Asatru Folk Assembly - March 03, 2021


Winter Nights (2010)

Topics
Winter Nights ritual
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Freya Ray Bradbury Freyja Grandfather Oak Dylan Sheets Marcus Wolf Lasher Keen Alcetru Midgard Asatru Frost
Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1) Asatru and Myth (2012)

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

125.29

Word count

1,385

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Winter Nights is a time of remembrance and connection with our ancestors, goddesses, and ancestors' descendants. It falls on the last Sunday of the month, which is either October 11th or 17th in the Asatru calendar.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! 0.97
00:00:30.000 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly
00:00:36.360 bringing you the latest on the revival of the ancestral faith of Northern Europe
00:00:41.100 and the awakening of the European-descended peoples everywhere.
00:00:46.000 The gods and goddesses never went away.
00:00:49.000 They are with us always, and now they stir, and we reclaim our spiritual birthright.
00:00:56.720 A glorious dawn awaits.
00:00:59.240 Hail our awakening!
00:01:01.440 Hail Asatru rising!
00:01:05.200 We had a big celebration a couple of weeks ago here at Runenburg,
00:01:09.600 with lots of fun and feasting,
00:01:11.700 and with many AFA members and supporters in attendance.
00:01:15.560 Music was provided by our friends,
00:01:17.620 Dylan Sheets of the band Lasher Keen and Marcus Wolfe,
00:01:21.320 who was down from Portland.
00:01:23.300 We served a stunning meal.
00:01:25.620 Before dishing it up, we did a food blessing,
00:01:27.740 and then made up a plate for the ancestors and specifically for the great women in our family
00:01:33.680 lines. After all, they gave us life. The least we can do is to remember them with a symbolic gift of
00:01:40.560 food. Before dinner, we had stood in a circle around Grandfather Oak, the huge and very special
00:01:48.420 tree standing in the field in the front of the house, and we did a ritual calling on all the
00:01:54.160 gods and goddesses, and on the beings we call the dísir. Then we went around the circle,
00:02:01.700 and each of us called upon a specific female ancestor to be with us. We gave these invisible
00:02:08.220 guests our love and asked their blessings in return. The event was one we call winter nights.
00:02:17.240 Traditionally, it falls on the Saturday between October 11th and 17th in the Icelandic calendar,
00:02:22.700 but Asatrua today celebrate it on pretty much any date in October.
00:02:29.820 Winter Nights is all about the Desir, beings who we usually consider to be our female ancestors,
00:02:36.860 those great mothers and grandmothers and aunts and great aunts and so forth extending back
00:02:42.140 into the past.
00:02:44.340 And here is a concept essential to Asatrua and, I suppose, to all native religions.
00:02:50.620 Death is not a brick wall sealing us off from those on the other side.
00:02:55.780 It is, at most, a curtain, a veil, through which whispers of love and remembrance can
00:03:01.740 easily flow.
00:03:03.740 We honor those who are no longer visible members of our community.
00:03:07.940 We tell their stories to our family and friends.
00:03:11.060 We show their pictures, maybe visit their graves, pour libations on the earth as we
00:03:16.020 say their names.
00:03:18.860 They in turn send us love, inspiration, wisdom, a hunch at a crucial time, or maybe that bit
00:03:27.000 of luck when we think all is lost.
00:03:30.640 The line of ancestors and descendants transcends space and time and mortality.
00:03:36.920 We are never truly separated from those we love and who gave us the gift of life.
00:03:45.200 While I always call on all our gods and goddesses at Winter Nights, we especially connect them
00:03:51.300 with the goddess Freyja, our Lady of the Vanir, the one most closely associated with love
00:03:57.400 and fertility.
00:03:58.980 October is just right for Freyja's more somber side.
00:04:04.900 But while we certainly hope you have friends with whom you can celebrate Winter Nights,
00:04:08.920 you can honor the De-Seer all by yourself.
00:04:12.760 An AFA member wrote us to say,
00:04:15.080 I did my own winter night's ritual on Friday night.
00:04:18.860 I filled my drinking horn with ale and went out to a fenced-off area on the grounds of
00:04:23.380 my apartment complex, where a few small trees grow and no one ever goes.
00:04:29.620 After calling upon the gods and goddesses, I spoke the name of every female ancestor
00:04:34.320 whose name I knew, and recounted as many of their deeds as I could recall.
00:04:40.180 I could feel their presence surround me as I gave them thanks and honored them.
00:04:45.140 I renewed my pledge to make them proud that I came from them.
