, we can have great ideas, but if we sit on the sofa and just kind of do this, we won't make it.

00:37:44.980 It's important to have vigor.

00:37:46.660 Certainly that's one thing that characterized the Vikings.

00:37:51.140 As much as any other virtue is vigor.

00:37:54.040 The energy, the outgoing, overflowing, bursting out energy characterized also by a wonderful spring day like this as well.

00:38:04.740 Upswelling life, upswelling life continually expressing through the individual and through the group.

00:38:12.020 Finally, the last one we wrote down.

00:38:15.340 Ancestry is better than universalism.

00:38:18.760 Tens of thousands of years of evolution in a particular environment has given us a set

00:38:32.920 of particular virtues and vices.

00:38:37.200 It has made us what we are.

00:38:40.920 The experience of other branches of the human family are different.

00:38:47.240 must be true to what is in us. We are more like our ancestors than we are like anyone

00:38:55.220 else. It is to our ancestors then that we have to look. It is to our innate soul as

00:39:01.880 a people that we have to look. Because from our ancestors we have acquired wonderful things.

00:39:10.240 Not the obvious, not just the obvious, but the other qualities that are subtler, but

00:39:19.120 so, so, so important.

00:39:24.280 We are one with our ancestors.

00:39:27.960 One of the traditions of Alsatru is that we are reborn into our clan line.

00:39:35.740 We are our own ancestors, in a sense.

00:39:40.100 I find that an interesting thought, comforting in some ways because it keeps it all within

00:39:45.640 the family, but intimidating in other ways because it puts the ultimate responsibility

00:39:50.920 right back on us.

00:39:53.260 If we want to come back into a world, say, a hundred years from now as our own great

00:39:56.720 grandkids, and if we want that world to be a decent place, then we'd better do something

00:40:01.820 about it, hadn't we?

00:40:02.820 We'd better do something while we're here.

00:40:05.300 There are no free rides.

00:40:06.900 The responsibility is ultimately up to us.

00:40:09.600 no one else to blame. And that's good, because that kind of responsibility gives us strength,

00:40:18.600 gives us the opportunity for heroism, and there's not much more else that we can honestly

00:40:24.440 ask for.

00:40:32.060 So, nine virtues. Correspondingly, nine vices. Opposite courage, we have cowardice. Opposite

00:40:41.300 honor, we have dishonor. So forth. You can make up a little chart. I'm not a chart maker.

00:40:45.400 I probably would have done that. The good life, the right life in Ausatru consists simply

00:40:52.440 in maximizing your personal set of virtues and minimizing your personal set of vices.

00:40:59.180 It's that simple, I suppose. Now, if a lot of these virtues, if a lot of these desirable

00:41:05.800 characteristics in the individual sound familiar, well, doggone it, I guess there's a reason

00:41:10.960 for that. Because they're nothing more, nothing less than what traditionally we have thought

00:41:17.940 of, rightly or wrongly, but traditionally we have thought of as the all-American virtues.

00:41:25.180 You know, you think of the characters of the Old West.

00:41:28.780 You know, tough, independent, hardy, forthright, honest, straight-speaking.

00:41:36.400 You know, I know we're dealing with archetypes and not realities, okay?

00:41:39.740 But all of these things, yes, of course these are familiar.

00:41:43.020 They're the basis of what we have come to think of as Western civilization

00:41:47.640 or certainly the best in American civilization.

00:41:51.100 So, yes, yeah, those are familiar.

00:41:53.380 But what people don't realize is that these values didn't come to us out of the Middle East.

00:41:58.700 They have nothing to do with the Middle East.

00:42:01.340 We get them directly, honestly, straightly from our own people, from our own ancestors.

00:42:08.080 They're not imports. They're domestic products.

00:42:10.820 So we should buy, right?

00:42:12.140 Okay.

00:42:12.900 What so many people, even so many people of good intent, so many people of earnestness don't understand as well, is that so many of our institutions, our political institutions, our social institutions that we think of as promoting freedom, also derive from our ancestors.

00:42:36.200 i think that if you talk to most christians they will tell you that our political freedoms are

00:42:44.020 derived from the bible we know better of course go back to essential things like trial by jury

00:42:51.760 a nordic institution common law guys they don't call it anglo-saxon common law for nothing

00:43:01.740 It wasn't imported from the Middle East.

00:43:04.060 It comes from us.

00:43:05.200 In fact, what you might be interested in informing people

00:43:08.660 is that the very word law does not come to us from the tongues of the Middle East.

00:43:15.460 It doesn't come to us from the languages which Christianity reached at an early point.

00:43:20.700 The word law derives directly from the Old Norse and the Anglo-Saxon.

00:43:25.860 It doesn't come from an outside people.

00:43:28.960 It's ours.

00:43:29.620 And yet we have all been given the slander that our ancestors were uncouth, crude, lawless, uncivilized barbarians.

00:43:40.420 And a slander is what it is.

00:43:42.900 The very word law is ours.

00:43:45.580 The very concept is ours.

00:43:51.160 The idea of parliaments evolved from the Germanic thing, the tribal meetings,

00:43:57.920 Evolved up through the Althing, of course, in Iceland.

00:44:01.440 Similar institutions on the Isle of Man and other places.

00:44:05.620 This is where we get our traditions of self-government.

00:44:09.140 This is where we get our traditions of civilized men and women coming together,

00:44:14.120 solving their disputes in an honest and fair way,

00:44:16.860 without decrees from some higher power.

00:44:20.400 But organically, grassroots level, roots level, this is us.

00:44:26.940 The idea of limits on the rights of rulers, the idea of keeping those guys off our backs,

00:44:33.980 this also is a tradition that goes back to pre-Christian times in Scandinavia and throughout the Teutonic world. 0.62

00:44:43.220 One of the greatest conflicts that we had with the kings who were early converted to Christianity

00:44:49.700 is their incredible desire for centralization,

00:44:53.800 for extending that royal reach into everybody's pocketbook,

00:44:57.540 into everybody's pocket of any sort.

00:45:02.140 The Hames Kringla, for example,

00:45:04.660 Snorri Sturluson's magnificent collection of sagas about old Norway

00:45:09.220 at just about the time of the so-called conversion to Christianity

00:45:12.880 is replete with examples of this.

00:45:15.660 Over and over and over you've got the pattern of a king,

00:45:18.600 royal guy, right, wants more than he's got, converts to Christianity, says, aha, what

00:45:25.520 a nice tool for making sheep out of my wolves. And so he goes in, he converts them, kills 0.99

00:45:31.740 the ones that won't cooperate, exiles the troublemakers, takes things over, confiscates

00:45:36.040 their lands, centralizes power, centralizes authority, in direct defiance of the law of

00:45:43.700 the folk, in direct defiance of the traditions of the folk, and to his own aggrandizement.

