Latest / Random Heathen Ramblings / Occult Mead and The Wewelsburg Round Table Sun Wheel feat. Eirik Westcoat [RHR S7, EP01]

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Occult Mead and The Wewelsburg Round Table Sun Wheel feat. Eirik Westcoat [RHR S7, EP01] · Random Heathen Ramblings

• 0:01
  Hello everyone, and welcome to the Random Heathen Ramblings
• 0:03
  podcast where we discuss all sorts of things Germanic
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  Heathenry related. My name is Jesse and I'm your
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  All right, everyone, welcome back to the Random Heathen
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  Ramblings podcast Season 7 episode one.
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  This is your first time tuning in, listening, or watching here
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  that way. And as I said, season 7.
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  So you've got, you know, 6 full seasons worth of content to go
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  month, but it is a great way in an impactful way to show your
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  support of the show and what we do here.
• 2:01
  And Speaking of what we're doing here, we've got a return guest
• 2:04
  coming on. He was a first time guest.
• 2:07
  I believe it was season 5. I'll try to annotate that
• 2:10
  somewhere on the show here for you.
• 2:11
  So check the show notes or for those of you on Patreon, head
• 2:14
  down into the description so you can revisit the experience with
• 2:19
  my return guest today. But he's got some really
• 2:23
  interesting things to to check out.
• 2:24
  He's a published author. He's he's got a lot of academic
• 2:28
  background with rune studies and, and all this fun stuff.
• 2:32
  So we're going to welcome right now to the stage, Eric Westcote,
• 2:36
  otherwise known as the Skaldic Eagle.
• 2:40
  Welcome to the show, man. Thank you for coming back here
• 2:42
  today. Hey.
• 2:43
  Jesse, it's good to be back. Yeah, seen a little bit more
• 2:47
  Grays coming through on you, just like me.
• 2:49
  Although the dark hair contrast for you, you got more, more,
• 2:53
  more seasoned look there. So you've been busy doing stuff.
• 2:56
  It's it seems with your with your.
• 3:00
  Well, you published a couple more books recently.
• 3:02
  I think you've attended some events where you've done some
• 3:04
  public speaking, right. So you've been busy, huh?
• 3:09
  Yeah. Very cool man.
• 3:13
  It's great to have you back here.
• 3:14
  I do appreciate you wanting to come on here and talk about what
• 3:16
  we're going to be talking about today, which is the new one of
• 3:19
  the new books that you just published just this past year.
• 3:21
  I believe October is when you publish them.
• 3:25
  So we're going to get into that here shortly.
• 3:28
  But maybe people that are tuning into the show for the first time
• 3:32
  or even maybe some of my seasoned listeners that didn't
• 3:35
  catch the last episode where you where you were featured as a
• 3:39
  guest. If you wouldn't mind, maybe just
• 3:41
  kind of tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are,
• 3:45
  where the Skaldic Eagle name came from, what you've been
• 3:48
  doing, kind of just give us a little short back story of the
• 3:51
  origin story of the Skaldic Eagle.
• 3:54
  OK, I guess, yeah, Skaldic Eagle goes back to, I've been writing
• 3:59
  like a modern human poetry in I guess the traditional
• 4:02
  alliterative meters since about 2011.
• 4:06
  And I think toward the end of 2016, I decided like I wanted, I
• 4:11
  guess, rebrand my web blog where I was posting all this and
• 4:14
  started, I guess looking around for just a little of those
• 4:18
  random things, looking around for names.
• 4:19
  And I guess somehow put the combination of Stolik Eagle
• 4:25
  together. And then greatly surprised
• 4:27
  myself when I looked around on the Internet and found that
• 4:29
  nobody was using that combination of those, I guess
• 4:33
  very straightforward and somewhat common words.
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  And I guess it's it's stuck ever since.
