Asatru Folk Assembly - September 17, 2023


Women Shape and Distribute Power in Way Men Dont (from VNS Episode 62)


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

131.41974

Word count

3,005

Sentence count

104


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 but uh it's really it's really a testament to
00:00:10.000 to loyalty i'd say in a lot of ways troth with our gods she was true to the isir whereas
00:00:20.400 it's easy to say but it's much harder to do when you're on the spot
00:00:25.920 so yeah she's very inspirational especially for our young ladies and our daughters that brings
00:00:32.720 me to the first question we have it's actually from your wife eric hello matt i hope this i hope
00:00:41.620 all is well i have a question for you and eric on tonight's vns how can we raise our daughters
00:00:48.980 to carry themselves with dignity and confidence in their worth, like Queen Sigrid did. Thank you.
00:00:58.280 So, Eric, as a father, as we both have this in common, being a father of daughters,
00:01:07.200 and our girls are all very young, what ideas do you have or what wisdom do you have to share on
00:01:15.500 how we can raise our daughters to value themselves the same way that Queen Sigrid did.
00:01:24.060 Well, I think that it's very important to, if we look, if we just contrast that with what
00:01:31.540 it means to be a young woman in today's, in the modern world, you could say.
00:01:38.720 commenting from the from the outside obviously not being a woman but is that i believe that
00:01:45.800 women today do not understand the value that they actually have and it is a different value than
00:01:54.620 than men have so men are the pursuers and women are in a sense the price that is being pursued
00:02:02.120 And it's this great wealth that women have.
00:02:07.160 And I think that women have been convinced that, in fact, they're not special.
00:02:14.220 They're just like men.
00:02:15.780 So they should go out and be men.
00:02:18.120 And they should go and pursue things.
00:02:21.520 And they should go out and actualize themselves, or however you'd want to phrase it.
00:02:28.360 And emphasis is being put on having, quote-unquote, a good time or going out and getting things for yourself.
00:02:42.960 um when i think that for us to live optimally or live really in alignment with our nature
00:02:53.080 and what is good and right women need to women need to understand that they that they are that
00:02:59.880 they are incredible they have these great gifts they uh are the carriers of uh of new life
00:03:09.320 and that is uh both a gift but it but it's also a responsibility that they have they have a
00:03:15.900 responsibility to their ancestors to their to their family to themselves to the to the gods
00:03:22.940 to uh to guard this treasure that they have they're given this uh this great beauty and um
00:03:32.800 and uh sort of um sixth sense if you if you will um these gifts that that nowadays are being just
00:03:42.960 taken and and abused and they they really need to be be taught that they have something of
00:03:52.400 incredible great value and it needs to be safeguarded and they need to be taught that
00:03:58.240 there are people out there that will not hesitate to manipulate or by force try to take those gifts
00:04:06.080 away from them just for them themselves to have a good time or they just want the shiny thing
00:04:13.280 so i think that we need to teach our our daughters our young women that they're so incredibly
00:04:22.160 valuable and they're doing themselves a disservice when they tell themselves that they're actually
00:04:27.840 not that valuable and they can just quote unquote go around and have a have a good time it's not
00:04:33.680 doing them any favors they they have a responsibility to safeguard their gifts and
00:04:42.880 really have men come and try to prove themselves and show themselves to be worthy of the gift so
00:04:49.520 so that they can then come into a union of marriage
00:04:54.260 and then birth the next generation
00:04:57.120 and build new glories and wealth for our folk as a whole.
00:05:04.620 And I think that is the key that we need to teach our young women
00:05:09.400 that you have wealth, you have great gifts,
00:05:12.880 but you need to be aware of this
00:05:15.320 and you need to hold yourself in great respect
00:05:19.780 and respect for your ancestors and gods.
00:05:22.640 They're the reason that you're here.
00:05:24.820 And not throw this away because someone has told you that,