00:45:51.700 In so many ways, we must remember, it wasn't just people outside our folk group that are

00:45:59.140 our problem. Our own greed, our own loss of tradition, our own loss of perspective and

00:46:06.660 of spiritual insight has run us afoul so many times. Correspondingly, the opposite of the

00:46:14.860 limits on rulers, the other end of that particular stick is the rights of freemen, and to a great

00:46:20.160 extent also the rights of women. All of these were developments of our pre-Christian traditions

00:46:27.200 in northern Europe. Alsatru is the root of these. Women were much freer in the ages of the Vikings

00:46:34.100 than they were a couple of hundred years later under Christian rule. 0.84

00:46:38.120 And similarly, correspondingly, the rights of all the freemen shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

00:46:45.340 The idea of divine right of kings is not a heathen, not an also true institution. 0.80

00:46:57.200 Well, so far, we've covered a lot of ground.

00:47:01.620 My goodness. We've gone from the Ganges to the West Coast.

00:47:06.380 We've gone from 40,000 years in the past, Carlton Kuhn's figure,

00:47:10.220 all the way up till, well, we've actually mentioned about the 30th century, haven't we?

00:47:16.200 We've covered gods. We've covered myths.

00:47:19.380 We've talked a little bit about the values of our ancestral faith of Al-Satru.

00:47:23.800 I'm going to take a short break, and then I'm going to come back, 0.68

00:47:26.880 and we'll talk a little bit about the 20th century revival of Al-Satru 0.75

00:47:30.400 and what we hope will be perhaps a lot farther down the line developments in Alistair.

00:47:37.520 So let's take a break, get a drink or two, get my sugar fix over there, a little caffeine, and we'll drive on.

00:47:45.240 Thank you.

00:47:53.220 Yeah, we're still bringing people out.

00:47:54.800 We're not ready to...

00:47:57.800 Well, a while ago, we, as I say, covered an awful lot of ground and an awful lot of time.

00:48:04.040 Time and space is something that we really played liberties with there.

00:48:08.160 We roared all the way from the beginning of our existence as a people,

00:48:12.960 conservatively 40,000 years, could be much, much more than that,

00:48:16.540 depending on your favorite anthropologist,

00:48:19.160 all the way up, zipping through the present as though it were just the tiniest little bubble in space-time,

00:48:24.480 whizzing on down to the other end 30th 30th century terrific nice advance on

00:48:31.380 regards of front of time in terms of space we've covered at least half the

00:48:36.900 globe and then yeah one could go a lot farther than that I suppose actually

00:48:41.940 during the breaks I commented to someone that I'd like to have my kids mining the

00:48:45.680 asteroids someday so I suppose we actually got out a little bit farther

00:48:48.720 than that well we're going to get a little bit closer to home now a lot

00:48:53.280 closer to home, in fact, both in space and in time. We're going to talk about the revival of this

00:48:58.120 ancient religion of Alcetru in the 20th century. Alcetru was severely suppressed and repressed

00:49:07.840 by the Christian kings who came into Scandinavia, as well, of course, as those on the continent,

00:49:16.540 Charlemagne's slaughter of the Saxon nobility being only one example of the genocide that

00:49:22.380 was conducted against us. An incredible amount was lost. There are just fleeting, brief references

00:49:34.280 to some myths in the surviving texts, and we don't have the myths that they're referring

00:49:41.240 to. Manuscript after manuscript evaporated. Tale after tale was lost. Beowulf, I believe,

00:49:51.240 only by luck. There was a manuscript found in some obscure place that wasn't going to make it

00:49:59.360 otherwise, similarly with much of our other ancient lore. However, since religion, all true

00:50:06.340 religions spring from inside, they don't come from the outside world. They're not primitive man's

00:50:11.980 explanations of the outside world. They are our own inside world's explanations to us, and so it

00:50:19.240 doesn't go away it's all in there if we can just tap it we can reach inside with

00:50:24.220 pure instincts reach inside tap into the wisdom that is there it's within us as a

00:50:31.480 people within our very genes so it was only natural that sooner or later it was

00:50:38.500 going to reemerge sooner or later when the time was right was going to well up

00:50:44.260 again, and sure enough it did. Various and sundry forms, some of them literary

00:50:50.500 movements more than anything else. Gothism in Scandinavia, the Romantic

00:50:56.520 movement on the continent incorporated a lot of heathen, also true type motifs.

00:51:02.680 You had a growing interest in mythology and in comparative mythology through

00:51:07.120 comparative linguistics, and a lot of a lot of this kind of stuff is going on

00:51:10.460 right on the edges of the scholarly worlds. And then other things started happening. A

00:51:16.940 fellow named H. Rudd Mills in Australia revived Odinism, as he called it, and developed it

00:51:23.180 along his particular line of progression. And then in other places you had things happening,

00:51:29.780 for example, around the turn of the century, a little before and a little after, you had

00:51:34.380 a number of continental German groups that became interested in the runes, became interested

00:51:40.200 in Teutonic mythology, Teutonic mysticism, sort of theosophical offshoots, all sorts

00:51:47.780 of little things happening, little bubblings, little ferments rising up out of the collective

00:51:53.760 unconscious. And all of this is as though it were just setting the stage. Time passed,

00:52:04.240 started heating up and some of this I can speak about I guess with some degree of

00:52:10.480 authority because I was there I was there when it happened to guys and so

00:52:15.040 I'd like to tell you for a couple of minutes about the the birth of what

00:52:19.180 became the also true free assembly in the United States and some of the

00:52:22.840 strange events that surrounded that long ago and I may look old but actually it

00:52:31.000 It was only when I was in my 20s, or late teens, in fact.

00:52:36.220 I had gone off to college.

00:52:38.940 My Catholicism in which I'd been raised was already being badly eroded

00:52:43.200 by little things like the issue of free will,

00:52:46.860 the fact that I didn't like tyranny in any form, and so forth.

00:52:52.060 And so I was ripe. I was ripe.

00:52:54.840 I'd been sniffing around the edges of some of the occult material,

00:52:58.620 and I'd read some of the Eastern stuff,

00:53:01.000 And I'd read a little Theosophy, and I thought Alistair Crowley was a really bad dude and stuff like that.

00:53:07.380 Well, you know, a lot of that looks kind of silly in retrospect now, but, you know, that's what people do.

00:53:12.780 Here I was as a freshman at college.

00:53:14.500 I was wide open.

00:53:15.500 I was vulnerable.

00:53:16.780 This guy was ready to take a spiritual rocket, and wham, it happened.

00:53:21.680 But it happened not because I was searching for, wow, truth or enlightenment or any of that stuff.

00:53:29.220 I was looking for a good novel to read.

00:53:32.100 Well, I found it.

00:53:33.860 It was not great literature, as my wife will readily agree.

00:53:38.840 It was something called The Vikings, a historical novel by a fellow named Edison Marshall

00:53:43.260 who churned out historical novels like crazy, I guess, for quite a while.

00:53:48.980 Before I even got to the end of this book, wow, I was convinced.

00:53:53.720 When it came down to virtues, when it came down to people to emulate,

00:53:58.000 the Vikings had it over the monks.

00:54:01.500 The monks lost this guy.

00:54:05.620 Well, you know, actually, my father always wanted me to be a priest.

00:54:08.760 I don't think this is quite what he had in mind.

