AFA UPDATE

A PROJECT OF THE ASATRU FOLK ASSEMBLY

Issue 156

April 20, 2012

Contact email: afa@runestone.org

Please tell your friends about AFA Update and suggest they subscribe! They
can do so by going to:

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WHERE TO FIND THE ASATRU FOLK ASSEMBLY ONLINE:

AFA website - http://runestone.org

Asatru Rising podcast - http://asatrurising.podbean.com

Our videos on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/smcnallen

The AFA blog at - http://asatruupdate.blogspot.com

AFA MySpace at - http://www.myspace.com/asatruupdate

Follow the AFA on Twitter - http://twitter.com, username AsatruAFA.

The AFA mission statement: "to practice, promote, and further evolve
the religion of Asatru, thus forging it into a powerful and effective tool
for building a better world."

AFA MEMBERSHIP - If you like what you see here, and agree with the
Declaration of Purpose as found on our web site at http://runestone.org
...send us a membership application!

AFA NEWS

AFA Midsummer Just Keeps Getting Better and Better!

News since the last issue concerning AFA Midsummer: Folkbuilder Bryan Wilton
is coming all the way from Oklahoma to give a talk on the Heavener
Runestone. His presentation at last year's AFA-sponsored Ostara event,
actually held in Heavener Runestone State Park, was outstanding; no one who
sees it at Midsummer will forget it. Another great bit of news is that
clergy student Matt Flavel will perform his public blot as the final
requirement for his clergy curriculum, and of course his ordination is also
on the schedule!

As we mentioned two weeks ago, we're featuring music by Robert Taylor and
Nicholas Tesluk of Changes as well as Lasher Keen...and tons of classes and
talks on everything from Asatru communities to spiritual practices to
choosing names for our children.

Disaster Preparedness - the AFA Family Safety Program!

As we've said so many times before, the AFA is not "just a national
organization" - it is a community of like-minded men and women. As such, we
try to take care of each other...which brings us to the question of disaster
preparedness and family safety.

The last few days have seen unprecedented tornadoes and hail throughout a
wide swath of the central United States. Recent months have witnessed other
tornado activity throughout that area, and down into Texas. Wildfires
ravaged much of Texas last November. Other areas have also suffered, and we
can expect more radical weather in the months and years to come. We've been
spared Katrina-scale hurricanes lately, but we'll see those again, sooner or
later.

According to a just-released survey, 82 percent of Americans report that
they personally experienced one or more types of extreme weather or a
natural disaster in the past year. Here are some more figures -

- 35 percent of all Americans report that they were personally harmed
either a great deal or a moderate amount by one or more of these extreme
weather events in the past year.

- Over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has
been getting worse – rather than better – by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52%
vs. 22%).

- Only 36 percent of Americans have a disaster emergency plan that all
members of their family know about or an emergency supply kit in their home
(37%).

With AFA members spread all across the US and around the world, it's just a
matter of time before some of us become victims. We need to start planning
our response to disasters now, rather than later. We do not want to find out
that some AFA member died in a tornado or tsunami and that we did not know
about it for six months! It is imperative that we be able to come to the aid
of threatened AFA members everywhere.

Our answer to these threats will be the "AFA Family Safety Program."

Here's how it will work: AFA Folkbuilders, by the very nature of their jobs,
have a firm handle on where each AFA member in his or her region lives - the
town, an address, and multiple ways of contacting them. Upon learning of
widespread natural or human disasters in their region, Folkbuilders will
attempt to contact members who live in the affected area and will find out
what the AFA can do to help. AFA Clergy will be intimately involved in this
process, offering spiritual and emotional support to victims.

A Family Safety Response Director will be appointed for the AFA as a whole.
He or she will, along with Folkbuilders, be alert for threats across the
country and will coordinate with Folkbuilders to mobilize the AFA's
resources as needed. The Director will also encourage AFA members to make
their own preparedness plans and to have emergency food and supplies on hand
for their families.

FROM STEVE

Does Asatru Need New Myths?

The question arose on an Asatru group recently - does our religion need new
myths? Are the old ones irrelevant to modern men and women?

I think it's good to ask questions like this. We need to challenge our own
ideas from time to time, and there's a lot of room for free inquiry in a
faith such as Asatru. So, when the suggestion of new myths was posed to me,
I gave it serious thought.

Here's where I ended up: We can make up new stories, but we can not make up
new myths.

Myths are not casual tales, composed on the spot to make a moral point or to
entertain or to amuse. They are not the product of rational thought,
consciously imposed on a particular subject matter - in this case, the
activities of the Gods. They speak the deep language of the unconscious, and
the more profound levels of our own being respond to them (Often entirely
bypassing conscious awareness as they do so). The mythic motifs found in our
lore are often consistent all across the Indo-European world, and in some
cases, even beyond. They are created, not by the conscious mind, but by the
unconscious - one could even say, by the Gods - and then emerge to
consciousness. Deliberately composing modern myths would completely reverse
this process.

This doesn't mean the old stories can't be paraphrased. Accurate re-tellings
retain the essence of the myth, and also stimulate an interest in the
original manuscripts. But modern, consciously-devised sermons posing as
myths do not have this power.

