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July 24, 2025 - Know More News - Adam Green
01:29:59
Asatru Folk Assembly Matthew Flavel Interview | Know More News w/ Adam Green
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
Adam Green here with No More News.
Thank you all for joining me today, Thursday, July 24th, 2025.
Have another guest on the show today coming from the Asuch Asatru Folk Assembly.
He is a leader there, a pagan Nordic group.
A lot of requests to have him on the show.
Be an interesting conversation to hear what he has to say and maybe answer a few questions, clear up some things.
So, well, everybody, welcome our guest.
First time on the show, Matthew Flaville.
What's up, Matthew?
Nice biblical name you got there for a pagan.
I sympathize with the name.
I couldn't help it.
I was not consulted.
It's an infant, but thank you for having me on.
I'm excited to be on and talk to your audience today.
Yeah, yeah.
On the name thing, have you thought of a name change?
Do you have another pagan name you go by or anything?
No, I don't do that.
Old timers in the early days of the reforging of Alcatru, that used to be a more common thing.
But that was the name my parents gave me.
Yep.
Were they Christian?
I respect that.
Were they Christian?
I suppose nominally, if they had to check a box, but they certainly weren't, you know, regular practitioners.
Right.
Yeah.
But the name obviously comes from the New Testament, the infamous gospel of Matthew.
So how long have you been involved with Asatru and what's your position there?
And tell us a little bit about it.
Sure.
I've been Alcatru since 2001.
Been a part of the Alchrue Folk Assembly since 2009.
I started out as a member and I wanted to get more involved and see how I could help.
I immediately felt at home and like this is what I needed to do with my life.
So I want to see how I could help.
I started out as a folk builder, which is like a local representative.
I'm doing that in Alaska.
I was born and raised in Alaska.
Okay.
Did that for a number of years.
2012.
He doesn't even have a Gophi in the interface.
Gophi is just a word for a priest.
Your microphone's having a little bit of issues.
It's kind of coming in and out right now.
Let me see if I can get that a little bit better.
That sounds good.
It works.
Yeah.
Roboting a little bit.
I'm not sure if it's your microphone or it could be the connection or something.
Hold on.
I'm curious.
You said you got involved in 2001, but then not officially until 2009.
Is that what you said?
Yeah.
So I realized that I needed to break from Christianity and I came home to believing in our gods.
Then took me a while to kind of find my place and to become actively involved in the Ostrue Folk Assembly.
There was nothing going on in my area at the time.
And that's part of why I became a folk builder is I wanted to fix them.
So yeah, it took me a little bit there.
Became a Gophi in 2012.
Tried to stay as involved as possible.
And then in 2016.
Hold on, hold on.
What's a Gothi?
What's a Gophi?
A Gophi is a priest of the Icer.
Okay.
It's an old Norse word that basically mean a man of the gods.
It's like a high priest.
I saw the high priest, or is there only one high priest?
So there's only one high priest.
And in 2016, I was made the Alterior Gophi, which is, you know, the Gophi of all the other gophies.
So you're like second in charge?
No, I'm like in charge.
Oh, in charge.
Okay.
I thought I saw another guy on red ice.
I've seen you on red ice before, but wasn't there an older guy with a white hair, white beard?
Yeah, Stephen McMallan, that's our founder.
And he stepped back from being the Al Scary Gophy in 2016.
And at midsummer 2016, he passed the torch to me.
Okay.
All right.
My apologies.
I didn't know you were the guy.
I didn't know you were in charge.
So you mentioned there that you started believing in the gods.
In what way do you believe in the gods and which gods specifically?
The Iceier specifically is the tribe of gods typified by the Norse lore and the Norse nomenclature that your audience probably be familiar by Father Odin.
In what way?
I suppose that's kind of a broad question.
I believe that.
Like, do you think specifically, do you think they're real?
What I mean is specifically, you think they're like actual historical, they really happened on earth, real in that sense?
Yes, I think they're real in every sense.
I don't think they are inherently physical, though I think they could manifest themselves physically given the right circumstance.
But yes, I think they're absolutely real.
So you think like Thor and Odin have manifested in the real world?
Real in that sense?
We created Our folk in the real world.
And I think they have revealed themselves to our ancestors and to us in different ways.
And there is stories of, you know, the all-father appearing physically in our lore at different times to different people.
So you said they created us.
Does that mean you don't believe in evolution?
So there's a process.
And I think that created what created is a strange word because it's kind of a totality of things.
What our Lord tells us is they found something that was, and they imbued that with what makes us us.
They imbued that with the elements that make Aryan man and woman.
So they only made Aryans or all people.
All white people, all Aryan people.
So who made the non-white people then?
I have no idea.
No, it's kind of a fundamental tenet in the Astru Folk Assembly that each race of people has their own relationship to their divinity and their own.
So everybody was made by their own gods.
I would assume everyone was made by their own gods.
I know we were made by our gods.
So I was looking into this a little bit.
I was reading Wikipedia and stuff.
It looks like it started in Iceland in the 70s.
Can you tell us a little bit about the growth, like how and when it started and morphed into what it is today?
So Wikipedia is a biased source on some stuff, and their facts are a little bit sketchy on that.
What was kind of cool is it started simultaneously around the same time in, I don't know, what would come to the form it is today in kind of three different places.
There was two gentlemen in England that were developing the Odinic Rite.
The same time Bane Bjorn Bjantensen and some of his fellows in Iceland were founding the Astru or Fehlagh.
And the same exact year that that organization was founded, unbeknownst to one another, our founder, Steve McNallan, founded the Viking Brotherhood that would eventually evolve into what we have as the Astru Folk Assembly today.
So kind of spontaneously at a number of different places, a number of different men felt the calling to come home to our gods and develop it.
And that's kind of how it came to where it is today.
I think that looks different and kind of reflects the people who that calling took root in culturally.
Iceland, Icelandic Ausatru certainly looks different.
It looked different in the 1970s as the American version, I think, because of where it took root and the people it took root from.
And that was a first generation of people that knew a bit of lore about our ancestors.
They knew that we needed to come home to our gods, but building something from nothing is always a really unique and daunting challenge.
So through a lot of trial and error, learning, a lot of building relationships with the gods, it evolved over the years to the point that it's out to hopefully continues to do so.
The Icelanders had a dramatic parting of ways with kind of their founding principles and what it was.
Originally, it had a lot more in common with the things that we do in recent under the leadership of the recent.
They have gone pretty far, pretty far woke.
And unfortunately, they no longer claim to actually believe in the gods, which is a strange thing for a religious organization.
So the original sect, I guess, of this, you said went woke.
That's the one that's still in Iceland.
Well, yeah, that was well.
So that's the thing.
Their organization was founded at the same time our founder was building something here.
But the Austral Feligh, under the original first two, I'll see you Gothar.
So up until I want to say up until well into the 90s, they were a fairly folkish organization and they were very devout, more racistly, no longer devout.
They no longer claimed to believe in the reality of our gods.
And they've no longer really stand for any of the core principles that define our faith.
You mentioned starting from scratch.