00:54:11.340 But as life went on, as the days went on, the weeks went on,

00:54:16.020 I realized that something was happening inside.

00:54:21.200 It wasn't instant.

00:54:22.340 There was no blinding light on the road to Damascus kind of scene. 0.86

00:54:26.240 What happened was that I thought, gosh, I really like these heathen gods.

00:54:31.320 I really like this Odin.

00:54:33.200 I mean, this is a hard guy, but he leaves you alone, really.

00:54:36.580 He doesn't ask for your soul.

00:54:39.540 You don't have to kiss up to him. 0.99

00:54:42.320 And if you tried, he'd probably kick you in the teeth. 0.96

00:54:45.080 And I like that. 0.99

00:54:46.120 That's honest.

00:54:46.820 That's straightforward.

00:54:47.960 I like that kind of a virtue.

00:54:49.520 you. And so I started reading a little more about this sort of stuff, and it started sinking

00:54:54.800 in a little more. And it wasn't like I went out the next day and, you know, dedicated

00:55:00.220 myself to the old gods. It wasn't that quick, because I still had a lot of conditioning

00:55:04.780 to overcome. But within a couple of months, it was pretty plain what I had done. I had

00:55:11.840 accepted Odin, father of the gods, as my own deity. This was the God I wanted to follow.

00:55:20.620 Now you've got to realize that in rural Texas in 1967 or 8, this was a pretty radical kind of

00:55:29.260 statement. Well, I didn't state it to an awful lot of people. It's not that I was ashamed of it,

00:55:34.020 but who do you talk to about this sort of thing? I had my usual crowd, you know, we hung out and

00:55:38.040 We partied a little bit, and they knew where I was coming from,

00:55:41.780 and we'd all get together because they could identify with lots of it.

00:55:45.980 They really could.

00:55:46.700 They weren't religious in the conventional sense,

00:55:49.200 and they liked the approach of the Vikings.

00:55:52.180 And so as time went by, well, they understood where I was coming from.

00:55:57.380 I took a photograph out of National Geographic of a Forzhammer.

00:56:01.880 It must have been about 1977.

00:56:03.280 I bet you've all got the issue at home on your bookshelf somewhere.

00:56:07.000 And I took it down to a jewelry shop.

00:56:09.640 And I said, make me one of these.

00:56:12.800 And they did.

00:56:14.180 They made me one of them.

00:56:14.920 It was my first Thor's hammer.

00:56:17.980 And I was so proud the day they brought that bout to me.

00:56:21.340 It was terrific.

00:56:22.260 And I wore that for a long time.

00:56:24.280 And, of course, I've worn its replacements rather regularly.

00:56:27.540 A friend of mine really dug it.

00:56:29.360 He thought it was great.

00:56:30.180 He said, hey, I want one of those, too.

00:56:32.400 There's a guy named Rick.

00:56:34.060 I won't give his last name.

00:56:35.120 I want to preserve his privacy to some extent. 0.94

00:56:37.820 But he became a cobra pilot in Vietnam 0.91

00:56:40.060 and wore it throughout his tour there. 0.94

00:56:42.200 So here's a warrior.

00:56:43.400 Whatever you thought of that particular fracat

00:56:45.180 is not really relevant at this point.

00:56:46.960 But here's another warrior who, in the 20th century,

00:56:51.020 was wearing the hammer of four.

00:56:55.300 Well, this continued on kind of a personal level for a long time.

00:56:59.020 I wasn't really in a proselytizing mode.

00:57:01.400 It didn't matter.

00:57:02.140 I wasn't out to convert other people.

00:57:03.440 I was just reveling in being truly different, truly individualistic, doing something that was just right for me. 0.76

00:57:12.260 And then the time went by, and at that point, the Jesus-free movement was quite strong. 0.87

00:57:19.880 And I'm rather laissez-faire on that sort of thing. 0.97

00:57:22.580 I don't care. If people want to follow Jesus, then they should follow Jesus.

00:57:29.180 On the other hand, these people were really irritating.

00:57:31.800 They were in-your-face kind of people.

00:57:33.820 And I don't like people in my face.

00:57:36.080 And so, naturally, I got a little pushy back.

00:57:39.640 And so I thought, look, guys, it's time to do something about this.

00:57:41.760 It's time to implement a plan.

00:57:44.080 So, we launched, we, me and a couple of other crazies,

00:57:47.980 launched The Rune Stone.

00:57:51.120 First issue.

00:57:52.480 Oh, we were ever so proud of it.

00:57:54.960 Had a run of 11 copies, I believe.

00:57:58.160 But we were on our way.

00:57:59.840 We had begun.

00:58:00.420 We had Odin Lives bumper stickers printed up. Garish, outrageous, red on black. We loved it. It was really hooah. We had a couple of hundred of those. We took them around. We put them on our cars. We sold them to people through the mail. We had a great time. And again, in rural Texas, this was an interesting development. 0.55

00:58:19.420 we weren't able to get a second set of them run for some reason.

00:58:24.560 So that was only the beginning, you know.

00:58:26.840 And then I finished college, and Uncle Sam comes knocking.

00:58:32.180 Kind of put on the green guy.

00:58:34.360 Put on my green.

00:58:35.760 Entered the Army four years.

00:58:37.300 That's what I owed him.

00:58:40.240 I do recall early in my Army career, if you want to call it a career,

00:58:44.780 I had to get a replacement set of dog tags.

00:58:48.640 And I was down at the jump school at Fort Benning at the time.

00:58:51.860 And I went down there to a little building down by,

00:58:55.040 maybe you've seen pictures of those 200-foot towers

00:58:57.020 they drop guys out of for parachute training.

00:58:59.020 It's really awesome.

00:58:59.620 But I went down there and I had to get my replacement set. 0.99

00:59:03.280 And the little old lady sitting there, you know, 0.83

00:59:05.240 typing in the information and all of this. 0.99

00:59:07.200 Okay, she got my name right.

00:59:08.760 She got my blood type right.

00:59:10.660 Time for a life change, guys.

00:59:12.760 I didn't even know the word alsatru at the time.

00:59:15.660 We hadn't discovered that yet.

00:59:17.280 this was organic grassroots one man and a few others with you know fixed spear

00:59:23.820 points running up the hill against the establishment kind of stuff and so I

00:59:27.780 didn't even know the word alsatru so I said put Norse and she did and I wore

00:59:32.520 those through jump school some other schools and for for a long long time

00:59:37.500 thereafter the ones I wear now because I still do this sort of thing on weekends

00:59:42.480 they say, I'll say true. And I'm proud of that. I have no problems with that.

00:59:47.420 Well, obviously it's a little hard to do the infantry thing and do a religious 0.98

00:59:51.900 thing like this at the same time. So the organization, the movement suffered as

00:59:56.220 they say. But the day came when I got out, shucked off the green, and moved to

01:00:02.960 Thor, don't ask me why, Berkeley. Well here I was in Berkeley. Berkeley is an

01:00:08.520 interesting sort of place. I had an interesting time in Berkeley. We held

01:00:14.340 meetings because by now the Roomstone had grown to a hundred and some odd

01:00:17.580 subscribers. We thought that was really going to town. We held meetings in a

01:00:20.700 little office on University Avenue, you know, with in so many ways our cultural

01:00:26.880 opposites walking up and down the streets, people who would not even

01:00:30.120 identify with what we were doing. But we'd go back there and devoutly sacrifice to

01:00:34.920 the gods, make offerings to the gods, practice our religion, talk up our religion, support

01:00:40.580 each other. It was about that time that we adopted the name of Ausatru Free Assembly.

