Asatru Folk Assembly - March 03, 2021


The Cathedral and the Spaceship (2010)


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

135.4

Word count

1,487

Sentence count

82

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 .
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.