So does that mean like in Iceland, in all of Scandinavia, had Nordic paganism completely been stamped out by Christianity?
There's no continuation of it since a thousand years ago before the Christians really took over in the North.
You have isolated hotspots, and I can't say there wasn't, you know, some guy in a cave somewhere, but in general, as something culturally aware of, yes, as a practice faith, now there were different moments in time where individuals personally tried to reconnect with the gods and perhaps small groups of people, as far as we're aware of, in any kind of organized or a lot of people doing it together since.
Yeah, it was pretty well stamped out by Christianity and laid dormant until that period in the late 60s and early 70s.
And you guys resurrected it.
Like, what were the sources or the books that were used to learn about it and try to bring back the faith?
A lot more is translated into certainly into English now than was available to that early generation in the late 60s and early 70s.
But specifically, both the poetic and the prose of the base of the icy.
You cut out a bit there.
You said the poetic.
The prose and poetic, which are 14th century Icelandic manuscripts in the form we have now.
Were they authored by Christians?
Were those authored by Christians?
One of them, yes, the other it's hard to say because it was a compilation of earlier works.
It was certainly compiled by Christians at the time because that's who 200 and some odd years after the official conversion.
It was written by Christians because that's all that's everybody was Christian.
There was nobody else to write about it, possibly, right?
But is that a criticism you've heard?
Sorry, is that a criticism you've heard?
Is that these are unreliable because the Christians are the ones telling writing about this?
Absolutely.
Some people say that I think they're incorrect, but that is something that certainly encounter.
I know there's a story written by some Jewish guy That says that Odin was drinking semen or something like that.
The Christians love to bring that up.
I'm sure you've heard that one before, right?
No, I have never heard that one.
Really?
Does not make any sense.
And I've never once heard that.
It's ridiculous.
You've never even heard that.
You're saying you never heard it in your own lore, or you've never heard a Christian say it.
Well, I've never heard, I've never heard that, period.
Oh, wow.
You must not be on Twitter because the Christians say it every day.
I see the Christians saying it.
I'm on Twitter, but there's a lot of people that I don't always read everybody's stuff because I think there's a lot of nonsense that goes on there.
So, did you say it was two books, the Edda, and or was it one book you described?
Is this like the equivalent of the Bible in your religion?
No, no.
But it is a collection of our lore and stories of our ancestors.
And that's what it was intended at the time and still is today, is kind of a documentation of what the elder faith was.
So we have the prose edda and the poetic edda roughly from the same time period.
They're maybe a generation apart in their compilation.
And those are stories about Odin, Thor, Freya, right?
Those are the main ones.
Are there some other main gods that are in that?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's Odin, Thor, Balder, Njorder, Freyr, Freyr, Frigg, Heimdahl, Ragi, Vithar, Valley, Orsetti.
We have a number of gods and goddesses, but those are the main ones we focus on.
Oh, and Tyr.
I was going to say this for later because I got some still like kind of introductory questions, but did you see the clip from the Netflix show about Norse paganism where they have Odin seeing paganism conquered by Jesus?
Did you see that?
Here, I'll share the screen so you can watch it.
We'll watch it quick.
But had you seen it?
That's what I'm that's what I want to know.
I have not because I tend to things made by Netflix tend to make me upset.
So I, yeah.
Well, this will make you upset.
That's why I was asking if you saw it.
I try to avoid things that I know are coming from the other team.
Yeah.
Well, this is so overt, I thought I'd show it to you.
So this is the season finale.
It's all about Thor and Odin.
There's, I think that's Freya.
And then in the final scene, the climax of the whole series, it's Odin looking as Jesus conquered all the pagan gods.
And this is what they're trying to, they're basically boasting about it, right, on Netflix here.
I'll show it.
a minute-long clip here So, Odin looking up at Jesus on the cross and all the pagan runes and artifacts going into the rubble of history.
*Gunshot*
The boats, the Viking age turning to the Christian modern age.
all the ancestors looking in sadness at the king of the jews on the cross All right.
So, yeah.
Any thoughts on that and the symbolism there?
Again, without the context of watching the program, certainly it conveys a degree of sadness.
And I think that is very sad indeed.
It is unfortunate that our ancestors broke troth with their gods and were converted either through choice or through extreme violence to embrace that.
That's really unfortunate.
It's odd.
I really don't believe in the power of the Jewish Messiah to cast down or have some kind of metaphysical battle with our gods in that way.
I think I'll hear Christians say all the time: okay, you say Jesus is fake and Jewish.
He's not real.
It's a myth.
Well, what are we going to replace it with?
They always say that.
And if they're European, I'll say, well, if you really need some type of spirituality religion, you can go to your previous pre-Christian ancestral gods.
I think the most important aspects of religion for people, what they need, is marriage rituals and like death rituals.
Could you explain what you guys do for those two huge life events in humanity, marriage and death?
Sure.
We have weddings and we have funerals.
One of the things, one of the things that's interesting is so much of Christian religiosity, the way that I think a lot of our audience would understand it is through a European lens and is built on the traditions that predate it.
So, you know, the European religious wedding is very similar in a lot of ways.
One of our weddings is, you know, typically done in one of our holy spaces and Hoff if folks are fortunate enough to be able to get to one of our four Hofs presided over by one of our Gothar.
There's an exchange of vows, just like you would recognize.
There's exchange of rings like you would recognize.
The exchange of rings with vows of broth and loyalty is absolutely one of our things.
So it would look very, very similar, but we absolutely host weddings.
We host legally binding weddings.
There's me and my wife.
Oh, that's you.
Yeah, that's me and my wife and my daughter in utero there.
But yeah, so our wedding would look really familiar.
Sometimes people want a hand fasting as well, which is kind of a Celtic tying of a knot ceremony, which is cool.
And I've had to practice many times on my arm, so I don't mess it up.
Our funerals are the one that I think you would see the most difference.
One of the most important parts of the wedding that maybe visually wouldn't look different to folks, but I think is essential is inviting the gods to be present in your marriage, to start building your life and your family and your relationship together, inviting the gods in with them as a part, with them bearing witness to your vows, with them interwoven in your relationship from the outset.
And you think that's really important.
Our funerals, one of the things that I find most offensive is when people have a Christian funeral and the funeral is all about Jesus.
Yeah.
And they don't talk about the deceased.
They, you know, talk about the deceased only in the context of that deceased's practice of Christianity.
And then they give, they use it as an opportunity to sermonize about Jesus and their idea of their afterlife and how you need to do what Jesus tells you.
Yeah.
You saying that, the last two funerals I've been to, that was so heavy.
They turned it into a sermon.
They see a funeral as like a recruiting opportunity.
And it turns into more Jewish Jesus worship than even talking about the person that just died.
I thought it was disgusting.
Yeah, that deeply offends me.
Our funerals are very much about celebrating the person who's passed, about giving an opportunity for people to come up and speak about them, to share memories about them, to raise horns in their honor and to really celebrate who that person, that person's life, and that person's journey to the afterlife.
So that's a very big focus.
And we also, we have, we inter ashes of our loved ones at all of our Hofs.
And that's very important to us.
So we do have the facility to do that at all of our elite sites.