01:00:48.080 Before that it had been, well, Viking Brotherhood is what we called it for a long time. But,

01:00:53.680 you know, that was bound to change as we expanded our role and realized the depth and the sincerity

01:00:57.920 and the importance of what we were doing. We did sacrifices, or bloats is the actual

01:01:02.920 term, and I want to emphasize we're not talking bloody sacrifices, you know, we're

01:01:07.060 not out there slaughtering chickens or doing anything of that, but sacrifices

01:01:10.900 nonetheless of our will and our works and our feelings to the gods. Out in

01:01:16.000 Tilden Park, up in the Berkeley Hills, we did the first public Odinblot, a

01:01:21.280 sacrifice to Odin, which perhaps stirred things up a little bit, even in Berkeley.

01:01:26.380 And we started holding our All Things, our annual meetings, that are still being

01:01:34.540 carried on under the auspices of the Alcatru Alliance in Arizona. Well, time

01:01:42.100 went by, other things happened, moved to Northern California, got out of the cities,

01:01:47.200 moved to the sticks, which is kind of where I prefer it anyway, and real

01:01:51.780 expansion started. We started doing a lot more energetic publishing. We started

01:01:55.760 experiments and local outreach. We started getting it together. Then, again, another change,

01:02:02.120 life not being a constant, or the only thing being constant, being change, moved to Texas.

01:02:08.000 I'm from Texas originally. Moved there to help out in the family business. Spent a couple of years

01:02:13.640 in the oil industry until the price of oil got so low in the mid to late 70s that it wasn't worth

01:02:18.420 taking out of the ground. But while we were there, we did some wonderful things. We published

01:02:25.960 rituals. We made tapes. We had half a dozen different tapes that we were offering. We

01:02:32.340 wrote booklets. We published booklets, at least one of which we have over here, What

01:02:38.000 Is Also True?, which is sort of, well, I guess it's my Catholic background, so it's sort 0.61

01:02:42.280 of a heathen catechism sort of thing. Most of these things are still available, again, 0.95

01:02:50.880 through the Ausatru Alliance in Payson, Arizona. I'd be glad to give anybody an address who's

01:02:56.840 interested in that if you don't already know about them. We developed membership. We developed

01:03:04.280 local congregations called kindreds. They started dotting the map across the country.

01:03:09.420 We developed guilds, sort of like special interest groups, and some of these were quite

01:03:14.600 ancient and traditional.

01:03:16.480 We had mead-making guilds, and I think that was probably one of our most successful ones.

01:03:24.600 We had a lot of things with a real antiquarian flavor to them, but on the other hand, we

01:03:29.360 had things that were quite the opposite.

01:03:31.140 They were very outreaching and modern.

01:03:34.100 We had, get this, an aerospace technology guild.

01:03:38.580 We had people who were into planes and missiles and rockets and stuff, and they would meet.

01:03:46.220 One thing that they did, the last couple of All Things that we held in Texas, was to begin

01:03:51.800 the All Things by launching a rocket, a little model rocket.

01:03:56.460 In fact, I understand it's a tradition that they're still carrying on at the All Things,

01:04:00.540 and I think that's pretty neat.

01:04:02.140 The whole point was that Alcetru is not something to lock away a thousand years ago.

01:04:08.260 alive now. Our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, which if you want

01:04:14.260 to look at it in a way, is us too, are going to be living in the future. So let's accept

01:04:20.040 that. Let's enjoy that. Let's appreciate that. There's a lot of life to live, and it's not

01:04:25.860 all in the 10th century. Other good thing we did, the poetic Edda, one of the most important

01:04:35.100 source works of our traditional belief. Very hard to find. Books like this go out

01:04:42.120 of print. They're of interest mostly to academics or to a handful of students in

01:04:46.800 a Scandinavian department somewhere. We got together a bunch of people. We did a

01:04:52.740 letter-writing campaign. We pushed the idea. We got it reprinted by the

01:04:57.180 University of Texas. That's the Lee Hollander translation of the Poetic Edda.

01:05:01.260 we thought that's one of the very good things that we did at that time.

01:05:06.580 Not to say that it was always easy.

01:05:10.640 I love Texas.

01:05:12.400 I truly love Texas.

01:05:14.040 I love my fellow Texans.

01:05:16.180 But, my goodness, when you're a heathen,

01:05:20.380 it can be awfully rough in rural Texas.

01:05:23.120 I mean, they don't understand.

01:05:24.420 They should understand.

01:05:25.960 You're not going to find a more independent,

01:05:27.860 a more cussed bunch of rugged, no-nonsense-tolerating bunch of individuals hardly anywhere.

01:05:38.460 But they don't understand the theology.

01:05:40.520 It's a little intimidating to them.

01:05:41.900 So we did have some run-ins with the locals.

01:05:44.660 There for a while after the price of oil dropped...

01:05:46.540 I'm starting to talk with a Texas accent, aren't I?

01:05:49.400 There for a while.

01:05:50.480 There for a while after the price of oil dropped so low that you couldn't take it out of the ground,

01:05:55.320 I took a job as a jailer in a county jail.

01:06:01.260 Well, the advantage was it gave me time to sit there and answer correspondence

01:06:04.140 and write stuff and plan things and all of that.

01:06:06.920 But it did run into problems every now and then because, by golly,

01:06:10.440 see, we had this big extravaganza

01:06:13.900 because we had opened a northern European heritage center there in town.

01:06:17.960 So there was a focus for our front.

01:06:19.440 We thought we were being horribly conspiratorial.

01:06:22.620 I mean, everybody's heard of Marxist Leninists,

01:06:24.600 But who ever heard of Announce a true Leninist, right?

01:06:26.640 The true spirit of revolution.

01:06:30.360 And one of the things that we featured was to bring some SCA people in from the Dallas-Fort Worth area

01:06:36.860 over to do a fighting demonstration on the courthouse lawn.

01:06:41.260 Now, we thought that was pretty innocent, right?

01:06:43.680 But you wouldn't believe the furor that that stimulated locally.

01:06:48.180 We had so much hassles.

01:06:49.460 And here I was, you know, right at the center of the legal establishment

01:06:52.920 or the law enforcement establishment of the town.

01:06:55.400 Oh, God, you know, and the sheriff's looking at me kind of like this.

01:06:58.660 You know, who is this guy really?

01:07:01.040 It was interesting.

01:07:02.200 It was interesting times.

01:07:03.680 Opening the Northern European Heritage Center in itself was an interesting experience

01:07:07.800 because here we are, I bet counterculture maybe gives kind of the wrong impressions,

01:07:12.880 but in a way, yeah, we were definitely outside the mainstream.

