Asatru Folk Assembly - February 10, 2024


The Striker： Asa-Þórr, Part 2 (from VNS Episode 17)


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

131.12

Word count

1,797

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the trials of Thor in Utgard and how they are connected to the primordial world of Jotunheim. We also discuss the role of time in the story of Thor and how it relates to his trials.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 All right, our next question from Ali, can you speak on Thor's trials in Utgard and the themes
00:00:14.760 we can glean from them? I'll let you go ahead and take this one. Okay, so a couple of things happen
00:00:22.260 and first and foremost when you talk about the trials of Thor, there are of course other trials
00:00:26.660 going on that involve other characters in the story, obviously, Thialfi and Loki.
00:00:34.220 Roskva does not seem to have placement in the trials, so it's worth just noting that,
00:00:41.140 of course, Thialfi goes against thought or of memory or of the wit of thinking.
00:00:50.800 And remember, poetically, our ancestors applied different titles.
00:00:55.340 So like there's three or four different names for a raven, whether you're talking about the physical animal, the poetic animal, things like that.
00:01:03.000 So when we we see Thealfi racing against Huey, we see, you know, this this the race between like, I guess, poetic wit is possibly playing out or in actuality, even just memory itself or collective memory.
00:01:20.600 Perhaps some people have postulized that our memories can – since our memories go to the east, which is the symbolic direction of the Jotuns, there are four worlds connected to the middle, and that being Leosafheim and Svartalfheim, and then we see Vanaheim and Jotunheim.
00:01:43.460 And in the East, the memory, the memory well is there. And so we see the root structure of the network of power that is Yggdrasil. It's seen as a network of power and that root tap goes into the East, into the primordial.
00:01:59.520 So if we were looking at Utgard-Loki as kind of a differentiation into the east, into the more primordial building blocks of the material world, we could see that perhaps the actions and therefore the thoughts and memories that relate from the middle, from Middle Earth or the Middle Guard, is extending out eastward, that it has a place because we see Jotunheim as the primordial.
00:02:29.520 building material of the middle world, this correlation of the interaction between
00:02:37.160 the things of the past, things of the eternal, things that were deeply primordial, left over
00:02:44.560 or breached from Aenir when he was slain and the flood, the primordial ocean, which holds
00:02:52.920 great ancient secrets and even animals now that were longer before than even the dinosaurs like
00:02:58.420 you know, sharks and things like that. We see this essence of the primordial being associated
00:03:04.640 to mountains, to the land, and in specific, the direction that our ancestors chose to correlate
00:03:10.720 that to was into the east. And this may have contextual sense amongst the Norwegians as,
00:03:16.700 you know, living on the west coast of Norway and seeing the mountains in the east, but it was a
00:03:21.520 symbolic direction. And so when Thor goes into the east, he goes into the land of the primordial
00:03:31.800 creation, into the land of the things that were around since before man. And he goes in and he
00:03:39.840 correlates himself against things that are older than the middle guard itself and so his
00:03:53.680 his tests are unique in that regards so we see this constraint or understanding that
00:04:02.080 his trials are placed around what he does in Jotunheim connects to middle guard
00:04:09.840 And that's a very interesting thing.
00:04:11.660 Again, I'm talking about the east being primordial source.
00:04:14.160 It is connected to the middle guard, our time, our memories, and also to things that happen in Jotunheim, especially the ones that are actually moved by Thor, happen in the middle guard.
00:04:28.880 When he drinks from the horn, he lowers the sea.
00:04:32.640 When he lifts up Jormungandr, he's shifting that which encapsulates the middle guard.
00:04:38.540 When he fights against time, he's fighting against the constant draw of time. 0.98
00:04:46.140 And again, it's worth noting that the Nornir come from the east. 0.98
00:04:50.200 They are, again, the building blocks of the primordial material world come from Jotunheim.
00:04:58.100 And so when Thor goes into Jotunheim and he tests himself against those things in Jotunheim that are greater representations, and of course he finds that out in the end, the whole story is deeply connected to showing how the catalystic god can come down from heaven into the middle realm, move into the primordial collection,
00:05:25.940 the things that make the spirit of the world that the world was fashioned from, and go against forces in that world that are older than the world itself or somehow contain that world, he then shows his might.
00:05:45.020 He shows his deep connection between the upper and the middle by stepping into the primordial and wrestling, quite literally, time itself, moving the binding agent, the constricting agent, the holding agent of the middle world by lifting Jormungandr in the form of a cat, and also, too, when he drinks from the horn.
00:06:13.340 And so each of these trials have context when we talk about drinking games and things like that.
00:06:19.280 It has context to the people that the poem is being recited to.
00:06:24.980 The correlation between drinking and Thor is very, very clear in the stories, but it also applies.