That's cool.
Any other rituals?
Any sacrifices or rituals that we should know about?
Or ceremonies or holidays, that type of thing.
We have ritual observances every month at our Hofs.
We usually celebrate a holy tide once a month.
We have two main rituals: the bloat and ensemble.
Bloat is bloat is a communal participation in the gift cycle.
We believe very much in the exchange of gifts between us and the gods.
We exchange worship and loyalty in exchange for blessings, torment.
That cycle is never ending.
So the bloat is the writ large.
It's very often we gather in a circle.
Bloats are officiated by our Gothar.
There is a round offering typically over a horn of mead.
We'll go around in the central and people will place their worship and their devotion into the horn, placing their hands on it, imbuing that energy.
We then offer that to whichever God we're giving bloat to.
And we ask that in return, if they accept our offerings and if they find us worthy to give us their blessings.
And so we'll have an additional horn that will fill with the might and the blessings they want to bestow upon the folk.
And Gothi will go around the circle and either through drinking from the horn or if it's a large group through aspirant, we will distribute those blessings.
And those are the fundamentals that can look different depending upon the occasion.
Sometimes gifts or offerings are put into the ritual fire to send up to the Aseer.
And that's our big ritual of interaction with the gods.
The other ritual involves toasting the gods, but it also involves celebrating our loved ones and those that have passed.
That's told us.
That's a communal toasting that goes on, usually in three rounds.
One round, everyone there will, as the horn comes to them, make a toast in honor of one of our gods.
The second round, we'll raise horns to our ancestors and those that have passed.
And the third round, it's more of a freestyle round celebrating people that people that we know, people that are important to us, our heroes, often other people who are participating in the symbol.
So it really binds our community both with the living, with those who have passed, and also with our gods.
A lot of mead.
You keep mentioning like raising horns.
Is this mead and horns and you guys take a drink?
Typically?
Typically.
Any other drinks or is it just mead?
It doesn't have to be.
It's typically mead.
I think that's the most celebrated and the one that we kind of go to.
And we also have a lot of people that brew their own mead, which is.
Yeah, I was going to ask that.
Do you guys brew it yourselves or do you buy it?
Yes, we do both.
It really depends.
It's nice if we have somebody who provides us with meat that they've brewed, but we also end up buying quite a bit as well.
But sometimes people will do it with beer or with wine.
Do you have a favorite type of mead?
I do.
And there's kind of two that are running for the top spot and they're both hungry.
There's a spiced pear that was absolutely delicious and then a spiced orange.
I'm a sucker for sweet meads and those are those pretty awesome.
No, those pear and orange sound like they'll be sweet, but not too sweet.
Sounds good.
Yeah, they're nice.
It's hard to get the fruit character out without it being sweet.
Although I do know a guy that made some strawberry mead that was exceptionally dry, but you could like the strawberry flavor was very prominent without with it being a very dry mead.
And I don't know how he did it, but I was really impressed.
How big is I'm saying it wrong?
It's not Asatru.
It's Asatru.
How big is it?
How many locations?
How many countries?
Folk assembly.
We have members in 12 different countries at present.
We have four Hofs.
We are very close and hopefully we'll be announcing our fifth Hoff very soon.
The pictures from Thorshoff in Linden, North Carolina.
Are they usually, are they all former churches?
Yes, with an asterisk.
Three of them are former churches.
The other one started out as a Grange hall.
It's been used as a church over its time.
It was built in 1938.
That's Oden's Hoff.
So it's been a number of different things that started out as a Grange hall for the Grangers.
The other three are former former churches.
So the synagogues turned into churches that turned that they took over pagan temples ages ago.
And then now you're taking the churches back.
It's the idea.
That's the idea.
And so there is a spiritual value to that that's really cool.
They're, you know, That's what was done to us.
There's kind of a poetic, I don't know, a poetic justice to it.
But also, they're buildings that were built for very much the same kind of purpose.
They're built for communal worship.
So they're set up really well.
They typically have, you know, a spot for communal eating, which is a big part of what we do.
We share meals together.
They're set up for, they're set up for just the right thing.
And they're also zoned for the right purpose, which is helpful.
I've got a stained glass image.
It might have been in the AI intro of me with two wolves on each side there.
All these pictures of your gods kind of look like me.
Do you notice that?
Well, okay, so God's here.
This looks like it was a church that used to have a nativity scene too with this little house thing in here.
Well, so yes, but I think it's important.
Yes, our gods look like us and we look like our gods.
We don't believe in this universal faith that God is the gods of all people.
We certainly don't believe that other people's gods are gods.
Our gods look like us because they're our gods and we're their people and we really like it that way.
All of our murals were painted by Svon Harrell, a good friend of mine and a very devout man who's served our gods for a really long time.
And he really does something special when he paints those murals.
I'm fortunate enough, he kind of includes me in the process of painting them.
And I get before and after and progress pictures, but he does a really beautiful job with them.
That's the first one he painted.
Very cool.
Nice.
So you said there's four in the U.S., right?
Yes.
We've got Unzhoff in Brownsville, California.
We've got Thorshoff in Linden, North Carolina, Aldershoff in Murdoch, Minnesota, Jordzhoff in White Springs, Florida.
So have you guys run into any like legal issues with them trying to shut you down or slander attacks or Christians trying to interfere with what you guys are doing?
Anything like that?
Christian interference?
No.
Legal interference?
No.
Dishonest media slander interference and trying to, you know, get the community to turn against us.
Get people scared to join because they label you, right?
Stuff like that.
Yeah, sure.
The media has really gone out of their way to, because again, that's what's sexy is to talk about racism.
They don't talk about our faith.
They do take issue with the fact that we're an ethnically exclusive faith.
And so that is the headline in the story.
And, you know, they call someone racist and it's scary.
They don't call synagogues racist because it's Jews only and they don't want converts, right?
But that's a very special, that's a very special circumstance that they don't criticize pretty much ever.
So it is legal to have a rules don't apply to white people.
Yeah.
So it is legal, though, which you guys are, you're legally allowed to say only Europeans for European faiths.
Certainly, certainly.
And we overtly do.
We only allow heterosexual white people as members of the Astrufol simply.
Okay.
Media does not like that, but we have an absolute religious right to do that.
And those are sincerely held religious beliefs.
They're not just trying to be edgy or trying to be mean spirited.
What are your thoughts on Christianity, Christians today?
I argue with Christians and they say that you're anti-white if you criticize Christianity.
And meanwhile, I think it's anti-white if you hate on European ethnic religions.
It's specifically anti-white if you hate on European ethnic religions by definition.
The strange thing to say about Christianity is the majority of the world's Christians at present are not white folks.
That's a funny thing to say.
I think it was interesting you said that the pictures of our gods look like you.
It's funny that the pictures of the king of the Jews also tend to look like you when it's painted by European people.
Yeah.
And I think that that's part of the delusion.
There's a book called The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity.
And I think it explains a lot.
Our people are very confused and intentionally so.
When Christianity came into Europe to convert people, they had to present, you know, a triumphant warrior saying white Jesus that really has no relation to the Jesus of the gospels.