01:07:16.580 Here we were coming in doing this really bizarre thing,

01:07:19.080 But the way it worked locally was that the Chamber of Commerce was required by their, the way they operated there, to send all their guys around in their three-piece suits and have a ribbon-cutting kind of thing.

01:07:32.220 And so it was really wild. Here we were, you know, radical, alsatru, consciousness revolutionaries wheeling in from the fourth dimension, and here's, you know, the president of the local banks.

01:07:44.000 Now, you may think, looking at it, that I would fit in there, and I, you know, chameleon job.

01:07:50.760 Hey, you know, I learned about camouflage. I can do that stuff.

01:07:53.700 But it was, as they say, interesting.

01:07:58.140 Well, anyway, time went by.

01:08:01.900 We had extended ourselves an awfully long way, and there was a lot going on.

01:08:08.140 I feel that the AFA tried to do perhaps too much too soon.

01:08:14.000 I don't regret that. There's no apologies there. I'm not into apologies, not in that sense, not into growling, not into regrets. But nonetheless, we had extended ourselves awfully far and it was time to back off a little bit.

01:08:31.000 We were very tired. We were a bit on the burned-out side. There was a lot happening, and, well, when it's time, you know. When it's time, you know. What's the old thing? Lest one good custom should corrupt the earth, or something Arthurian. I don't remember quite where that comes from.

01:08:53.000 But then came the stage that we call, Maddie and I call, the lacuna.

01:09:00.000 A lacuna is usually, it's a term to describe in a manuscript,

01:09:08.000 like Beowulf or any of the old manuscripts, a gap, a hole.

01:09:12.000 You know, a place where the worms ate the words, you know, there's nothing there.

01:09:16.000 Well, this was sort of our lacuna.

01:09:19.000 We dropped off the pages, dropped, you know, off of flat land and into another dimension a bit.

01:09:25.380 And we took some time off.

01:09:26.480 We spent about five years knocking around and traveling and being poor and going strange places.

01:09:35.460 We moved back to Northern California, lived up in the hills in a little virtual ghost town,

01:09:42.900 chopped our own wood, flumed water out of a stream, lived on nothing.

01:09:46.760 Oh, it was beautiful. It was beautiful. The challenges were beautiful. The scenery was beautiful.

01:09:55.760 There was no danger of forgetting the gods, especially in a place like that. We kept it pretty much on a family level.

01:10:03.760 We never forgot. It was there and it was waiting. It was gestating.

01:10:10.600 We knocked around a lot.

01:10:13.200 I did a lot of writing, mostly for military magazines.

01:10:16.880 We went to Tibet.

01:10:18.060 No, correction.

01:10:19.080 No, we went to northern India and interviewed Tibetans

01:10:21.680 who had fought against the Chinese, got that written up.

01:10:27.640 We went to Burma and lived with insurgents along the border there.

01:10:33.480 We did all sorts of neat stuff. 0.99

01:10:34.900 But always, always, always, always Al-Satru was there.

01:10:40.380 Always the gods were there.

01:10:42.960 Up in the Himalayas, went up way up in some pass,

01:10:46.340 K-Long Pass, I guess, heading up towards Tibet there,

01:10:48.980 but still a few miles to the Indian side of the border.

01:10:51.920 And I really admired the Tibetans, and I respected their beliefs.

01:10:55.980 And, of course, they had all their prayer flags fluttering in a thin Himalayan wind.

01:11:01.160 And it was lovely. It was lovely.

01:11:03.020 And I thought, this place needs a herg, an altar, if you will. 0.87

01:11:09.360 And so we took some rocks and we erected a herg or an altar.

01:11:15.500 And I used my Thor's hammer and we consecrated it up in northern India.

01:11:20.180 I'm sure it's still there.

01:11:22.840 So the essence never left.

01:11:25.160 The real things that were motivating us never left.

01:11:29.020 Well, we're back again.

01:11:30.800 Just about a year ago, we decided to start publishing the runestone again.

01:11:36.060 It was time.

01:11:37.040 We had things to say.

01:11:38.320 We're back on the scene.

01:11:39.540 We're ready to go.

01:11:40.420 We're fresh.

01:11:41.720 And so we're publishing, publishing the runestone.

01:11:44.120 I'm sure you've seen the copies over there.

01:11:45.920 It says number one, two, and three on it, but it's really like probably 60 or 70, one, two, or three, something like that.

01:11:52.500 We're publishing other stuff.

01:11:53.660 We've just done a manual on daily living Al-Satru, a way of living religion without being stuffy,

01:11:59.760 a way of living religion and have fun at the same time.

01:12:03.020 You know, we're not into the straight-faced approach to religion.

01:12:06.080 Religion is much too important to do in a grim, straight-faced, humorless way.

01:12:11.500 It's got to live. 1.00

01:12:13.160 Also, there's a book on runic affirmations that is Maddie's work entirely.

01:12:19.440 My name's on it. I think I proofread it or something.

01:12:21.440 I'm not sure, you know.

01:12:23.120 It's her work, and I think it's a useful addition to the literature.

01:12:27.340 anyway here we are again

01:12:29.740 we're back in business

01:12:30.720 here we are

01:12:31.660 it's in the present

01:12:32.400 we're up here

01:12:33.220 with a lot of very fine people

01:12:34.920 a lot of energetic people

01:12:36.360 who are doing a lot

01:12:37.520 and who deserve

01:12:38.860 by the way

01:12:39.360 your full support

01:12:40.220 and some wonderful endeavors

01:12:42.620 coming down the line

01:12:43.660 alright

01:12:45.900 pulled it up

01:12:47.260 from one end of the time scale

01:12:48.460 we're sitting on this

01:12:49.580 infinitely thin present here

01:12:51.880 let's make the jump

01:12:53.360 into the future

01:12:56.440 What, if anything, does the future hold for Alsatru? Is Alsatru a fluke, a freak, a movement

01:13:13.440 not to be taken seriously? Is it going to disappear like a dew in the morning? Or is

01:13:17.940 there a future for Alsatru? And if there is, what form will that future take? And what

01:13:25.440 obstacles must Ausatru overcome in order to have a future? I'd like to turn that

01:13:33.660 question around. I'd like to ask, is Christianity a fluke? And if that seems

01:13:40.760 like a strange thing to say, consider for a moment. 40,000 years minimum, you know,

01:13:47.240 that's Carlton Kuhn. I think they keep pushing back the date at which our

01:13:53.040 people came into existence, in which our branch of the human race matured and became identifiable.

01:13:59.600 But 40,000 years minimum, okay? 40,000 years, and we have been Christian for significantly less than 0.57

01:14:06.520 2,000 of those years. That's about 2% to 4% of our existence as people. That's nothing.

