Asatru Links from the AFA Update

There are quite a few Asatru-related links in the latest AFA Update. Some are more obviously connected than others, but all relate to our concerns in one way or another.

OUR FOLK AND OUR CULTURE -

Across Atlantic Ice by Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley

This is an important new book on the peopling of the Americas, by a top scientist and a specialist on ancient tool making! Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian, and paleo-point expert Bruce A. Bradley, argue that early Europeans came to America long before the Indians came across the Bering Land Bridge. They accomplished this feat by traveling along the ice crescent which connected Europe to North America during the ice age. This book is the definitive one on this subject. If Kennewick Man or any of the other related controversies interest you, you must have this volume!

Here is the description from the Amazon page -

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional--and often subjective--approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

If you order it from the AFA site, at http://runestone.org, the AFA will get a cut at no cost to you!

“Wyrd, Causality, and Providence: A Speculative Essay” by Ian McNish

Available as a free PDF (halfway down the list of free downloads). Here's the first paragraph:

The arrival of Middle Eastern monotheism in Europe replaced a prior proto-scientific belief in causality with the teleological concept of Divine Providence, or the Will of God. Ancient Greek philosophy was supplanted by a demand that men should stop seeking to understand the nature of the causal forces at work around them, and accept these simply as the work of an all-powerful monotheistic God. A new, organized priestly class demanded that men must accept the “revealed” word of their God without question. The academy founded by Plato was ordered closed, and as Bertha Phillpotts first showed us, even among the Germanic nations the concept of Wyrd, which postulated an all-pervasive causal force, was replaced by the concept of Divine intervention or Providence. Europe entered the Dark Ages, and remained there until the rediscovery of the empirical character of the pagan classical scholarship made possible the Renaissance and the rise of modern science.

http://tinyurl.com/8224df6

ENVIRONMENT AND YOU

Keystone XL pipeline opposition unites Tea Partiers and environmentalists

TransCanada has threatened to use disputed eminent domain powers to condemn privately held land, over the owners’ objections. And that’s creating unusual allies — Occupiers, Tea Partiers, environmentalists, individualists — united to stop TransCanada from threatening water supplies, ancient artifacts, and people’s basic property rights.

http://tinyurl.com/87dw4ao

Keystone XL pipeline for export, not domestic use - will not reduce cost of gasoline

“The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don’t want you to know is the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market, selling it to buyers in Europe, Latin America and China — not to you and me.

The pipeline and the toxic crude it’ll carry across six states would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.

Already, U.S. refineries are exporting records amounts of the gasoline they make. For the first time in 62 years, America is now a net petroleum exporter. Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. exporter of refined petroleum products, is a major lobbyist for Keystone XL. Along with Motiva (an oil refiner jointly owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco) and Total (a French refinery), Valero has signed secret, long-term contracts with Keystone’s owner (TransCanada Corp.) and several tar sands oil producers to bring this crude to Port Arthur. All three have upgraded their refineries there to process diesel for export.”

Links: http://tinyurl.com/7782zv9

http://tinyurl.com/768zpq8

COMMUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE...AND NOW -

John Robb has started a new blog site dedicated to “resilient communities.” You can find it at http://resilientcommunities.com .

Some samples of his stuff: What is a Resilient Community? -

A resilient community is the path to a safe, prosperous, and vibrant future for us, our kids, and our neighbors — despite an increasingly chaotic world...

It’s pretty clear that our situation is going to get very ugly over the next decade and that isn’t even taking into account the global pandemics and environmental catastrophes that are lurking on the horizon...

So, what do we do? What can we do?

We take control of our future. We implement the only solution that can give us the a safe, secure, and prosperous future. We become resilient. We find ways to help local people, businesses, and municipalities to PRODUCE, and that’s and important word, more of what we rely upon.

Fortunately, we now have the technology and the insights required to produce with quality and efficiency at the local level like never before. In fact, the changes are so dramatic, they could almost qualify as a revolution in local production.

http://tinyurl.com/77dmaup .