And so a lot of the things that our people are moved by in Christianity are stolen from our native faiths and the existent culture.
The more people focus on their Middle Eastern biblical Christianity, the less appealing it is for our folk.
But you ask a question like what I think of Christians and what I think of Christians today.
And I think it's two separate things.
Christianity is wrong and it's certainly wrong for our folk.
It is a disloyalty to our people, to our ancestors and to our gods.
But I think that's really different from Christians today.
I think most Christians today don't know that there's an option.
I think most people who would identify as Christians today, it's what their parents were.
It's what their grandparents were.
It's what, you know, again, probably a thousand years worth of their ancestors were doing.
So I don't think it's given a lot of thought.
I think it's kind of a cultural default that a lot of people have.
I think we're getting more and more to a day where there's a lot of atheism, but I'm in my 40s.
And I think people, you know, my generation and previous, it's kind of your default setting.
If you're a person who is religious in the United States, Christianity is kind of what that looks like.
So I think a lot of people are well-meaning.
They just really do not know any better.
I hear the argument from Christians a lot that in order for Europe to survive, in order for Europeans to survive, we need Christianity to unite us and for birth rates.
What do you say to that?
Does your faith have answers to those questions?
I wonder what they mean when they say that.
And I think different camps of people probably say that with birth rates.
I don't think there's any particular enhanced fecundity with Christianity.
Yeah.
It just says, be fruitful and multiply once.
That's about it.
Yeah.
And then all of their priesthood are supposed to, well, the Catholics with their priesthood are largely celibate, if not perversely predatory.
Gay pedos.
Yeah.
No, I think that in any ethnic faith, it's an inherent and very important aspect of their faith to have children continue their bloodline.
So I think there's the birth rate thing makes no sense.
If the idea is to save Europe by repopulating it with other races of people because you feel that Europe's population is declining, I don't think that saves Europe.
I think that destroys Europe.
And I think we see that right now.
Christianity is allowing all of those things.
And, you know, Europe is a culture.
It is an ethnic homeland.
It is a civilization.
It does a lot of things.
It's not just a geography.
And it increasingly becomes just a spot on the map when it is indistinguishable and repopulated by non-European peoples.
And that doesn't save Europe at all.
It does quite the opposite.
Have you seen the movie Midsummer and how they portray a little pagan community?
I have not for the same reason.
I didn't watch that Netflix cartoon, or I try to, you know, avoid the pop culture portrayal of our faith because it's usually blasphemous at best.
Yeah, it's, I think, directed and written by a Jewish guy from New York, and he makes these pagans up in Sweden look like psychopaths, like murderous psychopaths.
I'm surprised you hadn't seen it, even just for research purposes, to understand the propaganda that's being put out against what you're doing.
No, because I know it's there, and I get, you know, people tell me about this stuff.
The effort is constant to demonize increasingly anything that's good and healthy and makes sense, especially if it benefits traditionally minded white people.
And I know I think a lot of folks are waking up to that.
But no, I try to, I don't know.
I try to keep my head out of that and focus on building and on what we're trying to do because it's really easy to get bogged down, you know, trying to look at all the points of negativity.
Well, I just find it funny that like the only big budget movie about anything pagan is like a horror film that depicts them in a really nasty way.
Another question.
We get that.
Yeah.
We get barbarous stuff to it.
It is either overtly they're evil and bad or they're barbarous savages.
And that's not an accurate reflection either.
Our folk were absolutely very civilized people.
They were the civilizing people.
They were known for their technological advancement, their cleanliness.
Yeah, so the Hollywood portrayal is never something I want to spend a lot of time consuming.
Yeah.
Wasn't it Tacitus wrote about the Northernmen?
I'm not sure what he called them.
He wrote about the Germanic tribes.
Germanic tribes, right?
And he spoke well of them, right?
Do you know exactly what he said?
Something about their families.
They were monogamous.
What was it?
What did he say about it?
He said a lot of things.
One of the big themes of Germania by Tacitus was their moral uprightness compared to Rome at the time.
He spoke about their tendency to be moral in their sexual relations, of being hippified by a certain amount of monogamy and by a loyalty.
He talked a lot about their virtues of shunning and being appalled by both cowardice and homosexuality and that not being tolerated there.
Yeah, their moral uprightness is put in contrast with Roman Edenism of the time.
What about the Viking show?
Do you have an opinion on that?
Did you watch any of that?
You think that accurately describes the faith?
I think that shows terrible.
I did watch some of that show early on.
It was, you know, it was kind of cool to see at the time, like the first episode, I remember it was kind of cool to see our gods portrayed in media in that way.
In the very beginning, there were some messages from visions of Odin and his ravens, and it was kind of cool.
But it very, very quickly just became silly and reinforcing ridiculous stereotypes, and there was like gay stuff.
They were trying to denigrate it, clearly.
Yes, absolutely.
And everybody was, again, they were gross, wearing like roadkill shoulder pelts.
Everybody is, you know, wearing everything's black.
And, you know, this like, again, it reinforced that everybody's barbarous.
That wasn't the case.
The archaeology tells us it wasn't the case.
Contemporary accounts tell us it wasn't the case.
Let's get the power chats turned on.
I saw a few questions probably came in here.
I'll get this screen shared so you can hear those come through.
And let's do this.
There we go.
All right.
We should be able to.
Oops.
Here's some of those coming in now.
Usually just takes a second, 45 minutes.
Okay.
We'll get some questions here.
What do you guys have to ask?
Matthew here.
God, I hate calling you Matthew.
I want to call you some cool, like, Viking, Viking name.
Oh, here we go.
Okay.
Lane sent $5.
Hail, Adam.
Thank you.
And again, Lane sent $5.
Hail, Adam.
Thank you.
Michael 57 to sent $20 on Rumble.
Hail, Adam.
Hail, Matthew.
Hail, our folk, and hail, our gods.
At work, so I can't chat much, but we'll be listening.
Good to see.
On the stream.
A lot of good exposure.
Yeah, happy to happy to hear what you guys are doing.
Thank you, Indominally.
Going to have to save this one for replay, but hail to both of you.
Hail our gods.
Hail, our people.
Prussian Buffalo sent $20 on Rumble.
Hail the gods.
Glad to see a positive folk building message here, gentlemen.
Down with Yahweh.
Cornpop the bad dude once sent $5 on Rumble.
When I was a kid, after work in the field, we'd light a fire and jump over it.
Had no idea until now that was a pagan ritual of purification and connection to the power of the son.
Do you guys do that one?
Well, yeah, that's something we at different times during the year.
We'll do the jumping over the fire, specifically around Austra to, like you said, as cleansing and purification to start the new year.
Wow.
People have to sign a waiver before they do that one.
It sounds a little dangerous.
It depends on how big the fire is.
I see that getting dangerous, but no, we've never had a never had a problem.
Okay.
Just like roasting marshmallows-size fire, and then you don't have to worry about it too much.
I got it.
That's interesting.
Any other cool stuff like that that you guys do?
All kinds of other cool stuff.
Trying to think of what's the one in these pictures where you have the strings or the ribbons and go around the thing in the center there.