• 4:41
  I'd love the name and I love the, you know, 'cause obviously
• 4:44
  you're also for, for folks that maybe don't know, not not only
• 4:47
  are you, you know, an academic within, you know, of scholarly
• 4:51
  poetry in the traditional alliterative meter, you, you
• 4:55
  also are a heathen yourself, am I right?
• 4:58
  Yeah. So obviously you have the, the
• 5:01
  background in, in the practice of, of Heathering and then that
• 5:05
  has probably played a big part in the, the research that you've
• 5:09
  done trying to be as authentic to, to, to the passion or to
• 5:15
  the, to the, to the faith, to the practice, whatever you want
• 5:18
  to call it, right. So a lot of times I see what
• 5:21
  people do is they get into this heathenry thing and they, you
• 5:25
  know, they look for some kind of like cool name, you know, like,
• 5:29
  you know, blood Axe, you know, Ravenclaw or some crazy like
• 5:33
  Larping name. And that's not what the Skulding
• 5:36
  Eagle seems to me. It seems, it seems very, seems
• 5:40
  very like it's a perfect name for the work that you've done
• 5:45
  from what I've seen on your website and you know, your
• 5:48
  already existing published work. So did you like have any core
• 5:53
  questions that you kind of asked yourself that went into the,
• 5:58
  the, the naming of this, this online moniker, as it were?
• 6:01
  Or was it just kind of like what what what what works?
• 6:07
  Well, let's see, I think it was, yeah.
• 6:08
  It was definitely meant to be very, very poetic, focused.
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  And well, at this point, I can't remember if I was considering
• 6:15
  other options, but I know I'd been, I guess, fascinated by
• 6:19
  eagles as a bird at the time and because still am in many ways.
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  Because then of course, I would go to use an eagle on the cover
• 6:30
  of my second book, which I titled Eagles Mead in 2019.
• 6:34
  Yeah, the actually you're the Eagle's Mead is where I first
• 6:39
  became aware of you. I was, I was speaking with some
• 6:44
  other members of the heathen community up in Ohio.
• 6:49
  I had them on the show. It's a husband and wife and they
• 6:54
  have a they have a pretty vibrant local and you know of
• 7:00
  online heathen community that they that they interact in and
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  they Roger Abney is the is the gentleman's name who I'm talking
• 7:11
  about and his wife, Heidi Beth. But Roger is also very much into
• 7:17
  the skaldic poetry. He plays AI guess it's a liar
• 7:23
  heart and I've he's he's recited like poems from like the poetic
• 7:33
  Edda, like the Voluspa. He's along with the harp and
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  he's the Eagle's Mead was, was where I first heard about you,
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  because he spoke very highly of that book and learning, you
• 7:47
  know, alliteration. And and I'm also, you know, I'm
• 7:50
  not AI wouldn't call myself a student of it, but I've dabbled
• 7:54
  in it and I love, you know, some people like listening to poems
• 7:59
  and and certain poets and how they write their poetry.
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  And I guess there's so many different styles of it, but I
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  love the alliterative, that traditional alliterative meter.
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  It kind of has a very, I don't know, it's, it's, it's the, the
• 8:15
  the flow, I guess of it that that I'm really into.
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  Is that what did you have any or have you, you know, when you
• 8:23
  first started off in this, did that, did that?
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  Is that what it appealed to you about alliterative poetry?
• 8:31
  OK. I think the that's a good point
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  you mentioned because I would say in some ways my style was an
• 8:38
  attempt to I think maybe deliberately make things flow a
• 8:42
  bit better. Because I think because the
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  exemplars I'm looking at where I could was working with the older
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  languages and could see things, some of them like Old English or
• 8:53
  Old Norse. But it's really hard to get a
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  sense for, you know, how things flow in Old English or Old Norse
• 8:58
  if that's not your native language.
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  But I would. But there were there were
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  earlier attempts, I guess some doing this sort of poetry in
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  modern English, probably Lee Hollander, he has a translation
• 9:11
  of the Edda. And Tolkien is famous for some
• 9:14
  of this. And so I think they were working
• 9:17
  with earlier metrical models. And so I think I find especially
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  like Hollander's verse to be a bit, almost like it seems a bit
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  the rhythm is off and it's like a bit clunky to me.
