Asatru Folk Assembly - January 31, 2021


The Nature of Blot Part 1 October 2008

Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Ausatrum Ausatru Gift
Steve McNallen Ostara 1993 Twelve Days of Yule Day 2 December 2008

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

137.88

Word count

573

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Ausatru is a native European religion practiced by people such as the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, who eventually moved into England, and many other Germanic tribes throughout the European continent. Many of us today practice Ausatru because it gives us a sense of identification with our ancestors, a connection with our past, and we find also that it meets many of the needs that we, just as normal men and women in the 21st century, have in order to get through our lives.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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