Maypole.
We dance around the maypole.
And depends if we have an evenly split audience of male and female, but typically ladies are going one way, the men are going a different way.
And you proceed around the circle going over, under, over, under, weaving, weaving the ribbons around the maypole.
And it makes a really cool pattern.
It's literally weaving all folk together and binding us a community.
And it's certainly, you know, all about that fertility and that fecundity that's exemplified by that maypole.
You know what irritates me?
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Oh, no, he's fine.
You know what irritates me is when I see Christians online talking talking nasty about Europeans' ancestral faiths and they celebrate Jesus conquering the pagan gods.
They celebrate the Judaization of Europe and the world through Jesus.
And the original goal of the Jewish Messiah conquering all the nations and all the world was the Jewish objective of their Messiah.
And then now the Christians act like, especially the so-called pro-white Christians, act like, how are they so blind that they don't see that they're advancing like the Jewish goals of the God of Israel, the God of the Hebrews and the chosen people, conquering all of the world.
And then they celebrate, the rabbis celebrate Jesus conquering the pagan world.
And then the Christians celebrate Yahweh conquering the pagan world.
How do they not see it?
We have a tremendous capacity to do absurd mental gymnastics to avoid things that are hard.
And we've seen that take a lot of really strange manifestations in that particular struggle.
There's a lot of, you know, there's like the British Israelite thing.
There's, you know, let's pretend, you know, we were Jews.
There's all kinds of, again, there's all kinds of really saying Jesus was Aryan.
Jesus was a white, blue-eyed, Aryan child.
I understand.
He was really a white guy and he wandered in and he wasn't the guy that they made the extensive lineage of back to David.
Hello.
This is Aubrey.
Hey, Aubrey.
Yes.
Little princess there, little Viking princess with her wand, huh?
There you go.
Yeah, it amazes me.
And I think that a lot of people don't know.
And I think, again, they don't put up a picture of a Jewish rabbi, and that's not who you're talking about on Sunday.
There's a picture of, you know, a white Jesus, and the imagery is all European people, and they try to make it a cultural norm.
As everybody does, as you got the super swole Korean Jesus, you got various, you know, Al-Sharpedin-haired-looking black Jesus.
Christianity tends to do that wherever it goes because people naturally want to gravitate to the faith of their people in something that's ethnically congruent.
And I think that it's just easy to pretend there's not a big Jewish objective to Christianity.
It is disappointing when it comes from people that are supposedly very aware of what we're doing.
You make me want to go get my daughter to show off all these young, young Viking princesses.
She found this crown and her wand, I don't know, in the back of the closet somewhere today.
So it's this new discovery this morning.
My two daughters have the same wand and the same princess outfits.
I got two girls also, girls.
Congratulations on that.
Yeah, people, people are silly, but I think that those people are also fertile ground to come around.
I think they do what's easy.
And one of the uncomfortable things is getting out of your comfort zone is very hard.
And we often don't want to admit that, but it's much easier for you to pretend and go along and get along with your family or with things that you're used to than it is to take the courageous stance and carve a new path into the future.
But if some of us don't do it, a number of us making the difficult choices makes it that much easier for our children, for our daughters to not have to deal with those difficult choices in the future.
Well, that's another question I wanted to ask.
Can you contrast for us the difference between how pagan religions, Nordic religions view women compared to Christianity?
Thank you.
Sure.
There's not a there is like a very old Middle Eastern war on women.
And it's, I don't know, it's funny odd, and it's certainly concerning when you go back.
There's a there's a lot of mistreatment and like a blame.
Yeah, but there's like this pathological need to, in a very paranoid way, like be mean spirited to women.
And that's certainly not present in Alcatru.
Gender roles are natural and understandable, and there's no such thing as equality.
We all understand that.
Everybody's different, has different strengths and Weaknesses.
There's no need to have to rigidly enforce that by some kind of fatwa or making them walk around in, you know, garbage bags or whatever else.
There was always a understanding of the special sacred things of women amongst our ancestors.
And one of the things in Alcatru is understanding their special connection to divinity.
Women have a they're different.
They're made different.
They are imbued with different strengths and weaknesses.
One of those is they connect with the gods in a really special and different way.
They're able to, I don't know, access spiritual things in a unique way that's always been celebrated and beneficial.
So there's none of that inherent anti-women stance.
That's good.
Yeah, I see a lot of amongst Christians and Catholics online today, a lot of very anti-women sentiments.
Maybe some of it originates with blaming Eve for the Genesis story of taking the apple and tempting Adam or whatever.
They do have Mother Mary and stuff also.
There's the don't speak in church.
There's they got to cover up.
I think in Christianity, there's a sense of like man is made in the image of God and he's the leader and that everything else is like subordinate to them, including including women in a degree.
Another question I had is most of the people that join, number one, how do you join?
Do you have a like a conversion process for former Christians?
Are a lot of people that join?
Are they former Christians?
Are they former atheists?
How does that breakdown look?
That's interesting.
Got two questions there.
So how does one join?
There's no immediate expectation that someone's going to go from not believing in the gods to having some deep and profound enduring loyalty to them.
That's kind of an absurd expectation to go there in an instant.
So joining the Austral Folk Assembly, you have to, as I mentioned before, be a heterosexual white person and you have to want to believe in the ICER.
And we want to encourage you along that path to naturally build that relationship with our gods.
So there's not a great deal involved in joining.
There's the other thing that comes to it is it's not really a conversion.
In a way, it's a reversion back to what's natural and what you inherently are by default as an Aryan man or woman.
Coming home, we describe it as coming home to Osatru because that really is your spiritual default appropriate setting for our folk.
So it's not like you're converting something.
It's like you're casting off the false religions or the foreign things that have burdened you and you're coming back to a place of wholeness and integration with yourself, your culture, and your gods.
So it's much more of a homecoming than it is some kind of a conversion process.
Yeah, when you join, you're invited to get involved and talk with other members and attend events and start participating in that gift cycle.
Biggest thing we want is that you're have an open mind and an open heart when you participate there and you allow for something special to happen.
And when you do that, you know, again, there's elements involved.
The participant needs to be open to it, but the gods on the other end need to do their part to facilitate that as well.
And ideally, our Gothar can be a bridge to help enable those interactions to take place.
So that happens.
You were asking if most people come from Christianity or most people come from atheism.
I think we've seen that change, you know, certainly over our lifetimes.
Depends on what part of the country and what part of the world.
We've seen a big increase in people coming from atheism.
I'd say that, you know, 30 years ago, most of our people were raised Christian and came over from, if not a regularly church attending family, at least a family that was, you know, much like my family, identified as Christians, whether they participated in their faith or not.
But more and more, you see people coming over from atheism or at least agnosticism.
You mentioned your faith.
What background are you?
What ethnicity are you?
American.
So my ancestors have been here for a really long time.
Most of my ancestry comes from the British Isles.
In fact, the most recent of my ancestors to come to the Americas was a Swissman and his French wife.
But most of my ancestry before that is from the British Isles, mostly English, but some Scotsmen in there.
Flavil is flavoul English?