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  So in a sense, I think that always being there, I think my,
• 9:35
  my own work tended to try to find a way that flowed a bit
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  better. It's like people, people are
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  constantly like saying about how like, you know, Shakespeare's
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  dynamic mentameter, like really matches like natural speech
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  rhythms to a great degree. And I think that's certainly a
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  goal for what I'm doing with my own poetry and reviving the
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  illiterative meter. Yeah.
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  Now, do you think that in your expert opinion, do you think
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  that the the clunkiness as you mentioned is is due to the
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  translation of words from these older somewhat dead languages
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  like Old English and Old Norse and and stuff that doesn't quite
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  transfer over into modern English translations?
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  Do you think that's why that is? I think that may be, that may be
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  a little part of it, but I think the larger part of it is that I
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  guess what especially what Hollander is doing, and I think
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  maybe also Tolkien does this with one of his, with his
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  cigarette and Guterin is they're, they're trying to
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  follow like Norse metrical models and, you know, put modern
• 10:45
  English into Old Norse rhythmical forms.
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  And you know, modern and like modern English and Old Norse are
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  very, very different in the terms of their natural rhythms.
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  So this is a project that can only come out, it can only come
• 10:58
  out sounding extremely unnatural because I mean, just just the
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  rhythmic structure of Old Norse is way different from modern
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  English. The modern Icelandic is way
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  closer to Old Norse. So you could, you could still do
• 11:11
  those rhythms probably much more effectively.
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  But you know, modern English versus only it's, it's so far
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  apart. It's just just trying to fit
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  into the different language rhythms.
• 11:20
  Yeah, that's fascinating because it almost, you know, and, and I
• 11:26
  don't think this is probably a a fair comparison.
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  But what I think of when you're talking about this particular
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  part of, of, of the language is that like take a take a somebody
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  who speaks English, modern English, but they live in, let's
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  say, you know, the mountains in Appalachia and they're, you
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  know, the pattern of the speech that they have, not just their
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  accents or dialects, but the way that they speak, how they sort
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  of like the I've always compared their, the language of
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  Appalachia, even though it's modern English, is it, it rolls
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  like the, the mountains do. Like it has ups and downs and
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  there's dips and you know what I mean?
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  And you take somebody like that and you put them outside like
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  to, you know, I don't know, like, you know, the Northeast,
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  you know, down New York City, Manhattan or whatever, you know,
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  they're going to sound so far out of place.
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  It's almost going to be like a, a totally different with
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  different language, but it's hard for people that, that, that
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  don't have an ear for it to, to relate or to understand it.
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  Again, I'm not trying to like it's probably an unfair
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  comparison, but like that's what I think of is, is you might be
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  speaking a, a close enough language, you know, or, or a
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  language that's, that's you know, I can understand the
• 12:41
  words, but the way you're saying it, I'm like having a hard time
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  paying attention that way. But so, yeah, man, how long have
• 12:51
  you been? So you said you, you, you, you
• 12:54
  got into the wrote you wrote what year was the Skaldic or the
• 12:58
  eagle the eagles meet? Where did you publish that?
• 13:03
  OK, Eagles meet. You done those bit in 2019. 2019
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  and obviously you'd been already doing the the research and, and
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  and getting into scalded poetry, alliterative meter poetry for
• 13:16
  for a while. So and then recently you kind of
• 13:21
  switched a bit from that into something of, of more like
• 13:25
  symbolism. We're going to talk about your
• 13:28
  most recent publication with The Occult Need.
• 13:34
  So do you see that what you did with with the Occult Meet?
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  And I do eventually want to get my hands on it 'cause I know
• 13:42
  you, you publish it like we talked about before, back in
• 13:44
  October, it was a busy time to the end of the year for, for a
• 13:48
  lot of folks. So maybe people that don't know,
• 13:51
  there'll be links for your books the the Occult Meet included if
• 13:55
  they want to go pick a copy of of which I do.
