Amina and Mathias dive into Yule traditions in the North. first, they talk about some aspects of pre-Christian Scandinavian jól -including if it even really existed, its place in the calendar, and what rituals took place in the period- and then they branch out to Celtic traditions. At the very end the pair derail themselves and get sucked into a conversation about Germanic and Celtic loans, the origin of things we think are Celtic and Germanic, and the stereotypes about Celtic and Germanic peoples. This is part one of two episodes on Yule.

Amina and Mathias sat down with author Gregory Amato. He is the author of the book series Spear of the Gods, which takes place in the Viking Age. Gregory Amato has strong opinions about how authors represent the Viking Age and Vikings. He is not fond of the stereotypes and toxic masculinity that are often a part of contemporary narration of the Viking Age. Instead, Gregory writes Viking Age fiction from a perspective that respects the diversity of the time and selects period specific values that he aligns with to promote through his characters.

Amina and Mathias are diving deep into the myth of the Wild Hunt in different European cultures. They explore the connections between the Wild Hunt and Odin, local folklore about trolls that invade your farm, the southern German Krampus traditions, transcendental rituals and witchcraft, the secret cult of the Benandanti in northern Italy, and stories about berserkir in Scandinavia. They of course also get deep into Irish lore about Cuchullain and Pwll, and why the Brits are afraid of geese!

Amina and Mathias sit down with Alexandra (Sasha) Zavyalova to talk about Slavic and Northern European pagan fall traditions. Sasha is from St. Petersburg, Russia, and belongs to the Modovian minority called Erzya, a Finno-Ugric people. She has been raised in the pre-Christian Erzyan traditions, and is herself a student of northern paganism. Along with Sasha, the two hosts go far and wide in conversations about connections between Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, and Finno-Ugric autumn and early winter traditions across the northern European expanse.  

In this episode, Amina and Mathias discuss underworld mythologies and how they seem to link up with ancient fall traditions in the European North. The conversation takes our two hosts from pumpkin spice and licorice through conversations about (and mispronunciations of) the ancient Welsh hero Pwll, the Franco-Danish hero Ogier the Dane, the Swiss-Lombardic hero of Dietrich of Berne, over the founding of Czechia and the founding of Krakow and the Czech-Polish cultural hero Krok, all the way to Odin and his retrieval of the mead of poetry. They also circle round the conversation about journeys to Hel by sailing to the far North --and there's a little bit about Freyja, Isis, and the sparsely known Minoan snake goddess.

Mathias Nordvig and Amina Otto discuss fall traditions in the pre-Christian North on The Sacred Flame Podcast. They manage to cover the entire North Atlantic region in a conversation that takes us from the origin of modern Halloween traditions in witchcraft trials between Scotland and Denmark to pre-Christian Nordic rituals, and folktales about the Wild Hunt.

Mathias Nordvig has a PhD in Old Norse mythology and teaches at University of Colorado in Boulder, USA.

Amina Otto has an MA in Old Norse and Gaelic studies from Cambridge and is doing a PhD in Old Norse-Gaelic studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

What is madness? What was madness back in the Viking age, and what is madness today? The concept of madness may seem clear to us, but at the end of the day, it is certainly always dependent on cultural context. In this episode, I discuss western madness and where it comes from. I depart from Carl Jung's attempt to blame the atrocities of Nazi Germany on Wotan/Odin and dive into a cultural examination that takes us from Serbia's Iron Gates national park and Kosovo to gold mining in Nevada's Mt. Tenabo, while navigating through indigenous homelands, nations, and internment camps -a ride that takes us all the way to the underworld and far into the sky with the Blue Star Kachina prophecy.

The Eternal Return ensures that we always come back to this particular moment in history. The notion that time recurs and we return to the same moments in time has been present in European philosophy since Pythagoras and was an important aspect of Stoic philosophy. We live, we die, we live again. The Eternal Return is certainly also a cultural phenomenon, which stipulates that the human ages will return, moving through cycles of ups and downs. The sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe have proposed a theory of generations and temporal cycles in the book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny." They propose that four archetypal generations are born in each saeculum (a natural century, c. 85 years). Of these archetypal generations, the hero generation is the one that oversee the restructuring of society after it has unraveled and been through a crisis. In this episode, I investigate this concept of turnings, cycles, and generations in context of Germanic, Roman, and Hunnic peoples in ancient Europe, and offer some thoughts on what the ancient saecula mean for us today.

In this episode about Viking Enlightenment, we explore the intricacies of a heathen worldview, and the forms of life that it leads to. Inherent to the heathen worldview is the understanding that we have material needs that must be fulfilled, and that a reciprocal relationship with Earth is central to that. We must establish bonds of relationship with this world, and worry less about what comes after death. This means, too, that when we are faced with forces that try to pry away our resources, be they natural disasters or governmental institutions, heathens will find other ways to manage their resources, primarily in the form of egalitarian constitutions. Such processes are what have led to the creation of republics like Iceland in 930, Nassau in 1706, USA in 1776, France in 1789, and many, many others -- because animist heathenry is not just a way of life, it is the way that life expresses itself.

In this episode I explore the concept of whiteness and why it has become so closely associated with Vikings. We begin with the story about Rig, a deity claimed to be the same as Heimdall, and his journey through Midgard. Rig is said to have created the three classes of humans, and according to the old story, these three classes have something akin to phenotypical descriptions attached to them. After the story, I dissect it and its history, its use in modern times, and dive deep into our modern ideas about Vikings and race, racialization, and the construction of whiteness today.