Asatru Folk Assembly - January 31, 2021


The Nature of Blot Part 1 October 2008


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

137.88402

Word count

573

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Steve McNallan, and I lead an organization called the Ausatru Folk Assembly, or the AFA.
00:00:17.000 Ausatru is a native European religion. It was practiced by people such as the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, who eventually moved into England, and by many of the Germanic tribes throughout the European continent.
00:00:30.000 Many of us today practice Ausatrum because it gives us a sense of identification with our ancestors,
00:00:36.300 a connection with our past, and we find also that it meets many of the needs that we,
00:00:41.600 just as normal men and women in the 21st century, have in order to get through our lives.
00:00:48.800 In Ausatrum, we have two primary rituals that we use to commune with the divine.
00:00:56.320 One of them is called the Sambal.
00:00:58.720 In the sumble, a drinking horn is filled with honey wine and is passed around the circle of worshipers.
00:01:05.520 Each worshiper then makes an appropriate comment or an appropriate toast,
00:01:09.540 the idea being to draw up the power from the past, the great deeds of the heroes,
00:01:14.480 and the feats of the accomplished men and women of our line,
00:01:18.160 so that that power, that spiritual essence can be used today.
00:01:22.380 But today, I'm going to talk about a different rite, a different ritual.
00:01:28.040 This is the bloat. Rhymes with boat, spelled B-L-O-T. The bloat or the blessing.
00:01:36.940 The bloat is a mutual exchange of intangible gifts between ourselves and the holy powers, the gods and goddesses.
00:01:47.260 Gift giving was a very important part of early Germanic society.
00:01:52.100 you made friends by giving gifts you nourished and encouraged and maintained that friendship
00:01:59.160 by the giving of gifts similarly kinfolk would give each other gifts just as a part of their
00:02:05.240 responsibility to each other and this is important because it shows also our relationship to the holy
00:02:11.820 powers we are friends of the holy powers of the gods and goddesses we are kinfolk to the gods and
00:02:19.420 goddesses they are not our masters we are not their slaves so it's not like we're there trying
00:02:25.640 to appease them trying to give them some sort of gift so that they won't bother us sort of a divine
00:02:31.060 shakedown operation it's not like that at all on the contrary we and the gods are kin and friends
00:02:39.240 we give gifts to each other because that's what friends do well you may reasonably ask what sort
00:02:47.400 of gifts can it be that the gods give to us? And generally, those come down to things
00:02:55.780 like wisdom, courage, inspiration, spiritual insight, a sense of connection with the divine
00:03:03.720 and with each other and with the world around us, a sense of awe at the amazing natural
00:03:08.620 world in which we live. All of these things, along with the luck that gets one through
00:03:14.220 a hard place can be the gifts of the gods. So what then do we mere mortals, quotation marks,
00:03:22.300 have to give to the gods? What we give to them is another set of intangibles. We give them our
00:03:30.360 loyalty, which we describe with the archaic word troth. We give them our loyalty, our troth. We 0.96
00:03:37.340 We give them our spiritual might.
00:03:40.160 We give them our devotion, our remembrance, and our honoring of them.
00:03:47.060 So this mutual exchange is rich.
00:03:50.180 It's something that is beneficial to all the parties concerned.
00:03:56.460 In Ausatru, as it is practiced today, the bloat is not a complicated ritual.
00:04:01.780 It's fairly simple, actually.
00:04:07.340 You