Flavil?
Flavelle is a, yeah, it's like Norman French.
It's an English name by, you know, since 1066, I guess.
So, so what's the vetting process then?
How do you know?
Do you guys just judge if somebody seems European enough to join?
Or how does that work?
And also, I saw a super chat.
Do you allow not, I don't even want to ask this, but how do you know if they're homosexual or not?
Just what they say.
Scouts honor?
The lisp.
The list.
Yeah.
Do they have a lisp?
That's funny.
What's their fashion sense?
Here's the thing.
There's a certain amount of good faith effort that we don't run down all the things.
We do ask you to affirm when you join, you know, you a heterosexual white person that's not involved in an interracial relationship and you check the box and we trust you.
And then if we have reason to not trust you, then we'll remove you from membership if you've been dishonest on that.
We also run a background check to make sure, one, that you're not a sex offender and where you're certainly not a registered sex offender.
And we also run a check to make sure that, you know, your criminality, if any, hasn't been shocking in its nature.
And that's mostly crimes of cruelty.
Our biggest concerns are safety.
There's a lot of things that you can understand in the right circumstance.
There's cruelty towards people under your power, cruelty to animals, cruelty to elders, cruelty to women or children that aren't justifiable under any circumstance and speak of a dangerous mental defect.
Is it true that people have like accused you guys?
Is any Truth to it that there's like a prison gang is a satru in prisons, something like that.
Yeah, I think that's a stigma that is kind of situational.
There is a lot of Alcatrue going on in prisons.
It's become kind of the default in a lot of institutions for all their white prisoners.
I went and I did some prison ministry in a desert prison in Susanville, California.
And it was expressed to me that 100% of their white inmates were Alcatru.
And I was given reason to believe that that was enforced.
So I think that that kind of happens.
We all know that in prisons, racial groups tend to be.
I've heard there's a lot of Christian identity that British Israelism also was in prison.
So I haven't heard that.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I think that it depends on the institution you're in.
I do know that there's, you know, a lot of people come home to Alcatrue from being incarcerated, but I don't think that's the majority of, you know, certainly our participants.
That's not reflected in our membership percentages at all on people who, you know, have former convictions.
What are the religions of the non-whites in prison?
I wonder.
Christian?
Jesus?
They all believe in Jesus.
They all find Jesus in prison, huh?
A lot of them do.
I know that there's a lot of black Muslims in prison.
I know that that's a big thing amongst black population.
It's hard to say.
I went there.
The chaplain at the facility I went to was, I think he was a Scotsman, actually, but he was a Catholic priest.
And he, his entire, you know, his entire congregation there is all of the Latinos.
So not sure how it always breaks down.
I've been fortunate in my life that it's never been a place I've found myself other than when I've gone in to minister there a couple of times.
Well, that's interesting.
Here, we got a couple more super chat questions here or power chat questions.
Let me get a share screen so you can hear those again, get those back turned on.
It usually just takes a second.
You said you weren't Christian growing up, right?
Okay, I wasn't.
Hold on.
Yes, we were nominally.
Hold on, hold on.
$20.
Is it possible for a former homosexual to join the Ifa?
Another one's coming through, and you can answer that.
I think we kind of did that already.
Here was another one.
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Hail from Jerdshoff.
Good to see you here.
Mr. Flavellin, hope to see you in Texas one day.
Hail the gods.
Hail the Ifa.
Hail our folk and hail our ancestors.
What's that word he said?
Nordshoff.
Oh, another one.
Here we go.
Corn pop.
The bad dude once sent $5 on Rumble.
Viking women went on raids with men.
When the men went on a raid, he made a public event of handing her the keys to the house, and she was in charge of everything while her husband was on a raid.
Crazy Pill sent $10 legendary stream.
Phrase Goy Shiak, hail Aesir.
Thank you.
Oh, Thunderstorm.
Thunderstorm, $9 cent $10 on Rumble.
Been ethnic faith since I was a kid, learned it from my grandma.
Thank you both for your work and other people keeping ethnic European traditions alive.
Thank you.
All right.
What was that word that we saw there?
I think he was saying Njorbshoff.
Texas is part of the Njorbshof district.
Yeah.
And that's the Hoff that's located in White Springs, Florida.
You asked me right before we went in that if I was raised Christian.
I suppose loosely, culturally, my parents were, you know, would have described themselves as Christian, but we never went to church growing up.
There was a time my aunt and my cousins were Jehovah's Witnesses.
And in high school and, you know, maybe the first two years out of high school, I tried to be a Jehovah's Witness and I tried hard to get it right.
But one of the things I appreciate about the witnesses is they take out all of the European elements of their Christianity and try to keep it exclusively Middle Eastern and biblical.
And it really makes that stark contrast to where it was apparent to me that this wasn't for us and wasn't a noble faith for our people.
Also on the question, somebody asked, is it possible for a former homosexual for male homosexuals?
I don't think there's such a thing as a former homosexual.
I think that's a bridge that you can't uncross.
Only with Jesus.
Only you can pray the gay way with Jesus only, not with Thor.
Yeah, I don't trust that.
I don't trust.
I think at that point, something is broken psychologically where you're willing to engage in that way that kind of makes you forever a little bit of a danger to be around.
One of the bigger things, aside from, you know, it's icky, is it is disproportionately predatory to children.
It's one of the, unfortunately, one of the mental ailments of our folk that is passed on, for lack of a better term, vampirically to where it tends to be gay men, youth, boys.
Hornpop the bad dude one cent $5 on Rumble.
I have a friend who is interested in getting into religious citizens.
Sorry, another super chat came through.
Did that interrupt you?
Could you hear that?
I didn't hear it.
I saw text on the screen, but I wasn't able to read it fast enough.
Yeah, no, I skipped it, so it wouldn't interrupt your talk in there.
All good.
Okay, next question.
What is the belief in an afterlife?
Is it Valhalla?
So I think that's one really, really select circumstance that people kind of harken to.
Brother Baby sent $5 and talked about because it's a particularly cool and special outcome.
But no, I think in general, our afterlife is we go to be with our ancestors.
In the very rare occasion that somebody is completely of no redeeming value, then those people are their souls get dissolved and, you know, I guess recycled for lack of a better word on Maostrand.
But for most of our ancests, or for most of us who pass, we go to our ancestors, unwelcomed by them, are judged by them.
And then for the select few that the gods choose, they can, you know, elevate those who pass to something more.
And that's often depicted as, you know, inviting them to the halls of the gods, Inviting them to, you know, Valhall being the prime example I think most people are familiar with.
And, you know, the all-father can choose which of us he wants to invite there or not.
Yeah, I think that's the rarity.
The norm is you meeting with your ancestors and returning to the halls of the ancestors.
But what if some of our ancestors are in heaven with Jesus and the rest of the world?
No, it's just a joke.
I don't think Jewish rabbis can like pluck our people out of our out of their afterlife and move them to the Hebrew afterlife.
I don't think it works like that.
I agree.
I don't think so.
You mentioned Aryan a couple times.
What does that mean to you guys?
It means noble.
And it's really important because it's a self-identifier.