00:04:50.240 I recounted my deeds from the past year for both good and ill.
00:04:55.660 I asked their continued guidance throughout the year to come
00:04:59.180 and thanked them for all that they had given me
00:05:02.280 in the time that I had known them as well as what was inherited through blood.
00:05:07.660 I hailed them all, hailed the gods and goddesses, hailed the whites of the land,
00:05:13.460 yet, even after ending the ritual, the presence of my desir remained thick in the air about me.
00:05:21.620 Even now their presence is still almost overwhelming.
00:05:25.380 I now understand what Steve was saying about the veil between the worlds being thin this time of year.
00:05:31.580 Since coming to Alcetru, I've begun to cultivate a deeper understanding of things I've felt my entire life, but could not begin to comprehend.
00:05:44.860 Here's a poem I wrote long ago about the Deesir and their interaction with us, their descendants.
00:05:50.940 I'll start with the little prose lead-in I wrote at that time, and then I'll go into the poem itself.
00:05:57.020 It's called October Women, in honor of the Deesir at Winter Nights.
00:06:04.540 October is just right for the Deesir, for the women ancestors who have left Midgard and look on beyond our world.
00:06:11.940 It's perfect, too, for Freya's somber side, which we honor at this time of year.
00:06:16.920 And if you've ever read any Ray Bradbury, you know that he's the poet laureate of the October spirit.
00:06:23.400 it. Here's my tribute to Freya, and to the Deesir, and to their special bard, whose stories
00:06:30.820 have meant so much to me.
00:06:35.140 Can you hear her? Can you hear them? Shut your eyes and listen through the dark. Rustle,
00:06:44.900 crackle, crunch on the leaves, once green, now brown, like Freya's cloak. Green cloaks
00:06:52.400 are for growing things and for tossing on the grass for a love bed. Brown cloaks, like fallen
00:06:59.280 leaves and bare earth, are for covering and concealing. For October.
00:07:08.260 Ray Bradbury knows about October, but he doesn't know about her, or it wouldn't be his thumbs that
00:07:14.800 prickle when Frost circles the moon like her necklace, and it's too cold to make love on the
00:07:20.120 dark ground. Maybe he hears the wants behind her and fears the desir, creaking bones, dried up
00:07:29.880 skin bags, wrinkles like old apples in the straw. But Bradbury's got October right, at least as far
00:07:38.820 as he goes. Summer's end, no more long days to run in the sun and play in fields like children.
00:07:46.360 It's adults' time now.
00:07:48.640 Indoors, schoolbooks open, turn pages, turn inward,
00:07:54.340 and keep the fire lit all night.
00:07:57.400 Falling leaves turn to falling snow, 0.99
00:08:00.000 but the ancient ladies ignore the chill.
00:08:03.540 Out in the paddock stand the burial mounds,
00:08:06.700 stones all icy, but the desir don't care.
00:08:09.800 They cackle and call as though the air was warm,
00:08:13.380 and flowers bedecked the barrow in the sun.
00:08:17.060 You can hear them better this time of year
00:08:19.420 without the humming of the insects
00:08:21.340 or the sighs of lovers moving over the grass.
00:08:25.720 The Deesir, those ancient women, call to you.
00:08:30.020 Mothers, grandmothers, cousins and kin of old,
00:08:33.880 they hail and halloo as though they'd never left the far side.
00:08:39.420 Remember to feed the animals, the Deesir say,
00:08:42.020 and brew the fine beer that will keep you cheery.
00:08:45.900 It's not too cold to take off your clothes under the cover,
00:08:49.280 especially if you've someone to snuggle with.
00:08:52.620 Keep a log on the fire of family's honor
00:08:55.280 and know that summer lies beyond the snow.
00:09:00.740 Creaking bones and leathery skin,
00:09:03.700 wrinkles, cracked voices, aged dulled eyes.
00:09:08.680 Mr. Bradbury should know Freya better than that.
00:09:12.020 October is now, but springtime is forever, and the Deesir call us from verdant vistas.
00:09:20.920 Their eyes shine brightly, and their supple bodies twist and weave as they dance in the sun.
00:09:27.100 You can make it, they say, and as usual, they're right.
00:09:33.280 If you haven't already honored the Deesir for Winter Nights, there are still a few days of October left.
00:09:43.600 The four mothers of your line will appreciate it, and you will find yourself blessed more than you can imagine.
00:09:51.560 This is Steve McNallan of the Asatru Folk Assembly, www.runestone.org, serving our gods and goddesses, our ancestors and our folk.
00:10:03.840 Visit us online, and if we are what you have been looking for, drop us a membership inquiry.
00:10:09.880 It's time to come home to the ancestral way of our people.
00:10:14.780 Be sure to join us next time for more of Ausatru Rising.
00:10:33.280 We'll be right back.