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, we consider some aspects of nomadic identity and social organization. Why? Because at the end of the day, the peoples in human history who have been most influential on the direction that world history has taken have been nomads: wandering humans. From the Yamnaya, Scythians, and Huns to Arabs and Mongols in Eurasia, the classical nomads have been the ones facilitating trade and putting pressure on empires. Aside from these classical nomads, we may also think of the colonizing Europeans and contemporary migrants as nomads: people who move through the world in search of pastures, places to live and grow. At the end of the day, we are all a product of nomads, and the idea of a settled country is an illusion. It is therefore important that we listen to our nomad ancestors and consider what nomad identity is. 

In episode 8, I tackled sex and sexuality in a broad perspective. I would be remiss not to follow that up with a deep dive into what we today call queer sexualities and categorize with the LGBTQ+ acronym. Are there sources from the medieval period, the Viking Age, and before that, which can help illuminate these subjects? Some scholars and practitioners of Nordic paganisms suggest there are -but what does it look like with a critical eye toward the pre-Christian context; a period that did not (at least as far as we know) have a language for expressing queer sexuality like we do today? I'll unpack the stories that are often used as examples of pre-Christian attitudes to queer sexuality and take a deep dive into them. After that, I'll offer some additional thoughts on how we should approach the stories, the material culture from the Viking Age, and our current situation. 

Please NOTE: if you're looking to have biases confirmed in this episode, please understand that this is not how a critical perspective on our story-world functions. I do hope that you'll find inspiration from what I say. As always, I expect you as listeners to form your own opinions and interpret what I say as recommendations for further development of your own thoughts!

SHOW NOTES

Exposure to continuous or fluid theories of sexual orientation leads some heterosexuals to embrace less-exclusive heterosexual orientations (nature.com)

How Copenhagen Became The "Gay Village Of Northern Europe" - Jetset Times

Valkyrie fra Hårby - Birka female Viking warrior - Wikipedia

Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581 | Antiquity | Cambridge Core

A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics - PMC (nih.gov)

In this episode, I'm discussing sex and sexuality in the Viking Age --and far, far beyond. I departure from the story about Freyja sleeping with four dwarfs in exchange for the necklace Brisingamen. I discuss other, related stories, not least Ari Thorgilson's report that Hjalti Skeggjason was outlawed for calling Freyja a "bitch" in a poem that he composed in the year 999. From there, I consider other reports on Scandinavians' sexlives in the Viking Age, and what they mean for the general picture we get of pre-Christian attitudes to sex and sexuality. I relate this to factoids about human evolution, our physical configuration, and our inner hormonal processes associated with sexual activities. From there, I take it to a global level and discuss some aspects of other cultures' sexual practices. If you listen to this episode and feel that I don't give you a straight answer to what we can take from this knowledge of history in terms of applying it to our lives today, you'll have gotten the point: it's not for me to decide or even suggest how you should relate to this subject. 

This episode begins with the story about Gefion who created the island of Sjalland. I examine the story of her meeting with Gylfi in the form that it is represented by Snorri Sturluson in Edda. After that, I take a dive into the witch craze of the early modern period and discuss its impact on European-western societies, what role it actually played in social life, and how a goddess of the meadows was turned into a witch. I extrapolate some ideas from that, which hint at how we've created a society of the spectacle, a society where human life is framed, encased, and reduced to representations in the tiny boxes that we keep in our pockets, our phones.

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. 

In this episode I explore what it means to give something to a community, to sacrifice something, a part of yourself or something you own. It is important to know just how much to give so that you can avoid losing too much. These are the words of wisdom from Odin. I have often found myself giving too much to a community, and when what you give does not come back in some form of reciprocal acknowledgment, we get disappointed. The last four months have been incredibly busy, and I thought that it was because of my being busy that this episode kept being pushed further into the future, but not so long ago, I realized that it was in fact because I needed some important lessons about community before I could publish it. 

In this episode I’ll take you on a trip through the historical components behind the idea that Vikings did mushrooms before battle. We will explore the context for why that claim emerged in the 1600s, when the Danish scholar Thomas Bartholin first put it out there, and why it’s the kind story that’s thoroughly a myth in the sense of something that's entirely made up. After that, I’ll offer some comments on the idea that psychotropic agents are helpful for the purpose of reaching a higher self, communing with spirit, ritual, whatever you’d like to call that connection we humans can make with the world around us.