• 13:58
  But with what I was talking with, trying to get to is like,
• 14:01
  do you see the book or did you like how you went into this book
• 14:05
  talking about a symbol that, you know, do you see this book as as
• 14:11
  primarily for, we'll say, like practitioners or is it more
• 14:17
  scholarly or more, you know, mythological focus or maybe like
• 14:24
  a blend of all three for for practitioners, scholars and kind
• 14:28
  of the mythologically curious? OK, first I want to say I guess
• 14:32
  for the video of yours I do have a copy of the book with me.
• 14:34
  I'll show put it up here on the video.
• 14:36
  Oh, yeah, sure. Please.
• 14:37
  Yeah. Definitely.
• 14:38
  Anything you'd like to share? Yeah.
• 14:40
  And for the folks that are listening to this, the artwork
• 14:43
  on the cover of Occult Mead is the infamous Black Sun, which
• 14:49
  we're going to be getting into talking about here soon.
• 14:52
  So when I, when I was talking about, you know, the symbolism
• 14:54
  and, and how this is kind of like seeming like a focus point
• 14:58
  versus poetry, that's what I'm leaning towards.
• 15:02
  Those of you watching on Patreon got a chance to see it.
• 15:04
  So again, folks that are just listening, this is where it's
• 15:08
  it's valuable for the both of us for you to come over here on
• 15:10
  Patreon. So anyway, back over to you,
• 15:13
  Eric. Yes, I guess, yeah.
• 15:16
  The the nature of the occult meet itself as a book.
• 15:21
  Let's see, is it? I think for me it's a little bit
• 15:25
  hard to categorize because I would say it's as far As for, as
• 15:29
  you said, possibly for practitioners.
• 15:34
  Cause the occult kind of gets like a buzzword, you know,
• 15:36
  people I don't know for whatever reason, but like the occult, you
• 15:39
  know, as put in air quotes, the occult like that tends to spark
• 15:43
  a lot of people's interest. So hearing that maybe they think
• 15:47
  that they're getting something or that they might be getting
• 15:49
  something that it's, it's not perhaps I don't know.
• 15:52
  So that's, yeah, like when I say practitioner, practitioners of
• 15:55
  the occult. Yes, I wouldn't say there
• 15:57
  there's elements for practitioners here.
• 15:59
  I mean, they may not be as completely straightforward as
• 16:02
  like for instance, my earlier books, Viking poetry for Healing
• 16:05
  rights. There was very clearly stuff in
• 16:08
  there that one could use directly to do, say, calls to
• 16:11
  the gods, for instance, an eagle's maid.
• 16:14
  There was poems in there you could use directly as magical
• 16:17
  charms here in an occult maid. I mean, there's not like there's
• 16:22
  not anything exactly equivalent to that, but there was a lot of
• 16:26
  material meant to be inspirational and that can be
• 16:29
  applied by anyone who can think creatively with the ruins.
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  And I'm, I'm thinking particularly 2 essays there in
• 16:37
  which I go over the first one on the quartets of the Elder
• 16:41
  Futhark and also the first few ads of the Anglo-Saxon futhor.
• 16:45
  And then it's follow up essay in which I go into the final ads of
• 16:48
  the Anglo-Saxon futhor. So there's material in there
• 16:52
  that can definitely be that practitioners can make use of,
• 16:57
  although it's would really be up to kind of like open-ended for
• 17:02
  how any each practitioner might choose to apply the material.
• 17:06
  So I guess that would be, you know, those two essays are kind
• 17:09
  of the first thing that popped to mind when it comes to like,
• 17:12
  you know, direct practitioner material.
• 17:15
  OK. Oh, so, so, so, so for for folks
• 17:20
  that are into the the runic applications, right.
• 17:23
  Oh yes, there's another one also the essay called Eagle and Gar.