01:14:16.100 that's nothing

01:14:18.140 Christianity could well be the fluke

01:14:21.220 for all of this other time 0.99

01:14:23.060 we were either

01:14:25.480 also true or some other

01:14:27.500 permutation some other expression

01:14:29.600 of our inward soul as a

01:14:31.560 people

01:14:31.940 Christianity is a strictly

01:14:35.380 modern early this 0.97

01:14:37.620 morning kind of imposition

01:14:39.400 and to assume

01:14:41.260 that it represents our future

01:14:43.040 or to assume that some

01:14:45.400 universalist mishmash religion designed for a classless, faceless, nameless bunch of people

01:14:53.520 on the planet is our future is not necessary. And I hope and I suspect not true. We've got to

01:15:02.020 remember that we were also folk for countless millennia. We've been Christians of one sort or

01:15:09.640 another for significantly less than 2,000 years depending on what part of the

01:15:15.460 wave northward you want to count. That's one reason that I'm optimistic about the

01:15:22.780 future of Alsatru. Another reason is what I call the hidden Alsafolk. There's a

01:15:30.820 whole tribe of people out there that are Alsafolk that don't know about each 1.00

01:15:36.820 other. They don't know they're a member of a tribe, spiritually they are, but

01:15:40.040 they're not in touch with anybody. On that day, so many years ago, when I

01:15:46.960 decided that Odin was going to be my god, I thought I was the only man on the

01:15:53.740 planet doing that. When I took that picture of a Thor's hammer down to the

01:16:00.580 jewelry store, I thought this was probably the only one on the planet being

01:16:07.280 worn today. In retrospect, that's very naive, but that's what I thought. Oh, I

01:16:12.820 thought I was so bold. When we were running the AFA, the House of Truth Free

01:16:19.360 Assembly, we kept getting letters from people, people saying, I've been doing

01:16:24.580 for 10 years, but I thought I was the only one.

01:16:29.020 You know, or, you know, Odin's been my god,

01:16:32.080 or Thor has been my god,

01:16:33.400 or Freya has been my goddess for, you know, years and years.

01:16:37.420 But I never realized there was an organization.

01:16:39.460 I never knew there was a movement.

01:16:40.880 This was a routine form of letter we kept getting.

01:16:43.700 And it was wonderful because I knew how those people felt.

01:16:46.620 I'd been there.

01:16:48.400 Well, we got them hooked up.

01:16:50.560 And, you know, there's a lot more of them out there.

01:16:54.580 When we were in Burma, we were living in the headquarters of the insurgent force fighting the Burmese government there, and a lot of people drift in and out of there, quite a few round eyes, you know, writers for this magazine or that magazine, other round eyes teaching sniping or, you know, whatever it is they do there.

01:17:14.960 And there was one fellow, German fellow, didn't say very much, kind of, you know,

01:17:19.680 Tasserton sort of fellow, who had been there every summer for about 10 years.

01:17:26.240 This guy would leave his job in Germany, come and live along the Salween River,

01:17:31.560 and work with the Sikaran tribe, or actually ethnic group, not really a tribe.

01:17:38.500 He came partly to do physical therapy with him.

01:17:42.500 And I think he was teaching sniping on the side.

01:17:45.160 Anyway, you do get in some interesting conversation.

01:17:47.280 You know, you're sitting around, you're in this hut, you know,

01:17:49.840 with your palm leaf sort of thatch, and it's open sides,

01:17:54.300 and you're sitting around this table, and there's a candle, you know,

01:17:57.040 jammed into an empty .50 caliber casing on the table.

01:18:00.400 You know, that's your light source.

01:18:01.800 You're sitting there feeling ever so Hemingway-esque.

01:18:04.960 And you get into some great conversations.

01:18:08.080 Do you ever.

01:18:08.780 and 1.00

01:18:11.620 in the middle of one with this German fellow

01:18:13.720 I'd kind of fished around inside my shirt

01:18:15.640 and I don't know why

01:18:17.860 had pulled out my hammer

01:18:19.620 my Thor's hammer and was just

01:18:21.660 kind of had it there in my hand

01:18:23.620 and there was an instant reaction on his part

01:18:25.780 a real recognition and he looked and he said

01:18:27.400 what's that? I said well this is my

01:18:29.860 Thor's hammer

01:18:30.380 he reached inside his

01:18:33.860 tunic and pulled out his

01:18:36.080 he had

01:18:38.040 But had it made himself, he was not a member of an organization.

01:18:43.580 He was a man who wore it and who had it made because it was the right thing to do.

01:18:50.380 He didn't need an organization. 1.00

01:18:52.520 He was one of the hidden Alsafolk. 0.99

01:18:56.680 There's a line from the Odin Brotherhood.

01:18:59.980 It says, what is an adventurer?

01:19:02.660 It says, an adventurer is someone who does great things in the spirit of play.

01:19:08.300 And I like to think that that man, that German fellow on the Salween, was a true adventurer.

01:19:16.460 He should have smiled a little more to be an adventurer, I think, but that's another story.

01:19:21.020 Okay, all right. 0.99

01:19:22.400 So that's another reason I'm optimistic about the future of Alsatru, is the hidden Alsafolk around the world. 1.00

01:19:27.680 What are the chances of two guys, three people, counting Maddie, sitting in this mosquito-infested third-world hellhole, and all of us pulling out forest hammers, and there we were. 1.00

01:19:41.420 Quite a moment, synchronicity working over time. 0.99

01:19:46.340 Another reason I'm optimistic, instinct, ties back into all of this.

01:19:51.160 Instinct, we've still got our instincts.

01:19:54.100 All of this upwelling of archetypal life inside,

01:19:57.540 it's still there, it's still valid, it's still sound,

01:19:59.960 and there's lots and lots and lots of people out there

01:20:02.440 who don't know about Alcetru,

01:20:04.220 who consider themselves Christians,

01:20:06.200 and yet their values, their essential way they want to look at the world

01:20:10.480 is the Alcetru way.

01:20:12.280 They don't, often because they don't know there's an alternative. 0.97

01:20:15.900 They think that what they believe is Christianity,

01:20:18.960 and obviously it's not.

01:20:21.020 These are people as fiercely independent as you and I.

01:20:24.000 These are people with as much courage as any of us.

01:20:26.700 They are not into submission.

01:20:28.740 They're not the kind of people who would grovel before their deities.

01:20:32.620 Yet, they find themselves with Christianity because they don't know there's an alternative. 0.96

01:20:37.260 So instinct, sound instinct, is another thing working in our favor. 0.95

01:20:44.000 Lastly, and this may not sound like an advantage.

01:20:48.200 It may not sound like a point for optimism, but in a way it is.

01:20:55.200 Ausatru is a hard time religion.

01:21:00.200 And hard times are coming.

01:21:03.200 It's very easy to turn the other cheek when there is no exterior threat.

01:21:08.200 It is very easy to practice pacifism when there is no threat to your safety.

01:21:15.200 It is very easy to love everybody in the world and to entertain this delightful illusion of world brotherhood and universal brotherhood when it's not put to the test.

01:21:27.760 When it's put to the test, when reality comes right up against that particular dogma, that dogma will tend to give way.

01:21:38.380 We will need a religion that espouses strength.

01:21:43.100 We will need a religion that espouses honor.

01:21:46.900 We will need a religion that espouses courage and heroism.

01:21:52.080 Tough times are coming.

01:21:55.260 As we were flying up here yesterday,

01:21:57.980 Maddie was reading a novel, a paperback.