And this one -

Rebuilding Rich Soil with HugelKultur - http://tinyurl.com/6qjs2bm

We have a problem. Most of the land we live on (even in rural communities) is barren. Dead. What does this mean? It means the soil can’t support life without perpetual and massive injections of imported petro-chemical fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanical labor. Worse, it takes years to reclaim dead soil and turn it into something productive.

A home or community with dead soil, won’t help you survive an economic winter or supply disruptions. So, here’s a trick that may help out, but you need to start earlier than latter. Living soil has a lead time.

It’s a technique called Hugelkultur ...

SPACE...because there will be an Asatru of the 25^th century

A thousand private spacecraft launches a year by 2019?

U.S. companies launched just five licensed commercial rockets into space last year, but they might be able to loft nearly that many every day by the end of the decade, a federal space official contends.

George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, thinks it’s possible to double the number of permit-holding private launches every year for the rest of the decade. That exponential increase would lead to 1,280 liftoffs in 2019 — an average of 3 1/2 per day.

http://tinyurl.com/85noteb

Private space industry rushes to fill job openings

The burgeoning private space industry continues to grow and based on hiring needs, there is more growth on the horizon. Three of the leaders representing both commercial orbital and sub-orbital missions have busy human resource departments trying fill dozens of openings.

Scaled Composites, the company designing, building and testing Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship Two even produced a recruiting video trying to lure engineers to the Mojave Desert. Another southern California company, SpaceX has pages of hiring needs as the company prepares to begin a busy launch schedule over the next several years. And industry veteran Orbital continues to add plenty of engineers to its ranks every month.

Amateur rocketry

Comprehensive online resource for amateur rocketry -

http://www.rocketry.org

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org

AFA Update Number 154 Published!

Issue number 154 of the AFA Update has been published. If you're subscribed, you can find it in your box or on the AFA Update/Bearclaw Yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AFA_Bearclaw/ - or if you haven't subscribed, you can sign up (for free, of course) by sending an email to AFA-Bearclaw-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

As of today, AFA Update goes out to 2,082 people. Nice!

Some of the material you will have seen before, but some parts are new. Be sure to take a look!

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org

The Alamo, Asatru, and Our Duty

A recurrent theme in Asatru lore is that of the band of heroes, surrounded and outnumbered, fighting to the death rather than surrendering. Of course, such examples of courage and tenacity are not confined to the Northern sagas.

On March 6, 1836, the Alamo fell to the army of Mexican General Santa Ana. For thirteen days, the garrison of around 200 Texans held out against a force of about 1500 Mexicans. On the eighth day of the siege, Commander William B. Travis gave any man who wanted to leave permission to do so. One man accepted; the rest stayed to die rather than surrender.

Such an act seems almost impossible in our cynical and degenerate age. The men of the Alamo remain a shining example for those of us who live in these dangerous times. There is a wonderful poem sometimes found in Asatru circles, written in the old Germanic style, about this battle; it begins

Harsh that hearing for Houston the Raven:
Fools had enfeebled the fortress at Bexar,
Leaving it lacking and looted the while
Hordes were sweeping swift on the land,
Hell-bent to crush him...

(For more, go to http://www.anitra.net/commonwealth/alamo.html).

But aside from its obvious courage and idealism, what does this engagement in central Texas have to to do with Asatru?

Quite a lot, actually...

Our Christian friends, if they know Asatru lore well enough, chide us with statements from another supposedly lost battle: "Your Gods die at Ragnarok. They may be brave, but they are losers; mere mortals writ large. Why follow Gods like that when you could follow the God of Abraham?"

The answer, of course, is that by doing their duty and fighting to the death, the Gods and those great souls who fight alongside them make rebirth possible. If they do not fight, all ends in eternal darkness and death. Their resistance, and their resistance alone, enables the great cycle of arising, being and becoming, and falling away to a new arising. And of course, there remains the fact that the Gods are reborn into the new world, so the Christian argument is flawed from the start.