It's a racial identifier of our people.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
It certainly has gone out of fashion and is taboo to use in a lot of circles after World War II.
But it's a very ancient word that people defined ourselves by our nobility.
It's, you know, that was a very important defining factor for our folk and it's something to aspire to.
But certainly it means all, you know, all white people, all Indo-European, Cajun people.
So more on that, like the lore, you believe Europeans are all came from like an Aryan civilization?
Sure.
And we see that with archaeology and migratory patterns and language development, we see all of those things.
And our gods are real.
Our gods aren't social, you know, constructs or literary characters.
That being the case, they've been with our people since our people existed.
And that certainly ties back to our points of commonality and our common origins.
And these are the same gods that have been with us since us existed.
So where did the Aryan civilization originate?
That's always been a debated question because you thought you traced the linguistics and the archaeology back as far as you know.
I think likely in the Bacchus Mountains somewhere tends to be the running theory.
But I think there's a lot to be said for a hyperborean polar origin that really hold on.
You said polar.
Did you say polar origin?
I did say polar.
What do you mean by that?
I mean snow people, ice age people.
Yeah, kind of.
There's a lot of theories on that.
And then again, this is not a pennant of the Astru Folk Assembly, but when you start going in the way back, the lore takes on a lot of very northern imagery and a lot of imagery that implies it being in the Arctic, a very early origin point.
And I mean, that's a fascinating thing to wander on and to think on.
And I don't think you have to believe that, but it's interesting.
And there's a book by Baal Tillak called, I think it's called Arctic Homeland in the Vez that talks about the most ancient Indian lore, talking about a lot of those Hyperborean mythos.
So I've heard the term we was jeets because like the Aryans are related to India.
Have you seen that?
Like, can you straighten that out at all?
The idea that we're ancient Indians or something?
Sure.
You know, it's very easy for our people to see Central American, very obviously Incan or Aztec people and, you know, say you wouldn't confuse them with Spaniards.
Even though they speak a Spanish language and a lot of their civilization comes from Spain, they're not Spaniards.
And I think that's a really similar thing.
Again, there's during the Aryan migrations of our people, some of our people went into the Andus Valley.
Some of our people went across the steppe.
Some of our people took our language and our most ancient lore and you'd see it take root there.
And that's why you see a lot of linguistic similarities.
But when you intermix with the indigenous population for thousands of years, the result of that ceases being it's one of those you asked earlier, you know, like, you know, if you're, if you're white or you determine eligibility, but we all know that we see one another and we recognize us versus not us.
I know it's not the scientific answer that some people, you know, want to get out the skull calipers or whatever, but realistically, our people have always been able to identify this is one of us, this is not one of us.
And I think that, you know, mammalian creatures tend to be able to do that pretty well.
We don't try to get up in everybody's business or overly intrusive, but does this person look like they're one of us or not?
And that really is the standard.
Okay, a couple more super chats here, and then we'll get it get us closed out.
If I could just fix that up and shoot.
Okay, there it is.
Get this back turned on.
I saw a few more come through.
Appreciate everybody for the support today.
Hope you enjoyed the show.
We'll get these questions and then find out where we're here where we can learn more and follow Matthew and what he's doing here.
All right, they should be coming through any second.
There it is.
Pebble in the pond 2020 sent $20 on Rumble.
Hail the God.
Hail our folk.
Thank you, Adam, for an amazing guest.
Yeah.
By popular request, glad to finally have it.
Get it done.
Watchers sent $30.
I recently stumbled upon Arianity on Odyssey and on their website.
On the surface, it sounds a bit like a poisoned pill, but reading the material, it seems relatively based.
Great interview.
Might join the AFA one of these days.
Best of luck.
Thank you, Watcher.
Got a question about Wotanism as well.
Is that something you guys do?
Is that the same God?
Different thing?
What do you think?
Yes.
Okay.
So there is a tendency amongst our folk to everybody wants to do their own thing and call it something slightly different because I think as a people, we have trouble conforming to stuff.
And I get that.
I think it also prevents us from building lasting institutions and being a significant group of people accomplishing significant things.
It all depends on who You're talking to on how to answer that question because there's certain groups of people that would brand what they do as Votanism, and there's other people who might just use the term for a different reason.
It really depends kind of when to.
That was a certainly a very the formal usage of that term tended to be people who are very racially aware, very racially engaged.
I think a lot of people who tended to gravitate to that expression of Aus of Truth through a prison background doesn't mean it's wrong or it's bad, but I think that the increased need to call all of those different things they want to do something else makes it harder for people to figure out who we are and what we do.
Yeah, fundamentally, that is a form of Alcatru.
So, you Wotan is one of the gods in your faith.
Yeah, that's the Germanic name for Odin.
Okay.
All right.
I saw we had one more in from Liam.
A good question that I don't know the answer to, and I'm glad you asked it, Liam.
He says, Well, we'll hit it on the screen.
Thank you, White Stag.
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What does the name of Santa mean?
Great guest in show.
So, Ausatru is a word that combines two old Norse words.
The Iceer individually and I see her is an ow.
So it means what you cut out there.
A what?
What is it?
So an individual member of the ICER is an ous.
So Ausatrue is loyal to the Iceer crew.
What is the Iceer?
That's God.
The Iceer are the tribe of gods that are the gods of our folk.
Tribe of gods.
Yeah.
So it's all the gods.
Okay.
The pantheon of our gods are collectively the iceer.
Okay.
So ausatrue is troth to the iceer.
The true part is the root of our word true or truth, the same phonetic word, but it implies true in the sense of trusted or loyalty.
So loyal to the iceer.
There's some thought to suggest that it means belief.
But again, belief goes back to trust.
And that's one of the big points.
So it's not just, you know, we believe that they exist.
It's that not only do we believe in their existence, but we actively are in a relationship of loyalty to them.
Got it.
Cool.
That's interesting.
The same root word true is in both of them.
What is this whole long word here, too?
That's on the Wikipedia.
Let me try this.
Asatra trufilagid.
Truarfelagid.
Can you say that word?
Or fellagid.
And I hope I got it close to right.
That is the Icelandic organization.
And it means like the Ausatru Fellowship, roughly, I believe.
Association.
Yeah.
Okay.
Are you still connected to the Iceland one, to the Iceland branch?
Have you been to Iceland?
I have not been to Iceland.
I have been to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but I've never made it to Iceland yet.
We don't have any formal relationship with those people.
As I mentioned before, they no longer, as an organization, believe in the gods.
And I think their existence at this point is kind of blasphemous.
But I'm sure there's great members of that group that just happen to be people in Iceland who are sincere.
Certainly their founders.
We'd celebrate two of their founders as official heroes with days of remembrance that we honor as heroes of our folk.
But in their current state, we don't have any relationship with them.
They're too woke, right?
Among other things.
That's one of the big problems.
That's some of the things that Christians say sometimes, too.
They're extremely too woke, and they've been able to become that because they're no longer actively religious.
Once you stop having that core of sincere belief, they're answering to the media and not answering to the gods.
Okay, another question that I had that I'm curious about.