00:05:28.620 oh, you should just go out and have a good time.
00:05:30.500 You only live once or whatever crap that modernity will spew at them.
00:05:37.380 And I think this is very, like we were talking about Sigrid,
00:05:41.480 is that she understood her values.
00:05:44.660 She understood that she was desired, but she respected herself to such a degree that she outright had two suitors killed because she felt that she was being dishonored because these were people that were not worthy of her gifts, of her, and were not mannered enough to address her properly.
00:06:10.720 So that's what I have to say on that.
00:06:14.660 So, I've got a lot and I don't want to, I don't want to miss the point, or I don't want to, I guess, flow stream of consciousness here and maybe not make sense.
00:06:30.300 but there's some things that I really like to say. One thing that, I mean, I think a lot of us
00:06:40.120 notice in society generally, but in my position as Alsherier Goethe, and just as a Goethe generally,
00:06:50.600 a lot of what I do is counseling and helping people. And we talk on this program a lot about
00:06:57.580 soul sickness and about the various ways that our people are, are suffering because
00:07:05.400 of, you know, social conditioning and sicknesses of the time that we live in and separation
00:07:12.800 from our traditional values and from our gods for a very long time, generationally.
00:07:18.600 You mentioned a lot of this in what you were saying, Eric, and I think it was spot on society has taught our women for, I don't know, 60 or 70 years now.
00:07:40.600 Now, varying shades of women, women and feminine things are bad or are not of as much value
00:07:54.320 or not as good or less than are subpar in a direct comparison to men.
00:08:02.220 So the only way that women can be valuable and taken seriously and celebrated is by them
00:08:10.100 pretending that they're men and trying to be the best men they can be. And
00:08:20.100 that is terribly damaging in so many ways. But one of them is it set up a paradigm to
00:08:27.940 where they cannot possibly win. If the ultimate arbiter of value is man or not man,
00:08:36.900 the very best woman will never be better than the very worst man because at the end of the day
00:08:44.720 you know not to be vulgar but they can drop their pants one of them's a man one of them's not
00:08:50.160 that's such a low standard and it's such an insidious
00:08:57.140 device that it puts a goal in front of them that no matter how hard they tried, they could never
00:09:09.380 possibly be satisfied with a reach. But in the meantime, we've watched generations of ladies
00:09:16.420 spend their life pursuing something they can never quite attain and missing out on all the
00:09:24.740 amazing things that are inherent to them, and look back with a lot of regret. One of the things
00:09:32.440 that I've seen is this desperate need for acknowledgement. One thing that I hate seeing
00:09:38.620 is whenever we have a symbol, and someone wants to raise a general toast to men, or to,
00:09:49.500 you know if it's father's day and they want to raise a toast to to the fathers
00:09:55.320 if they're talking about soldiers and they want to talk about men who've gone and fought and died
00:10:01.880 it's you can almost count on it there's a knee-jerk immediate response i want to raise
00:10:08.100 a horn too to the women that did stuff yay women and
00:10:13.040 And there's obvious reasons that that's cringy and not great. But what it says to me on a deeper
00:10:23.500 level is there's this desperate need for validation that if men get praised, they have to get
00:10:32.040 something too, because there's a desperation there. And I don't care if they want to raise
00:10:37.020 a horn to girl power. What I care about is the fact that something inside of them is broken
00:10:44.940 to where they are so desperate for that acknowledgement. And I want my daughter
00:10:50.940 raised in a place where she doesn't feel a desperate need to do that. And you'll notice
00:10:57.280 men don't do that. If it's Mother's Day and we want to raise a horn to the mothers, somebody's
00:11:02.620 like dads are good too. Nobody does that because we don't, that's not one of the ways that our
00:11:10.120 soul is broken. It is one of the things about our ladies I would like to see fixed. And I think it
00:11:15.180 has this inherent devaluation that our culture, especially nowadays when, you know, we're as a
00:11:24.580 society pretending that gender doesn't exist. Reality has a way of pulling the carpet out