01:22:01.660 The title of the book is quite irrelevant.

01:22:03.340 What's really important is this little advertisement in the back page.

01:22:07.500 I'll read it to you, the relevant part,

01:22:09.160 because it's a long way back there and you probably can't see it.

01:22:11.560 It's paid for by someone called the Coalition for Literacy, and it says that by the year 2000, two out of three Americans could be illiterate.

01:22:22.420 Well, they don't say so, but obviously this is a reflection of the changing demographics of our country and many other factors.

01:22:31.020 What kind of civilization are we going to be able to maintain if two out of three people are illiterate?

01:22:41.560 how are we going to function? Even the establishment mouthpieces, Time, Newsweek,

01:22:49.200 people like that, they're all saying it's the end of the American century, and

01:22:52.320 they're saying almost in a crowing fashion that we're going to be the

01:22:56.200 coolies of the 21st century. I don't know, they've got their own axis to grind, 0.64

01:23:01.360 they've got their own agendas, some of which are hidden, some which aren't very

01:23:05.520 hidden. But nonetheless, we are headed for hard times. The world as we know it is going

01:23:12.160 to change in historical terms very drastically in the next few years. And our belief is suited

01:23:22.160 to those times. This gives us an incredible advantage if we're ready, if we've laid the

01:23:28.100 groundwork. That's the potential. Now, let's look at the obstacles. Working out

01:23:35.600 a plan, you're trying to figure out what you're going to do in the future, you've

01:23:38.660 got an objective up here and you're down here and you want to go up

01:23:42.940 here and you want to accomplish your goals, you've got to consider obstacles

01:23:46.400 that have been placed in your way. Sometimes those are very physical

01:23:50.280 obstacles or wire and unpleasant sorts of things, but there are other kinds of

01:23:57.920 obstacles, too. And some that we have to face are very much in our way, and they've got to be

01:24:02.880 eradicated. They've got to be blown away if we're going to get to a better world.

01:24:09.500 One of those obstacles is the fact that so many of our kinsmen are ignorant of their own culture.

01:24:18.640 So many of our children, so many of our adults have no idea what the history of their people

01:24:27.840 is. So

01:24:31.780 many of our young have heard of the Greek

01:24:35.820 gods, although they even get that even confused, but the

01:24:39.720 Norse gods are a stranger to them. In

01:24:43.660 school, and I say this as a teacher, they get

01:24:47.700 information from every culture around the world, which

01:24:51.700 of course vastly dilutes what they get of our own. So

01:24:55.720 So there's a tremendous ignorance just on the most nuts and bolts level that has to

01:25:00.080 be overcome.

01:25:01.080 We should do what each of us can individually to educate the people around us because there

01:25:06.540 is such a vast gulf that has to be repaired.

01:25:12.560 The second point, which ties into that very much, is the mistaken idea that people have

01:25:16.840 that Christianity is our native religion.

01:25:20.900 average television watching person out there, the average individual who goes

01:25:27.380 about their lives as honest hard-working people but not necessarily hooked in to

01:25:35.660 what? Reading, history, culture, things of this sort. That person probably thinks

01:25:42.140 that Christianity is our religion. They're vaguely aware that we had

01:25:45.280 something before but they don't really know what it was and they don't really

01:25:48.260 care, and it doesn't really matter anyway. And by the way, it's our favorite show on yet.

01:25:52.840 So this is something that's got to be repaired. Many of these Christians would make fine 1.00

01:25:57.620 also folk if it could be explained to them in a clear way. If they could see that their

01:26:03.580 instincts, as referred to a while ago, are really okay, they're really sound, but they

01:26:09.000 need to go with those instincts in something that is truly suitable as an expression of

01:26:14.020 those instincts and not something else that takes it and turns it off and twists it around.

01:26:20.900 A third obstacle is the materialism that goes with an easy life. We have that today. We

01:26:31.340 live in a world saturated with information. So much of that information comes through

01:26:36.620 us through television, through the radio, through the magazines, through the pop music

01:26:39.740 and so forth. And the message is produce and consume. The message is that obscene little

01:26:45.480 bumper sticker, the one who dies with the most toys wins. We live a life of toys. We

01:26:51.980 don't grow up. We don't accept the responsibilities. We don't accept the beauty, the stress, the

01:27:00.200 terror even of real life. We stay children in our society far too long, like most of

01:27:05.600 our lives. This materialism has got to be overcome. We've got to reach out and

01:27:10.160 realize ideals. We've got to search for that which is higher. We've got to search

01:27:14.360 for that which is purer. The next step up again on the evolutionary scale. Another

01:27:22.820 factor, a crippling factor, is the low self-esteem of so many people of European 0.97

01:27:28.940 American descent. Again, we are told everywhere that everything is our fault.

01:27:33.920 It's our fault if anybody anywhere in the world is starving.

01:27:37.300 It's our fault if anyone anywhere in the world

01:27:41.440 suffers injustice. Every

01:27:45.040 philosophical fallacy of history is our fault

01:27:48.480 and we're all supposed to feel horribly guilty. We're told that

01:27:53.100 our ancestors were barbarians, that civilization developed almost

01:27:57.400 everywhere else 0.71

01:27:58.320 and that our ancestors got it almost by contamination from these enlightened non-Europeans to the south and to the east.

01:28:11.600 We need to let our people know this is not true.

01:28:16.240 As a teacher, I was interested to see that modern history books, or at least modern teaching in class,

01:28:25.440 does not recognize really vital things

01:28:28.940 like the fact that all the radiocarbon-14 dates

01:28:31.580 that we had in Europe were revised in the 1970s.

01:28:34.480 They realized that they were miscalibrated.

01:28:37.040 This didn't make it into the textbooks.

01:28:39.920 It didn't make it into the classrooms.

01:28:41.500 We need to get it there.

01:28:42.920 I get it there because I teach science

01:28:44.620 and I can tell them all about that sort of thing, and I do.

01:28:47.560 But in general, it doesn't make it.

01:28:50.160 These are just examples of the kind of things

01:28:52.080 that we have to correct

01:28:53.240 so that our self-esteem as a people is raised again.

01:28:57.000 We need to have pride in ourselves.

01:28:59.140 We need to feel good about our ancestry.

01:29:02.660 We need to be able to say, yes, I'm proud to be a European-American.

01:29:07.160 I have no problem with that.

01:29:08.680 I'm proud of my people.

01:29:09.960 I'm proud of my ancestors.

01:29:12.520 And today, that's a problem because it is not politically correct.

01:29:16.280 We have to have the boldness to rise above the politically correct.

01:29:19.980 We have to seize our greatness and then expand it.

01:29:23.240 this last issue the one of self-esteem ties in with something that I thought

01:29:34.480 about a lot and I know other people have thought about a lot too and that is the

01:29:39.000 question of why is it why is it that we so often do not stand up for ourselves

01:29:50.000 Why is it that we are content to accept the burdens that other people would place on us?

01:29:58.480 Why don't we get angry?

01:30:01.240 Why doesn't somebody say, no, don't slander my ancestors?

01:30:07.120 Why does no one say, no, get off my people?