The men who died at a lonely mission village called San Antonio de Bexar similarly "lost." Yet, the time they bought allowed Sam Houston to raise an army, and led to the sweeping Texan victory at San Jacinto on April 21st of the same year. In a surprise attack, Houston's army killed 630 Mexican troops and captured 730. Only (Ahem!) nine Texans were killed. The actual combat lasted eighteen minutes.

Because of this victory, Texas won its freedom and remained an independent nation for ten years before joining the United States. As recently as the 1980's, a poll of Texans found that 18.5% thought Texas would have done better on its own.

Great things come from great lives, and great deaths. Our role, like that of Colonel Travis' volunteers, and like the Gods themselves, is to do our duty as demanded by honor - whether that duty be fighting and dying, or writing, or raising our children well, or speaking the truth when that is perilous. Victory is sweet, life is precious, and we ought to pursue them - but above all we must meet our Wyrd without shirking or shrinking. One could do worse than winning what all branches of the Indo-Europeans, from Troy and Thermopylae to Maldon and Beowulf, would recognize as "bright and undying fame."

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org

Announcing...Steve McNallen's Personal Blog!

For decades, I've been known as a mover and shaker in the revival of Germanic religion. Most people know me only through my role in Asatru, and as leader of the Asatru Folk Assembly. That's fine, but there's a lot more to me than that. I'm a pretty complex person, and to express that complexity I've started a personal blog where I can speak as a private person. I want this blog to reflect who Steve McNallen really is, the totality of the man behind the image. This is where I find my voice - on Asatru, of course, but on much more besides.

Originally, this new blog was supposed to help readers follow the development of my upcoming book on Asatru. It will still serve that function. But there will be much more, as well...my thoughts on many things ranging from the plight of indigenous peoples, to the special issues facing men and women of European descent, to the dangers facing all life on Earth, and anything else that crosses my mind and seems noteworthy.

Please come by http://stephenamcnallen.com and pay a visit! If you subscribe to my blog, you can download a free manuscript I wrote giving three things you can do to have a better day, every day.

Hail the Gods!
Hail the AFA!

Steve McNallen
http://runestone.org

An Asatru Classic Given a New Look!

People who know nothing of Asatru, particularly if their own religion is one of the Abrahamic faiths, are quick to assume that we are nihilists with no code of morality other than the law of the sword. The document that proves otherwise is the ancient poem Havamal, the "Words of the High One" - that is, of Odin himself.

Many of the readers of this blog will be very familiar with this pillar of Asatru, but most people have never heard of it. All the better, then that Eoghan Odinsson has written a version of Havamal - which he has titled Northern Wisdom - that is eminently understandable to the modern reader. Eoghan was kind enough to ask me to write a Foreword for his volume. I have included it here because I believe it points out some cogent reasons why this document, and other essentials of Asatru, are so little known to the general public.

By the way, you can order a copy of Northern Wisdom through the Asatru Folk Assembly store, at http://runestone.org!

In all the writings of our Northern European ancestors, one source stands head and shoulders above all the others when it comes to practical knowledge on how to live a good life. That work, composed in poetic form in Old Norse, is the Havamal. The name translates as The Words of the High One - that is, of Odin, the father of the Nordic gods and the epitome of the wisdom-seeker. In short, this is the advice of a mighty deity: winner of the magical runes, thief of the Mead of Inspiration, the one who gave and eye to drink from Mimir's Well of Wisdom. One could hardly ask for a better mentor for a life of success and happiness!

So why have so few people heard of it?

The answers are several: First of all, it's written in a language understandable today only to inhabitants of Iceland and the Faroe Islands north of Scotland, plus a relative handful of specialists. It has been translated into English and other modern languages, of course, but these have all been written by scholars, for scholars. Some versions try to maintain the original poetic meter, at the price of comprehension. Others focus on being absolutely literal, but they, too, use a vocabulary and a phraseology from early medieval times. Without exception, they treat The Words of the High One as a historical document - not as a handbook for life today, in the twenty-first century!

