00:01:04.320It's been a busy time here at the AFA.
00:01:07.740We attended Iger's Feast, held right up the road from us by Hammer of Thor Kindred.
00:01:13.460It was good to visit with Stefan Thorsman and the many AFA members and folk builders who were in attendance.
00:01:20.360Stefan's events are always enjoyable and, more importantly, spiritually uplifting.
00:01:25.140They're family-friendly and ritually very powerful.
00:01:30.000Other AFA members represented us at Lightning Across the Plains, hosted by Jotun's Bain Kindred, led by Mark Stinson.
00:01:37.760This was a very successful event with loads of people in attendance and lots of energy.
00:01:43.900We 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.
00:04:03.520Unfortunately, beautiful as they are, the cathedrals do not have the living quality
00:04:08.100of the forest, marking a difference between the Christian and the pagan sense of the world.
00:04:13.940To some extent, though, they make up for this with their soaring grandeur, which effectually
00:04:18.820captures the upward reach of the European soul in general, and the Germanic soul in particular.
00:04:27.140Certainly, I would like to see some equivalent to the cathedrals for Asatru,
00:04:31.940but I am not sure that simply scaling up our Hoffs would be the answer.
00:04:35.780True, the wooden stave churches of Norway seem to be based on Asatru precedents, but is that really what we want?
00:04:44.400When 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.
00:04:53.220Warlords, retinue, extended family, village, maybe, but a building that would house thousands? I'm not sure how I feel about that.
00:05:01.320Early Europeans built many structures of stone, Neolithic burials, some of them like Newgrange, quite sophisticated,
00:05:10.300defensive works, ritual sites like the many stone circles, and of course Stonehenge.
00:05:15.900It was a long time before we needed anything like castles, and when we did, we imported the idea from the East,
00:05:22.500where they had been building fortified structures to withstand siege by large armies for a long time.
00:05:28.400But once we started erecting castles, we got very good at it.
00:05:32.660Maybe we will evolve an Alcetru architecture of our own
00:05:36.360that is as distinctive as the Christian cathedrals.
00:05:40.540Whether it will move us as profoundly as a clearing in the forest
00:05:44.040or as a magical glen heavy with the presence of the gods remains to be seen.
00:05:51.020But let me suggest a different kind of cathedral.
00:05:55.660Search in Google Images for Cathedral Reykjavik and see what you get.
00:06:02.860Soaring, pointed at the sky, the very manifestation in stone of the Faustian upward-reaching Germanic spirit.
00:06:11.300If there was to be an Austro building on the scale of the cathedrals, it might look like this.
00:06:17.000But that's not really the reason I wanted you to see it.
00:06:20.580I'm not thinking so much of a building in stone, which we might adapt,
00:06:24.420as I am thinking of what this edifice calls to my mind, spaceships.
00:06:31.600The cathedral, of course, is a place of worship.
00:06:34.660It may be that the artifact that represents Alcetru's mark on the physical world
00:06:39.260will not be a place of worship at all.
00:06:41.740Perhaps we will continue to commune with the gods and the ancestors
00:06:45.160in the same sort of places as we have always done.
00:06:48.160It may be that the sign of our accomplishment and power will not be a stone building, however large, but something entirely different.
00:06:58.260The spaceship. Not the tiny little things we have seen to date, but the massive ones of our children's children.
00:07:07.920I am not the first to compare the spaceship and the cathedral.
00:07:12.780Norman Mailer noted the similarity in his book of A Fire on the Moon.
00:07:16.840But 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.
00:07:30.360I recommend it, and you can find it online.
00:07:34.200Though the Reykjavik Cathedral suggests an idea of flight and infinite extension, it cannot fulfill it.
00:07:41.560The cathedral is still essentially static.
00:07:43.920Like the cross, it is an immobile thing.
00:07:47.560We cannot conceive of the cross in motion.
00:07:50.120At most, it is tipped slightly, as though being carried on the back of Jesus.
00:07:54.540But its forearms are stability itself, and that, too, is the nature of Christianity,
00:08:27.580Counterpoised to the static cross is the whirling symbol of the three interlocked drinking horns,
00:08:33.820standing for Odin's transcendent inspiration and energy.
00:08:38.340This dynamic glyph is, not coincidentally, the logo of the Asatru Folk Assembly.
00:08:43.860You and I will not live to see it, but our cathedrals will be the spaceships that make a space-faring civilization possible.
00:08:54.700A grandiose dream? It may seem like it.
00:08:58.180But we can have that future if we have the courage and the will to create it.
00:09:02.880I 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.
00:09:18.820We must envision and intend and work for the far future even as we go about our daily lives.
00:09:26.980Ausatru is not some feel-good pastime for a jaded and degenerate society.
00:09:33.400It is not an amusement, competing with games on Facebook or the latest television trivia.