01:30:10.620 Why doesn't somebody get angry?

01:30:12.700 Why doesn't somebody stand up for themselves?

01:30:15.480 Why don't we say, you be what you are, that's fine.

01:30:18.600 I'm what I am, and I'm proud of it.

01:30:21.000 Why is it that we acquiesce in our own dispossession?

01:30:24.740 Why do we give our culture away?

01:30:26.640 Why do we give our country away?

01:30:29.840 Do you realize, by the way,

01:30:32.060 that 10% of the population of El Salvador

01:30:35.460 lives in California? 1.00

01:30:41.020 Why do we tolerate this?

01:30:43.240 Why do we acquiesce in our own death,

01:30:45.300 our own suicide as a culture and as a people?

01:30:48.600 let's look at individuals

01:30:52.380 in shamanic societies

01:30:56.280 not just amongst our own folk

01:30:58.080 but around the planet

01:30:58.940 when an individual is sick

01:31:00.900 listless

01:31:03.160 defenseless

01:31:04.300 ill

01:31:05.040 lethargic

01:31:05.940 the local wise man 0.60

01:31:07.880 the shaman

01:31:08.420 goes into a trance

01:31:10.460 and metaphorically speaking

01:31:11.740 journeys into the other world

01:31:13.160 because this person clearly has lost

01:31:15.400 his or her soul

01:31:16.540 I think the same thing applies to groups

01:31:21.980 I think that we

01:31:25.040 people of European descent

01:31:28.080 have lost our soul 1.00

01:31:30.120 our soul is wandering

01:31:32.260 it's wandering in the deserts of the Middle East

01:31:35.020 it's wandering anywhere

01:31:37.960 except where our folk live

01:31:39.760 it's lost

01:31:41.800 and we need to reclaim it

01:31:43.480 we need

01:31:45.400 our own shaman

01:31:47.500 our own series of shamans

01:31:49.880 to recover it

01:31:50.760 that's our task

01:31:52.400 that's our mission

01:31:53.260 and the nice thing is

01:31:55.380 you don't have to be

01:31:56.540 a professional shaman

01:31:57.660 each and every one of us

01:31:59.280 can help tap back into that

01:32:01.140 each and every one of us

01:32:03.000 by the way we live our lives

01:32:04.480 by the way we practice

01:32:05.680 also true

01:32:06.320 can reach back

01:32:07.620 into that collective unconscious

01:32:08.820 we can recover our souls

01:32:10.800 and it's our task

01:32:11.840 in this day

01:32:12.900 and in this age

01:32:14.180 we can have a future

01:32:20.060 so much more marvelous

01:32:23.180 than our present

01:32:23.980 we can have security

01:32:26.760 for our people

01:32:28.280 for our culture

01:32:29.500 we can guarantee

01:32:31.600 our continued existence

01:32:33.240 we can protect ourselves

01:32:34.820 from being swamped

01:32:36.480 in the global morass

01:32:39.220 we can preserve our identity

01:32:41.860 extend that identity

01:32:43.540 and be proud of it and live healthy and whole.

01:32:47.040 We can live in a world governed by the principles,

01:32:51.600 if not the practice of Al-Satru as a religion,

01:32:53.680 at least the acceptance of our way of looking at the world,

01:32:58.040 and we will have less bureaucracy.

01:33:00.560 We will not have government on everybody's back all the time.

01:33:05.220 We will not have a highly centralized bunch of people

01:33:08.800 telling us how to live our lives, how to think our thoughts,

01:33:12.920 what to buy, what to sell, how to work, what to think.

01:33:20.540 As people of Teutonic descent, broadly speaking,

01:33:24.780 and by that I include actually all the European peoples,

01:33:29.720 liberty is our birthright.

01:33:32.100 And liberty can be a laboratory,

01:33:34.880 a wonderful ferment of variety, of experiments,

01:33:39.400 of upward striving, of upward reaching.

01:33:41.440 It can be the laboratory of continued evolution for that wonderful drama that started 40,000 years ago or more at some spot long ago and far away.

01:33:54.140 And each of us, by the way we live, can have a role in that.

01:33:58.340 Each of us has something to do.

01:34:00.320 our tasks

01:34:02.760 are to sink deep the roots of Alsatru

01:34:06.000 by practicing our religion

01:34:08.100 by making it live

01:34:10.320 not as a philosophical abstraction

01:34:12.240 not as, well, we subscribe to this journal

01:34:15.140 and I kind of like Odin

01:34:16.820 but as a living belief

01:34:19.060 a living practice

01:34:20.800 ultimately there is no such thing

01:34:23.840 as an isolated rite

01:34:25.340 or an isolated ritual

01:34:26.700 because we are all connected

01:34:28.900 the very fact

01:34:31.340 the very fact of our common ancestry

01:34:34.500 serves as an antenna

01:34:36.280 and we are all on the same frequency

01:34:39.380 the folk frequency

01:34:40.860 and what any of us does

01:34:43.000 in some subtle way

01:34:44.160 affects all the rest of us

01:34:46.160 almost the hundred monkey effect

01:34:48.560 remember all of that

01:34:49.300 well it's similar to that

01:34:50.480 we're all connected

01:34:51.560 we're part of the same folk

01:34:53.000 we're individuals

01:34:53.980 we're startlingly individual

01:34:56.260 we're definitely individual

01:34:58.000 but we are still linked

01:34:59.500 and we can use that

01:35:00.800 practice our faith

01:35:02.220 practice our religion

01:35:03.260 faith is the wrong word

01:35:04.380 we're not into blind faith

01:35:05.560 we need to build

01:35:08.240 also true from the ground up

01:35:09.780 individuals

01:35:10.920 families

01:35:12.620 networks of families

01:35:14.420 and so forth

01:35:15.640 we don't need the permission

01:35:16.840 of the state to do this

01:35:17.980 we can do this on our own

01:35:19.740 we need to have children

01:35:21.320 we need to educate those children

01:35:23.100 so that our beliefs

01:35:24.020 carry on into the future

01:35:25.140 we practice

01:35:27.120 organic, tribal

01:35:29.880 root level

01:35:32.420 on the way up

01:35:33.920 also true. We can rebuild

01:35:36.180 the folk. We can take charge

01:35:38.400 of our destiny.

01:35:41.320 You're helping to do that

01:35:42.540 just by being here today

01:35:43.660 at this instant.

01:35:48.160 We've covered a lot of ground today.

01:35:52.000 What will it all have meant?

01:35:54.560 Well, that depends.

01:35:56.440 It depends on whatever we make it.

01:35:58.680 Because ultimately, our fate, our future,

01:36:01.940 is something we make for ourselves.

01:36:03.940 We are free men and women.

01:36:06.240 I invite you all to join us.

01:36:09.580 And by join us, I don't mean sign on a dotted line.

01:36:12.440 I mean be with us in spirit

01:36:13.860 as we climb up the next step,

01:36:18.460 as we continue our advancement,

01:36:20.000 as we carry on that drama that began so long ago.

01:36:25.460 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - January 30, 2021

Steve McNallen Ostara 1993

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