Eoghan Odinsson and his crowdsourcing friends have composed a version of the Havamal that is eminently understandable. No Old Norse poetic forms, no archaic terms, no fuss and no bother. And more than that, this version shows how very relevant this material is! The words of Odin are, as we might expect from a god, every bit as applicable to our lives today as they were a thousand years ago. Good sense is still good sense. We are not so different from our ancestors, after all - we are them recast in a different time and place.

It is my pleasure to write this foreword to Northern Wisdom. I urge you to read it and apply it to your life!

Stephen A. McNallen

New Podcast on Asatru Rising!

Last night I posted a new podcast on Asatru Rising - http://asatrurising.podbean.com.

It's on "Asatru Morning Rites," and should be useful to many folks.

Please tell others about it!

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org

Asatru - Why We Need to Support Indigenous Peoples

My role in the Asatru movement has, to a large extent, defined my life. Anyone who knows me, however, knows I've done a lot of unusual things besides Germanic religion. I went to northern India and interviewed Tibetans who fought the Chinese. I lived with Karen guerrillas in the jungles of Burma, fighting for their identity against a tyrannical government. Less well known is my praise for Nigerian democracy activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, and many other instances in which I have lent my voice to the causes of indigenous peoples around the world.

Why should a man busily re-establishing our native Germanic faith go to all this trouble? Why should I care what happens to Tibetans and Burmese and Nigerians? Don't we Germanics have enough problems of our own?

As a man of European descent, and as a follower of the indigenous European faith of Asatru, I have a spiritual obligation to care for and defend my own heritage. Less obvious is another truth - that I should also care about the fate of other peoples.

Ultimately, we European-descended folk are in the same boat as the Tibetans, the Karen, and the Amazonian tribes. We're all trying to preserve our peoples, cultures, and native religions in a world where transnational corporations and intrusive governments work to destroy all differences, to smooth out humanity into one featureless, deracinated "norm-man" fit only to produce, consume, and obey. Where will our vaunted Germanic freedom be then? What will happen to the Norse spirit, the Faustian upward reach of the European soul, when we're all slaving on the global plantation for the bankers and the corporate elite? Let me tell you: These historic traits of ours will be dead. And the only way to prevent this "death by homogenization" is to be who we are, to honor that which makes us unique. We should do that for ourselves as Northfolk, and we should encourage other groups to do likewise.

Someone once said of me that "Steve wants to help every ethnic group but his own." That's not true; my own folk are closest to my heart and will always have first claim to my loyalty and love. That is only natural and good. But the world is not necessarily a zero-sum game, and there are plenty of win-win solutions to our mutual problems. There will always be competition between groups, yes. But all of us who want to preserve our identity against the pressures of the global monoculture, regardless of our race or culture, have a common enemy in those who would make us all the same. If the transnationalists are to sell us Coca-Cola made in the United States and toys made in China, they have to "modernize" us first. Modernization is of course a two-edged sword; some aspects are beneficial but others are designed make us abandon our ancestral ways, pledge allegiance to the bank and the television set, and become a "world citizen." This is as true of First-Worlders like Americans and Germans as it is of tribal societies in the Third World, and nothing could be more disastrous to groups who wish to retain their distinct identity in the 21st century.

Environmental issues are a part of this struggle. Industrial development and resource extraction do not always take into consideration the needs of the environment and of the local peoples most directly affected. As I write, the last forest homes of the magnificent and extremely endangered Sumatran tiger are being sawed down to make - toilet paper! (Asia Pulp & Paper products marketed in the US under the Paseo and Livi brand names.) If that seems too far away to care about, don't worry; there is a long list of less dramatic species pushed to the brink in Europe and in America. People, too, are organisms adapted to a particular habitat; destroy that habitat and you undermine the existence of the people themselves.

I will gladly stand alongside those who are true to the ways of their people and their ancestors in the face of the global juggernaut. This is one of the great challenges of our age, and in it lies our duty to the ancestors who gave us life as well as our descendants, who will have to live in the world we forge. You want a heroic struggle? Don't pine for the past - you and I are fortunate enough to live in the most heroic age of all!

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org