There is more to genuine myths than meets the eye. Both the Poetic Edda and
the Prose Edda contain many layers. Take "Havamal," for example - in
English, "The Words of the High One." On the surface, most of the poem is
made up of nothing more than prudent advice for living. However, there are
deeper aspects to even this apparently straightforward poem, elements that
as Jim Chisholm has shown are meant as a guidebook for higher spiritual
evolution. Similarly, the story of Odin's mead theft in the Prose Edda
contains specific information on techniques for attaining god-like
consciousness and power. To cast aside this hidden material, or to claim
that a modern homily-motivate myth is as good as the original material -
well, that would be a colossal mistake.

Asatru's myths were written for several purposes beyond setting good
examples for daily behavior. We've seen that "Havamal" is not only a
practical guide for behavior, but also an encoded handbook for higher
evolution. What about that other pillar of the Poetic Edda, "Voluspa," or
"The Prophecy of the Seeress?" Scholars tell us it is a "didactic poem"
designed to teach the lore, but I think it is just what the title says - a
prophecy, a vision of things to come, considered so important that it was
specifically included in the Poetic Edda for our benefit. No pseudo-myth we
might compose can come close to any of this.

In short, here's my position: We can't make up myths to replace the old ones
or to put alongside them on an equal basis. Yes, the myths are ancient -
meaning they were written down long ago, and recited orally long before
that. But in a more important sense, the myths are timeless. They express,
as someone once said, "that which never happened, but is always true."

Two New Podcasts at Asatru Rising!

We've taken the Asatru Update blog post of a couple of weeks ago - the one
about the destruction of the Norwegian temple - and made it into a podcast.
And, just last night, we took the blog post in this issue, Does Asatru Need
New Myths?, and put it on the pod site as well.

You can find both of them at http://asatrurising.podbean.com !

LINKS - on folk and freedom, environment and communities, the distant past
and the emerging future, the straight and simple and the hard to
categorize...

OUR FOLK...

Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration

The arguments have gone back and forth over the years as to whether there
were actually large migrations of Anglo-Saxons into England, or whether the
invasion was a predominately cultural one. This paper presents evidence that
there were indeed large movements of Germanic tribesmen from the Jutland
peninsula into England.

http://tinyurl.com/743koog

Viking Era Graves in Poland - Norse? Slav?

Sword at his side, the so-called Young Warrior is among the thousand-year-
old discoveries in a newfound cemetery in Poland, a new study says.

rbowman quoted:

Check out the two opposing viewpoints in the next two articles.

> THE VERTICAL FRONTIER...
>
> Is Humankind Abandoning a Future in Space?
>
> As the space shuttle Discovery flies to its rest in the Smithsonian, the
> author of the article linked below wonders if we are not quietly abandoning
> a future in space - if the conquest of the solar system and beyond has been
> "canceled for lack of interest."

Government funded manned exploration is going down but it is now the
golden age of government funded robotic exploration.

> What Private Space Flight Looks Like in 2019: 1,000 Launches Per Year!
>
> The government may be losing interest in space, but private companies have
> not! If I had a billion dollars to play with, I'd start a space corporation
> and get in on the action myself! Some of these entrepreneurs will be the
> great captains of industry in the mid-twenty-first century...if we haven't
> destroyed all higher civilization by then.

Consider the time scale of past expansions. Ships first crossed the
Atlantic eleven centuries ago. Ships famous among the southerners
followed six centuries ago. Massive colonization started four and three
centuries ago. American civilization started being dominant in the
world one century ago.

In comparison the first aircraft were a century ago. The first unmanned
spacecraft were under six decades ago followed rapidly by the first
manned ones five decades ago. In that span of time the Vinland Saga had
not yet made it out of Iceland.

On 25/04/2012 15:43, Doug Freyburger wrote:
> rbowman quoted:
>
> Check out the two opposing viewpoints in the next two articles.
>
>> THE VERTICAL FRONTIER...
>>
>> Is Humankind Abandoning a Future in Space?
>>
>> As the space shuttle Discovery flies to its rest in the Smithsonian, the
>> author of the article linked below wonders if we are not quietly abandoning
>> a future in space - if the conquest of the solar system and beyond has been
>> "canceled for lack of interest."
>
> Government funded manned exploration is going down but it is now the
> golden age of government funded robotic exploration.
>
>> What Private Space Flight Looks Like in 2019: 1,000 Launches Per Year!
>>
>> The government may be losing interest in space, but private companies have
>> not! If I had a billion dollars to play with, I'd start a space corporation
>> and get in on the action myself! Some of these entrepreneurs will be the
>> great captains of industry in the mid-twenty-first century...if we haven't
>> destroyed all higher civilization by then.
>
> Consider the time scale of past expansions. Ships first crossed the
> Atlantic eleven centuries ago. Ships famous among the southerners
> followed six centuries ago. Massive colonization started four and three
> centuries ago. American civilization started being dominant in the
> world one century ago.
>
> In comparison the first aircraft were a century ago. The first unmanned
> spacecraft were under six decades ago followed rapidly by the first
> manned ones five decades ago. In that span of time the Vinland Saga had
> not yet made it out of Iceland.
>

Things are moving much faster now, but access to space is not one of
them. It's just not cost effective to go beyond LEO.

--
FFF
Dirk

Full Spectrum Praxis : ZERO STATE : http://zerostate.net

On Apr 25, 8:43�am, Doug Freyburger <dfrey...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Government funded manned exploration is going down but it is now the
> golden age of government funded robotic exploration.

Really? What new robots are planned and funded for the future? What
does NASA have going to Mars or the Moon? Not stuff currently flying,
for those were started years to decades ago... what's in the future?