I know in the Northernman movie and in the Viking show, they depict the pagans as doing like magic mushroom rituals.
Do you guys have any ritual like that?
Has that ever been a thing?
Or what's the deal with that?
No, because those sort of hallucinogens are illegal in most of the countries where we have membership.
And we don't encourage our people to engage in illegal activity.
So, no, we certainly don't have a okay.
Let me ask it again.
If we were in a place, if you were in a place where it wasn't illegal, would that be part of the faith?
Would it be part of the faith for everybody?
I don't know.
Is there a place for it in the practice of Ausa True if it were legal?
Yes, I could absolutely see there being a place for that.
Is there anything in that in like some of the books you mentioned earlier?
Do they mention any of that?
There's a lot of thoughts that there's allusions to it in certain things, not so much overtly.
I think that there's a there are a lot of different theories.
There's so much smoke that it's hard to believe there's not a little bit of fire to it, but no, not overtly in that kind of an exact way.
There's long been speculation that that's part of the concept of the berserker gang or the trance that the berserkers would go into.
There's some talk in, you know, distant, I guess, tangential relationship that in India, the Soma or their sacred drink had some of those elements to it.
But again, a lot of that's theory and speculation and it's kind of a taboo thing because it is illegal in most of the places where our folk find ourselves.
I understand.
Okay, a couple more super chats in here before we close it down.
And I apparently missed one.
I'll try to find that.
Here's Pebble in the Pond.
Hopefully this one plays correctly.
Do you guys sing?
I hated singing in church, by the way.
So I hope the answer is no.
So, no, but I wish we did.
Some people have their own.
Some people have made songs and some people have made some really cool songs that they may sing or perform for us.
No, we don't sing like $20 on Rumble.
Can anyone go to the Hoofs even if they are not?
Hold on.
Hold on, Matt.
Sorry, the thing popped on.
Can anyone go to Hofs even if they're not members?
$20 on Rumble.
Can anyone go to the Hoofs even if they are not members?
Sure.
We would like to have people come check out what underscore stacks on Rumble.
I'd like necessarily be a member to attend one of our Hoffs and come check things out.
Sorry.
Sorry, he's almost done to your daughter.
We're trying to close it out here.
Hold on.
Brother B, I'm trying to find what you lack.
Okay, do you believe in reincarnation or astrology?
So that's a complex one.
As far as one-for-one reincarnation, no, I don't think that's typically a thing.
I think that the gods can do what they want.
So I hesitate to say it's not possible, but I do think it's not typical.
There are elements of our soul, though, that are absolutely passed on as inheritance.
And sometimes those take the form of memory or seeing traits of an ancestor re-emerge in their descendants.
We'd see elements of the soul that, in a way, do get reincarnated or passed down as a spiritual inheritance.
But the one-for-one, like, ah, I was Napoleon.
I was whatever.
That's certainly not the norm how that works.
As far as astrology goes, don't not believe in it.
I don't think it's an overtly necessary osatru thing.
And I don't have, you know, I don't know enough about it.
I certainly don't want to.
So there's no like stars or sun.
Is there sun worship?
I saw like the what's the sun symbol I saw behind the guy there?
Yeah, the solar cross.
There is a degree of sun worship, not so much the sun as you know, the physical sun, but the goddess with dominion over the sun, soul or sunna, we do give her worship and acknowledgement.
We view her as one of the heavenly wardens.
It's not kind of the same level of closeness with the ICER, but yeah, we do give her worship and honor, especially around midsummer.
Cool.
Yeah, at least the sun's real better than worshiping a fake mythical Jewish rabbi.
Here's the one I missed.
Sorry.
I think I've missed Corn Pop also.
We'll do that one first.
Corn pop the bad dude one cent $5 on Rumble.
I have a friend who is interested in getting into the religion and is in Houston.
LMK, if I can get Matthew in touch with him and maybe he could start something in Houston if you want to expand.
Get in touch with them.
Where can they get in touch with you?
So website for the AFA is runestone.org.
And that's going to have contact information for everybody.
Me personally, Matt Lavelle, F-L-A-V-E-L.
That runestone.org is my web is my email address.
I'd be really happy if anybody wanted to reach out.
And yeah, we would love to have growth everywhere.
We would certainly love to have growth in the Houston area.
Cool.
I think I saw another super chat here that I missed.
Thunderstorm.
Thunderstorm 9 cent $10 on Rumble.
Been ethnic faith since I was a kid, learned it from my grandma.
Thank you both for your work and other people keeping ethnic European traditions alive.
Yeah.
Thanks for keeping it alive.
Seriously.
And here's the Brother B one I missed.
Brother B D sent $5 on Rumble.
I'm down with folklore and honoring our ancestors, but as a former Christian, I'm not down with worshiping a god.
Would I still be accepted?
Yeah, are you accepted if you don't think the gods are real?
Or are you worshiping the gods in the same way that a Christian worships Jesus?
I mean, it's hard to say in the same way.
Yes, we're absolutely worshiping the gods and any conventional use of the term worshiping.
And no, I mean, I can appreciate that, but we are a religious body.
We are a church.
You can't be a part of that.
You can't be loyal to the ISIR if you don't believe the ICER exists.
But what if you just European, you want to have a community, you want to replace the void that Christianity left, but you don't really believe that they're real, then they're not allowed still?
Well, yeah, because we're a serious church.
Of course, you're not allowed to be loyal to the ICER if you don't believe in them.
But as I said earlier, if you don't know and you want to give it a try and you are wanting to believe in them, then sure, we don't expect that people are going to magically have a belief out of nowhere, but you can't be firm not believing in them and then still participating.
So believing that they're like the one for the other.
So believing that they're like symbols or metaphors or archetypes, that's not good enough.
No, because that's not believing in them or worshiping them as gods.
And that's the thing.
We're not a cultural organization.
We're not a club.
We're absolutely a church.
We're a legitimate religion that worships our gods.
And all those things go together, all those things that people want.
But without the religion part, the religion part is what makes all those other things work.
Got it.
Got it.
Cool.
Well, this was very interesting talk, Matt.
I'm glad to finally have somebody from Asatru come on.
And Runestone, you said it was Runestone.org.
Runestone.org is the website.
And if you guys want to follow on Twitter, this is the count to follow, folk assembly, folk asatru, asatrue.
I keep getting it wrong.
I'm sorry.
You need those little dots on there to highlight the A. That would make more sense.
That's the second A is the one you highlight.
Asatru, right?
No, so it's Al Satru.
The little apostrophes go over the A and the U. Okay, that helps.
That'll, that's what I need.
I'll get it right.
I've been saying it wrong forever.
So you're fine.
You're fine.
All right.
Appreciate you having me on.
It's an honor to be on the show and to get to talk to your audience.
I appreciate everybody who has asked that I get to come on and help me get the opportunity and everybody who's been in the chat today.
And thank you guys.
It's been great talking to you.
Cool.
Cool.
And thank you, everybody that supported and donated.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Clip it up.
Share it out.
I will be back tomorrow with another new stream.
Thank you to our guests.
Thank you to you all.
Everybody have a nice night.
And I will see you guys again tomorrow.
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