AFA UPDATE

A PROJECT OF THE ASATRU FOLK ASSEMBLY

Issue 156

April 20, 2012

Contact email: afa@runestone.org

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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."

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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.

The burial ground holds not only a hoard of precious objects but also hints
of human sacrifice—and several dozen graves of a mysterious people with
links to both the Vikings and the rulers of the founding states of eastern
Europe.

Ultimately, the Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic peoples are closely intertwined
- all descended from the Funnel Beaker Culture.

http://tinyurl.com/c5t8kge

Five Hundred New Fairy Tales Discovered in Germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has
come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked
away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are
part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local
historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of
Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the
fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

http://tinyurl.com/75og824

OUR FREEDOMS...

Strip Searches and the Death of Privacy in the New America

There are two main drivers pushing privacy into the dustbin of history, and
both are related to technology. One is the increasing effectiveness of
government surveillance. Cameras follow you in most public places in London
today, and New York is catching up. Diffusion scanners at the airport
already show you essentially naked. The coalition Conservative-Liberal
Democratic government in the U.K. is preparing to allow the state to
collect, without a warrant or even suspicion, all information on calls or
texts except the content. The government's ability to do all of these things
causes many of us to think, irrationally, that it is reasonable for it to do
so.

http://tinyurl.com/7wzspwc

AFA COMMUNITIES...

An AFA community begins when two members meet each other for the first time
and share a cup of coffee. Community is people, not land. When you have the
people, you can think about getting land and all the things that go with it.

I want to see AFA community (people), and communities (land and goodies) all
across the country. We need to be working on that, and thinking about it
each and every day. That's how we'll make it happen.

What Took 10,000 years to build and only 50 years to destroy?

This excellent post by John Robb explains why your food production plans
need to include heirloom and heritage plants and animals, and how you can go
about that.

http://tinyurl.com/dxbtkhw

THE ENVIRONMENT...

Weather and Warming: Connecting the Dots

No one can afford to ignore the weather - especially farmers, campers,
hunters, self-sufficiency types, "preppers," or people planning intentional
communities. Here are some facts:

Last month was the warmest March in the Unites States since the records
began, in 1895. There were 15,272 warmest records broken across the country.

For the year to date, heat records are beating cold records 22 to 1, topping
the previous decade's average by more than a factor of 10.

Warmer-than-average conditions across the eastern U.S. also created an
environment favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. According to
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's Storm Prediction Center, there
were 223 preliminary tornado reports during March, a month that averages 80
tornadoes annually. (We saw still another extreme tornado event in the first
half of April, blanketing much of the central United States.)

For more relevant information, go back to the beginning of this issue of AFA
Update and read the stats on Americans who say they have been personally
affected by severe weather events.

Weather has always been variable - but we are seeing changes far, far
outside the "normal." All of these changes, whether drought in some areas,
record rainfall in other areas, extreme heat, tornadoes, or storms, are what
we can expect from a warming planet.

For those who want a scientific take on this, here's a link to a paper by
Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, titled "Framing the way to relate climate extremes
to climate change." It appeared in the journal Climatic Change, and you can
download it in pdf format at. Read the abstract at the beginning, if nothing
else.

http://springerlink.com/content/0008xl84w0743102/fulltext.pdf

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."

The exploration of the cosmos ("Conquest" is pretty presumptuous!) is
entirely consistent with the Asatru attitude. Our ancestors were
adventurers. The Age of Migrations...the Viking Age...the taming of North
America...and now the opening of the space frontier...the dragon ship and
the space ship...it's all part of the same thing.

It is our destiny, as Asatru and as Eurofolk, to eventually spread into the
Galaxy.

I feel strongly about this, and space-related links will appear in AFA
Update regularly, just to keep that meme in play.

http://tinyurl.com/6qkw6xw ​​

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.

American companies launched just five licensed commercial rockets into space
in 2011, 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. This would be, as they say, a game-changer.

http://tinyurl.com/83kjob5

CALENDAR

April 30 - Waluberg. There was a famed second-century Germanic seeress named
Waluberg. We honor her, or the deities Holda, Frigga, or Freya, on this
occasion. Freya is especially appropriate because of her link to sorcery and
seership. Walburga becomes a time for the mysteries of the Earth, for the
working of magic and for peering into the future.

May 1 - May Day. From the mysteries of Waluburg we enter the sunshine and
celebration of May Day. Think on Freya, take a walk in the forest or send
flowers to a friend. Make love outdoors.

May 9 - Day of Remembrance for Guthroth. This Norwegian martyr spoke out
against the tyranny of the Christian fanatic Tryggvason, and urged others to
resist him. For this, the king had his tongue cut out. Call up a friend who
follows our native Way - use your own tongue to participate in the bond that
ties us to the Gods!

Hail the Holy Ones!

Hail the AFA!

Stephen A. McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly

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