00:06:31.620 I noticed in some of the comments, somebody had brought up about Ukko.
00:06:37.540 Um, Uko amongst the Samai, clearly the Samai or the, uh, the Laplander, uh, folk had, you know, there was transference there or, you know, uh, I don't know to what degree most people believe that there was a, an accepting of, of Thor, but the, or that Thor was already amongst them just in their own version.
00:06:59.620 But he went by other names, too, amongst the Seme, other than Ukko.
00:07:04.060 He also went under Horagallus and also Toraturos.
00:07:10.520 And there are direct correlations to some of the rituals.
00:07:16.720 The consumption of alcohol in the amount that is consumed was seen as a correlation to the might of the god.
00:07:28.140 That perhaps the people were a conduit and that their consumption of the bounty, the extended bounty of ale that had been produced, somehow correlated back into a gift giving of strength.
00:07:43.100 And this is just by accounts. So the fullness of this ritual I'm not super familiar with, but it's worth noting that the context of the drinking game would have palpable entertainment value slash spiritual understanding slash cultural understanding of the idea of what he's doing.
00:08:08.740 and then to the lifting of the cat again it's tongue-in-cheek with the ideas like when you pick
00:08:14.920 up a cat and their stomach kind of stretches they're they're making that joke oh it's just
00:08:19.080 simply as lifting a cat up and then suddenly it's not and then it it expands out to the the
00:08:24.760 constrictive force of the equilibrium of the planet uh that the uh some have correlated to
00:08:30.780 the equator or or to the currents of the ocean and so thus literally the the uh constraint of
00:08:38.300 flow of of the primordial ocean around the middle guard is being shifted uh the the so the water's
00:08:45.120 being dropped it's being moved and and then time itself is being uh wrestled against and it only
00:08:54.960 brings him to one knee and then of course utgard loki says you know if i had known the power you
00:09:03.120 possessed i would have never let you in here and of course again there's that tongue-in-cheek thing
00:09:07.520 in which basically there's this kind of like long list of trials that are uh you know demeaning or
00:09:14.720 you know it's but then they turn out they're not demeaning at all they're actually extremely huge
00:09:20.000 And suddenly, Thor and Loki and Thealfi and Roskva suddenly come to a new realization, one of how deep and how residual the primordial realm is, but also how much he could then affect it in that world and it would affect the middle world.
00:09:40.260 So that, I think, is the power of that story in relation to metaphysical concepts and the power of Thor in relation to the very material plane that we live on.
00:09:56.160 Landon asks, is it a must to wear Thor's hammer in Ossetru?
00:10:01.680 Yes.
00:10:02.780 So let me let me qualify the yes.
00:10:05.260 You do what you want. But if your intention is to wear something that symbolically represents as a true, then yes, it is what it is. Everybody that and I meant this earlier. The more we spread out on everything, the less.
00:10:24.560 words escape me in the night a little bit. I apologize. The less goes behind the force of
00:10:34.880 that point. If we're all behind the tip of that sphere, then it has power behind it and has a
00:10:41.140 meaning. Branding matters. The cross equals Christianity. If you are any person in the
00:10:49.200 entire world, and you see a cross, that equals Jesus. And you get that, and everybody understands
00:10:56.220 it. Star of David equals Judaism. Thor's hammer equals Ausatru, and it needs to, because if it 0.95
00:11:05.060 doesn't, then we lose all that containment. If you go somewhere wearing a Thor's hammer,
00:11:11.860 and this has happened, I mean, this is an amazing thing that's happened in the time that I've been
00:11:15.960 involved in Ausatru. There was a time that, you know, nobody would recognize a hammer. Is that
00:11:21.660 a broken cross? Is that an anchor? No, anymore. I get comments very regularly at the gas station,
00:11:30.720 at the store, at wherever, you know, hey, nice hammer. They understand that it's a hammer. They
00:11:36.620 understand it's Thor's hammer, and they understand it means that I'm Ausatru. If you have a bore,
00:11:43.860 most people don't know that that means that you worship Freya. If you have, you know, a falcon
00:11:53.260 or something, most of that people don't realize that's a reference to Freya or, you know, any of
00:11:59.120 the other symbols of our gods, wear them as well, wear them in addition. But if the point is, and
00:12:05.660 the point for our ancestors certainly was to identify themselves as true to the Aesir, then
00:12:12.480 yes, the hammer of Thor is what identified that to everyone outside and inside. Hey, he's one of us
00:12:19.060 or, hey, he's on the other team. So in that sense, I do think it's essential if that's what you're
00:12:25.280 trying to do with your jewelry. If you just want to wear a pendant for you personally because you
00:12:31.620 feel devoted to a certain God and it's between you and that God, then by all means, wear whatever
00:12:36.760 you think is appropriate that way, please. But the one doesn't restrict the other. You feel
00:12:42.320 you could go out there and be the ouster true mr t if you want and you can have all the bling you
00:12:46.800 need i'm not even joking with it i mean it 100 serious you go hard but the hammer itself is
00:12:54.000 going to mean something to the people you encounter whereas the other symbols are
00:13:12.320 Thank you.