00:11:33.900 from under you. If you exist in an imaginary bubble of wokeness that by legislation, people
00:11:41.040 aren't allowed to pop. When reality sets in, you realize that in the competition to be
00:11:47.640 a man no matter what surgeries and hormones and anything you do you will never reach that goal
00:11:56.680 that's devastating if that's the only way you see you see value
00:12:01.600 queen sigrid was exuded value she not only did she understand her value
00:12:12.560 but her contemporaries did as well that's why the suitors were lining up
00:12:17.640 She had tremendous value, value in her femininity and her being a woman, in her being the mother of kings, in her being able to produce offspring of she is that blood link to the kings of old, to the kings of the future, of dynasties bringing them together, of literally forging kingdoms through choices that she made.
00:12:44.240 and she felt that and everyone around her knew that so this goes into you know
00:12:53.300 it's it's me and eric two guys sitting here you know telling you ladies about
00:12:58.620 lady stuff and in a way it's preposterous in another way we're two fathers of daughters
00:13:06.400 who are tremendously interested in the things that we're saying because they matter to us
00:13:13.540 in a way that they isn't as readily available to maybe some others. So one of the things I always
00:13:21.820 get a little bit emotional thinking about it, I apologize for that. But
00:13:26.700 I'm just thinking of stuff with my daughter, I always, always, always try to
00:13:33.560 I don't know, tell her how special she is. Tell her, you know, in silly ways,
00:13:40.360 Just like, yay, Aubrey's the best. Yay. And just tell her how great she is all the time,
00:13:45.900 because I don't want her feeling like she's not. I want to reinforce that and ingrain that
00:13:51.900 from literally the day she was born to where she knows that and she feels that. Because I think that
00:13:59.700 that lack of feeling valuable often puts our ladies in very vulnerable positions when they
00:14:08.280 are least able to fend them off when they're young when they're in school age when they're around
00:14:14.520 you know teenagers and guys into their 20s they're put in a very vulnerable position
00:14:23.480 and i want i don't want her to have those questions in her mind about
00:14:28.280 her value that she's going into the game with um
00:14:32.040 One of the things that's fundamental in what we do and in the tradition of our ancestors
00:14:40.540 is this special, there's so many things, a couple of things, just to mention off the top of it.
00:14:48.620 So when it came to having a tangibility with the interaction with our gods and with the world beyond the veil, women have always had a special ability that way that men don't have.
00:15:09.920 um women are much more likely to be perceptive of those things to have what you know some would
00:15:17.880 call second sight to be able to interact with spiritual forces in a way that men either can't
00:15:26.020 or it's much harder for them to come by uh it's one of the things that tacitus talks about amongst
00:15:32.340 our ancestors and why the the position of of vulva or saithcona was such an important thing
00:15:41.380 because these women had this ability inherently to their to their sex to their gender that the
00:15:46.180 men didn't have um so there's there's that and it goes into and i hope this makes sense and
00:15:54.340 please ask questions if this wanders and and doesn't isn't as clear as i'd like it to be
00:16:02.340 Women have an ability to shape and distribute power in a way that men don't.
00:16:11.580 Now, men wield power.
00:16:13.900 Men execute power with their will.
00:16:17.560 But that power is transmitted and bestowed by the women and by the people they choose
00:16:26.560 to acknowledge, to show favor to, to give themselves to, in a way.
00:16:32.340 you know, the prize of Queen Sigrid to whatever man was able to win her as a wife was a tremendous
00:16:41.680 transmission of power and of dignity and of status, of regality itself. And we see that in
00:16:49.020 our ritual culture. That's the reason that the horn passes in high symbol from women to the
00:16:56.360 person speaking back to women, that ability of controlling who gets the horn, who's served first
00:17:02.580 in the feasting hall, who gets their drinks first, the order in which people are seated.
00:17:08.840 We see that tremendously. A really good book to read, ladies, if you're interested in this,