• 17:29
  This is, and it's fairly, it's fairly similar vein which I go
• 17:32
  to the in the material about the these two, I guess symbols that
• 17:37
  we see in, I guess that the, well, the gar specifically as,
• 17:42
  as the ritual tool we see when Odin hangs on the world Tree to
• 17:45
  win the runes and the Hoffemol stanzas at 1:38 through 1:45.
• 17:50
  I mean that that's the only ritual tool mentioned while he's
• 17:53
  on the tree. This is the gar and through an
• 17:58
  interesting and creative application, I, I also discuss
• 18:01
  how the eagle can be connected to this.
• 18:04
  And these are things that practitioners can make use of
• 18:08
  and approaching the runes and doing their own, I guess their
• 18:12
  own version of their own symbolic version of hanging on
• 18:16
  the tree for 9 nights to win the runes.
• 18:19
  I see. That's an interesting point too,
• 18:23
  because, you know, I've had a perhaps a UPG take or, or, you
• 18:34
  know, a UPG approach to learning the runes, learning the learning
• 18:42
  the, the, the runic characters, first of all, but then
• 18:45
  understanding even deeper the what rune rune, right?
• 18:50
  Linguistically, what it what it means?
• 18:51
  It's their mysteries. But I've had this UPG approach
• 18:56
  and, and maybe I'm, I really do want to get into it because
• 18:59
  it's, it's with, with regards to your books, because maybe it's
• 19:04
  not so much EPG as I thought in that achieving or acquiring
• 19:10
  knowledge of the runes, whether it's their symbolic, you know,
• 19:15
  the, the, the, the characters symbols and their meanings,
• 19:20
  learning that the Mystic parts of it all comes with their,
• 19:23
  their sacrifice that comes with it.
• 19:25
  It's not just I picked the book up or I watched a couple of
• 19:28
  YouTube videos and now I'm this, you know, guru on the runes, a
• 19:33
  guru rune, if you will. So I've had this again, I've had
• 19:37
  this long standing opinion or this long standing Gnostic view
• 19:41
  of that. It is you're going to to get
• 19:45
  this, you've got to give quite a bit.
• 19:50
  So has that, that, that that's been a, that's been something
• 19:52
  that you've seems to have rarely informed or or been a part of
• 19:57
  your studies with. Yes.
• 20:02
  Yeah. If nothing else, one will have
• 20:05
  to. One will have to sacrifice a lot
• 20:07
  of time and and the work of acquiring the runes on deep
• 20:10
  level. Yeah, I mean if you know,
• 20:12
  because and that and that's part of it.
• 20:14
  If you just, if you look at it from a, you know, Odin hangs for
• 20:19
  9 days and nine nights, that's time.
• 20:23
  I mean, why would, why would, why would they give, why would
• 20:27
  they give a specific period of time?
• 20:30
  Right? Numer the, the, the numbers in
• 20:32
  the Lord in the myths, right? Like, why are certain things
• 20:35
  counted very specifically? Well, it's it, it, it I don't
• 20:39
  feel that that's, you know, just casual.
• 20:43
  I don't, I don't because he said, you know, the, the the the
• 20:47
  poet could have written that, you know, Odin hung for night,
• 20:49
  you know, for many days or many nights or multiple days or
• 20:52
  multiple nights. Now they gave specific numbers,
• 20:55
  you know, so I feel like there there's some significance to
• 20:59
  that too. I don't know how you feel with
• 21:02
  regards to that and that sort of thing.
• 21:05
  That may be another topic for another time, but just wanted to
• 21:09
  throw that in there too. So the occult mean, let's get
• 21:17
  into to that a bit. How do you, we'll say balance
• 21:25
  maybe speculative interpretations with historical
• 21:32
  rigor. OK, like, especially when
• 21:34
  dealing with symbols, this particular symbol, you know, the
• 21:39
  black sun and cause symbols have power.
• 21:46
  I think of most of all, most most of my audience and and most
• 21:49
  heathens would even agree, you know, like symbols have power.
