Asatru Folk Assembly - March 03, 2021


The Cathedral and the Spaceship (2010)

Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Stefan Thorsman Michael D. Griffin Norman Mailer Mark Stein Ken Follett Neolithic Ausatru Sheila Frigga Jotun
Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1) Asatru and Myth (2012)

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

135.4

Word count

1,487

Sentence count

89

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly ponders the idea of building a cathedral in the ancient forests of Alsatru, and why it would be a good replacement for the world s great cathedrals.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey! Hey! Hey! 0.97
00:00:30.000 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly,
00:00:35.200 bringing you the latest on the revival of the ancestral faith of Northern Europe
00:00:39.680 and the awakening of the European descended peoples everywhere.
00:00:44.720 The gods and goddesses never went away.
00:00:48.160 They are with us always, and now they stir,
00:00:52.120 and we reclaim our spiritual birthright.
00:00:55.700 A glorious dawn awaits.
00:00:58.100 Hail our awakening.
00:01:00.000 Hail, Asatru, rising!
00:01:04.320 It's been a busy time here at the AFA.
00:01:07.740 We attended Iger's Feast, held right up the road from us by Hammer of Thor Kindred.
00:01:13.460 It was good to visit with Stefan Thorsman and the many AFA members and folk builders who were in attendance.
00:01:20.360 Stefan's events are always enjoyable and, more importantly, spiritually uplifting.
00:01:25.140 They're family-friendly and ritually very powerful.
00:01:30.000 Other AFA members represented us at Lightning Across the Plains, hosted by Jotun's Bain Kindred, led by Mark Stinson.
00:01:37.760 This was a very successful event with loads of people in attendance and lots of energy.
00:01:43.900 We hope to see some of the Midwest folks who were there at next spring's regional AFA gathering near Heavener, Oklahoma, home of a famous runestone.
00:01:53.160 I know I will be there.
00:01:54.080 Another bit of news is the choice of Kat Ellis as the AFA's first volunteer coordinator.
00:02:01.080 Kat's job will be to build the AFA an effective, professional-quality staff of volunteers,
00:02:07.080 and to manage them as they help move us toward our goals.
00:02:12.080 The fact of the matter is, the AFA has grown to a size and sophistication that demands a more formal structure.
00:02:19.080 We'll be putting that in place over the next few months.
00:02:23.080 Recently, Sheila and I watched a movie called Pillars of the Earth, based on a novel of
00:02:30.840 the same name by Ken Follett.
00:02:33.320 It is the fictional account of the building of a cathedral in early medieval England in
00:02:38.080 the 1100s.
00:02:39.940 It's really well done, with lots of drama, good guys and bad guys, plenty of fighting,
00:02:44.880 and a couple of love stories.
00:02:47.080 But even before the credits had run, my mind was revolving around some questions.
00:02:53.720 Where are the cathedrals of Alsatru?
00:02:56.520 And for that matter, should there be any?
00:03:00.500 These questions were prompted by a statement in the movie where the good monk, as opposed
00:03:04.760 to the evil monk, wanted to have a cathedral built because, as he put it, they showed the
00:03:10.380 glory of God over time.
00:03:13.100 In other words, cathedrals were a sign of God's greatness that would last thousands
00:03:17.320 of years and testify to Him and to His representative organization on earth.
00:03:22.660 Well, that's a powerful idea.
00:03:25.720 Anyone who has been in the world's great cathedrals can vouch for their magnificence.
00:03:29.860 Though, of course, I do not identify with the religious motivations for their construction,
00:03:35.380 they remain a beautiful part of European culture.
00:03:38.780 They are the heritage of all Europeans, regardless of religion, for the simple reason
00:03:43.040 that they were built by our ancestors and, despite Christianity, are tributes to the
00:03:48.700 very spirit of our people.
00:03:51.600 Stand in them and you will feel the atmosphere of our ancient forests, the towering trunks
00:03:56.640 of trees replaced by stone pillars, with the muted light and the contemplative silence
00:04:01.960 of the wild.
00:04:03.520 Unfortunately, beautiful as they are, the cathedrals do not have the living quality
00:04:08.100 of the forest, marking a difference between the Christian and the pagan sense of the world.
00:04:13.940 To some extent, though, they make up for this with their soaring grandeur, which effectually
00:04:18.820 captures the upward reach of the European soul in general, and the Germanic soul in particular.
00:04:27.140 Certainly, I would like to see some equivalent to the cathedrals for Asatru,
00:04:31.940 but I am not sure that simply scaling up our Hoffs would be the answer.
00:04:35.780 True, the wooden stave churches of Norway seem to be based on Asatru precedents, but is that really what we want?
00:04:44.400 When I stand before the gods, it is by myself, or with my family and immediate friends, or at a gathering where I know everyone in attendance.
00:04:53.220 Warlords, retinue, extended family, village, maybe, but a building that would house thousands? I'm not sure how I feel about that.