00:17:14.740 is Lady with the Mead Cup. It is a dry read. It is repetitive, but it is worth the labor,
00:17:21.540 And it speaks a lot about that ability to show and to distribute power.
00:17:28.860 And all of that may seem ethereal, but in real world situations, you see this.
00:17:37.880 In a room full of people, women distribute social credit in a very important way.
00:17:45.460 The highest, you know, objectively, all things being equal, the highest valued guys in that room, if all the women ignore them and pick out one of the lower valued guys and show him deference and attention and take care of him and ooh and aah over what he says, immediately the power dynamic of that room changes.
00:18:08.440 and I think that we've all seen that. It's one of the reasons we talk about our ladies
00:18:13.720 and their ability to be frith weavers. If we're in a room and me and Eric are having a dispute
00:18:20.680 amongst each other, Mandy and Laura on the side can fix all of that in a way that men don't do
00:18:28.640 nearly as well. They have the ability to bring us together to soothe our, you know, anger or
00:18:37.780 whatever indignity we feel we've suffered or whatever, and make that work. They have the
00:18:44.100 ability to take guys who are shy, who are on the wall, who are scared to talk, make them feel like
00:18:50.400 a million bucks and introduce them to the group to where they're part of stuff and they're included.
00:18:55.560 They have the ability to take guys that are acting inappropriately, who are behaving ignobly, who are being bullies, whatever else they're doing, by not showing those guys attention, they're arbiters of what is socially acceptable or not socially acceptable.
00:19:15.140 And women possess a tremendous power for that, not just in terms of regality or distribution of spiritual might with a drinking horn, of just helping groups of people get along together, of the smooth flow or not of society.
00:19:35.520 They have those choices.
00:19:37.380 They possess tremendous power amongst themselves, and it's important for, I guess, the social economy, when women hold themselves with dignity, things function in a really special way and have tremendous potential that they don't have.
00:20:01.440 When those women are functioning out of desperation or out of a lack of self-esteem, it messes up that whole economy.
00:20:13.760 It messes up society.
00:20:17.580 The ability to, I don't know, women are extremely important.
00:20:23.160 They're extremely valuable inherently in the gifts and the blessings that they come into this world with.
00:20:31.440 And it's very important to instill, and this is back to the question of what we can do with
00:20:37.120 our daughters. We can show them other female role models that are doing it right and encourage
00:20:43.980 their interaction and learning from these women. We can build them up from the day they are born
00:20:50.780 to celebrate how wonderful them being women is and how special they are. And we can reinforce
00:20:59.860 that and build a solid foundation when children go out into the world and become adults
00:21:06.020 so much of their strengths and their weaknesses go back to childhood and how they were raised
00:21:13.920 and experiences they had when they were still forming their sense of who they were and their
00:21:19.300 identity in the world we can't fix everything for them but if in those you know 18 years that we
00:21:29.440 have that much influence over them. If we can fill them up with that much value and love and
00:21:37.980 sense of self, they're much better equipped to face the world. And so I'm hopeful that we can
00:21:45.720 all do our very best at making that happen. So the ladies of, you know, 20 years from now are
00:21:51.820 in a better situation than the ladies of 20 years ago. And hopefully that keeps getting better.
00:21:59.440 Um, that was rambly, but it's something I think about since I had a daughter. It's amazing how the everything changes when you have kids. And I knew that before I had kids. It's something you hear all the time, but you know it on a much different level when you do. And I absolutely feel that.
00:22:21.100 So speaking of one of the ladies that our women would do well to look up to and learn from, Githya Anna says, Ufda, what time is it over there?
00:22:32.300 Assume she's talking to you, Eric.
00:22:35.400 Yes, so it is 03.44 a.m. at this moment.
00:22:45.040 There you have it.
00:22:46.020 And anybody who's curious, it's 6.45 p.m. here in Reno.
00:22:51.100 A-