• 21:53
  It's it's why does the hammer mean something?
• 21:55
  Why does the spear mean something?
• 21:56
  Why do the runes as symbols mean something?
• 22:01
  This black sun image, right? This, this image has been
• 22:04
  charged and given a meaning that has been contested over time.
• 22:10
  I think for some reason that it gets, you know, debated back and
• 22:14
  forth how historical it is or whatever.
• 22:17
  So we'll get into that too. But I guess the the question
• 22:20
  was, you know, how do you balance speculative
• 22:21
  interpretation with historical rigor, especially when you're
• 22:24
  dealing with this charged image that has such a contested origin
• 22:32
  and meaning to it? OK, Well I think, I guess
• 22:39
  there's a couple of parts to this, but starting with, I guess
• 22:41
  it's a sense of you're trying to start with, you know, start with
• 22:45
  the known before then moving into the unknown.
• 22:50
  I guess I would say, yeah, try to put together what 1 can of
• 22:54
  like what can be objectively known about the symbol and it's
• 23:00
  context. So in this sense, I would
• 23:04
  consider that, I guess you could say this is, I guess my approach
• 23:08
  to this was a product of I guess two things, my academic training
• 23:12
  and my rune Guild training, which I think both tended to
• 23:16
  reinforce that kind of approach that I outlined.
• 23:20
  Trying to get necessarily to to start by, you know, trying to
• 23:23
  find out the things that can be reliably known.
• 23:27
  Then at a point recognizing that you may have to go past that.
• 23:34
  And that's not it. Yeah, there is.
• 23:36
  I think there, there is room for, I guess one does have to
• 23:40
  take some leaps out in places where you may not have, I guess,
• 23:45
  perfect data. And I mean, you can see this in,
• 23:48
  in scholarship at times. Like the example I'll use here
• 23:51
  would be, I guess there's various academically published
• 23:56
  theories on the, on, on how the, the origin of the Futhark runes
• 24:00
  in their order. I even have my own take on that
• 24:06
  which not yet published, but but need not to go into that point.
• 24:09
  But, and there's lots of cases like, I mean, it's a good
• 24:12
  parallel for, for, for this, for the so-called Black Sun, because
• 24:16
  with the, the origins of the Futhark order, we are never
• 24:20
  going to find any primary source documents, contemporary primary
• 24:26
  source documents explaining it 'cause I want to do 2.
• 24:30
  That was like 2000 years ago. And so.
• 24:33
  Yeah. So what we have is we do have a
• 24:35
  very well reasoned approaches from different academics trying
• 24:40
  to find something that will fit the contexts and the facts we
• 24:44
  can come up with. And there's a number of, there's
• 24:49
  a number of various interesting ideas out there and I think
• 24:51
  with, you know, varying degrees of the value to them, but I
• 24:56
  don't want to go into any specifics about any particular
• 24:58
  ones, but I think they are useful.
• 25:00
  They do help advance the thinking about it.
• 25:06
  When you say that the order, are you talking about like why the
• 25:09
  the the the 1st at starts with Faye who or Faye versus any
• 25:15
  other? Character, right?
• 25:18
  The order in particular, I guess the mystery on that part is like
• 25:21
  why is it a Futhark order instead of like an ABCD order?
• 25:26
  Yeah, like the Latin alphabet. Yes, like when you see all those
• 25:29
  writing systems that went around like in the Mediterranean area,
• 25:34
  as they pass around the writing system, basically everyone is
• 25:36
  parroting the order of the letters all over the place as it
• 25:41
  transfers. Like you know, Phoenician,
• 25:44
  Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, whichever ways these all go.
• 25:48
  Like literally everyone is just copying the basic order of the
• 25:51
  letters from whoever they get it, but then you have and then
• 25:55
  you have the runes which completely breaks with the order
• 25:58
  as if they had no idea the order even existed.