00:05:01.320 Early Europeans built many structures of stone, Neolithic burials, some of them like Newgrange, quite sophisticated,
00:05:10.300 defensive works, ritual sites like the many stone circles, and of course Stonehenge.
00:05:15.900 It was a long time before we needed anything like castles, and when we did, we imported the idea from the East,
00:05:22.500 where they had been building fortified structures to withstand siege by large armies for a long time.
00:05:28.400 But once we started erecting castles, we got very good at it.
00:05:32.660 Maybe we will evolve an Alcetru architecture of our own
00:05:36.360 that is as distinctive as the Christian cathedrals.
00:05:40.540 Whether it will move us as profoundly as a clearing in the forest
00:05:44.040 or as a magical glen heavy with the presence of the gods remains to be seen.
00:05:51.020 But let me suggest a different kind of cathedral.
00:05:55.660 Search in Google Images for Cathedral Reykjavik and see what you get.
00:06:02.860 Soaring, pointed at the sky, the very manifestation in stone of the Faustian upward-reaching Germanic spirit.
00:06:11.300 If there was to be an Austro building on the scale of the cathedrals, it might look like this.
00:06:17.000 But that's not really the reason I wanted you to see it.
00:06:20.580 I'm not thinking so much of a building in stone, which we might adapt,
00:06:24.420 as I am thinking of what this edifice calls to my mind, spaceships.
00:06:31.600 The cathedral, of course, is a place of worship.
00:06:34.660 It may be that the artifact that represents Alcetru's mark on the physical world
00:06:39.260 will not be a place of worship at all.
00:06:41.740 Perhaps we will continue to commune with the gods and the ancestors
00:06:45.160 in the same sort of places as we have always done.
00:06:48.160 It may be that the sign of our accomplishment and power will not be a stone building, however large, but something entirely different.
00:06:58.260 The spaceship. Not the tiny little things we have seen to date, but the massive ones of our children's children.
00:07:07.920 I am not the first to compare the spaceship and the cathedral.
00:07:12.780 Norman Mailer noted the similarity in his book of A Fire on the Moon.
00:07:16.840 But better yet is the tone you'll find in a speech given by Michael D. Griffin, former head of NASA, titled Space Exploration, Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons.
00:07:30.360 I recommend it, and you can find it online.
00:07:34.200 Though the Reykjavik Cathedral suggests an idea of flight and infinite extension, it cannot fulfill it.
00:07:41.560 The cathedral is still essentially static.
00:07:43.920 Like the cross, it is an immobile thing.
00:07:47.560 We cannot conceive of the cross in motion.
00:07:50.120 At most, it is tipped slightly, as though being carried on the back of Jesus.
00:07:54.540 But its forearms are stability itself, and that, too, is the nature of Christianity,
00:08:00.860 immobile, unchanging, static, petrified, stone-like.
00:08:07.900 The essence of the spaceship, however, is motion.
00:08:11.880 The upward ascent to the heavens, the long trajectory between the planets,
00:08:16.280 the immense speeds and distances required by travel to even the nearest solar system outside our own.
00:08:24.100 This is motion on a grand scale.
00:08:27.580 Counterpoised to the static cross is the whirling symbol of the three interlocked drinking horns,
00:08:33.820 standing for Odin's transcendent inspiration and energy.
00:08:38.340 This dynamic glyph is, not coincidentally, the logo of the Asatru Folk Assembly.
00:08:43.860 You and I will not live to see it, but our cathedrals will be the spaceships that make a space-faring civilization possible.
00:08:54.700 A grandiose dream? It may seem like it.
00:08:58.180 But we can have that future if we have the courage and the will to create it.
00:09:02.880 I want my far descendants to be able to look up at a starry sky and point to worlds in the vast blackness where the sons of Odin and Frigga, true to their Hyperborean heritage, have made homes for themselves.
00:09:18.820 We must envision and intend and work for the far future even as we go about our daily lives.
00:09:26.980 Ausatru is not some feel-good pastime for a jaded and degenerate society.
00:09:33.400 It is not an amusement, competing with games on Facebook or the latest television trivia.
00:09:40.340 It is not a club for Viking wannabes.
00:09:43.500 It is not even just the revival of one more obscure religion thought to have been forever lost.
00:09:49.320 also true is the spiritual elixir that will bestow inspiration and immortality on the folk
00:09:57.180 of europe on the people of the north who once steered by the pole star and who will someday
00:10:04.220 steer to the stars themselves this vision is worthy of our cathedrals the cathedrals of light
00:10:12.660 that will blaze a path to a future at which we can only guess and on the side of those gleaming
00:10:19.260 vessels will be blazoned to the bold insignia of Othin's three spinning horns.
00:10:27.600 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly, www.runestone.org. See you next time.
00:10:49.260 Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.