• 26:03
  I see interesting. I've seen it might be minor, but
• 26:12
  you know, like that may that may also touch upon like why you
• 26:19
  see, you know, the common like circular representation of the
• 26:24
  elder Futhark and some some are some some representations of
• 26:30
  that, you know, end with Othella and others.
• 26:35
  And in Dagas, you know, and you were talking earlier, like you
• 26:40
  said, you said, you know, we don't have, you know,
• 26:41
  contemporary written sources of what the correct quote, UN quote
• 26:47
  order was. You, you know this, I'm sure,
• 26:51
  but I'm and I, I, I don't know the name of it, but isn't there
• 26:53
  like a, a runestone or isn't there something of
• 26:57
  archaeological importance that, that shows the, the, the
• 27:02
  earliest known inscriptions of the Elder Futhark in the order
• 27:06
  that we know them to be today, like F, you know, Fehu, Urus,
• 27:09
  the orders us, etcetera. Yes, I think there's, it's the,
• 27:13
  I believe it's called the Kilverstone.
• 27:15
  Kilverstone Yes, thank you. Then there is also there's a
• 27:18
  pair of brackets like. Those are the 2 for like famous
• 27:22
  for being complete Foo ferks. Yeah, Yeah.
• 27:26
  So that would that would, you know, raise the question of
• 27:29
  like, why were they put in that order?
• 27:31
  Why were they all written out in that sequence?
• 27:33
  Right. Yeah.
• 27:36
  And when we look at. So for, for the sake of folks
• 27:41
  that, you know, I'm pretty sure everybody that that watches or
• 27:43
  listens to this show knows what we're talking about when we're
• 27:45
  talking about the Black Sun, you know, in the Woolwisburg Castle,
• 27:49
  right? Would you mind just kind of for
• 27:56
  the sake of those that maybe don't know, give us a, give us a
• 27:58
  brief, you know, background of, of what we're talking about here
• 28:03
  so the audience knows and has some context to it?
• 28:06
  OK, yes, I guess, yeah, all this modern, I guess some, as it
• 28:12
  were, I guess hullabaloo about this so-called Black Sun goes
• 28:15
  down back to him particular. It's a castle in Germany of
• 28:19
  Evelsburg Castle that Himmler was using as kind of a spiritual
• 28:23
  headquarters for the s s. And I guess after the war, at
• 28:30
  some point it's discovered that in the the, I guess in the
• 28:34
  ground floor room in the north tower, there's this unusual
• 28:38
  sunwheel symbol in a, in like a green marble in the center of
• 28:43
  the floor. And I guess for about all
• 28:49
  indications are that this symbol was installed there by Himmler
• 28:53
  at some point, I think the around maybe 414243 at some
• 28:59
  point. That's seems to be on where it's
• 29:01
  narrowed down to when the thing was put in there and.
• 29:04
  So less than 100 years old. Yes.
• 29:06
  And then so from I guess most of the post war period, I guess,
• 29:10
  you know, in the world World War 2 comes to end, the castle falls
• 29:13
  to the allies. And then I guess it the symbols
• 29:16
  are like ignored in the floor there for like decades.
• 29:19
  And then I think later, I guess around the 80s toward the late
• 29:23
  80s, some interest, you know, obscure occult circle starts
• 29:29
  picking up interest on it. That's an esoteric Hitlerist
• 29:34
  named Miguel Serrano was involved in some of this and
• 29:37
  starts writing some things about it.
• 29:39
  But then and then I guess sort of the, I guess the, I guess the
• 29:43
  neo Nazi fanboy community starts slowly taking an interest in
• 29:47
  this. And then there's in like 91
• 29:51
  where it really takes off is in Germany, there's like a, a, a
• 29:54
  fiction like a, a mystery thriller novel called the Black
• 29:58
  son of Tashi Lumpo is published. And I guess in that one, there's
• 30:03
  like this, a cult of assassins, and they mark their
• 30:06
  assassination victims with this symbol from the floor of the
• 30:11
  castle. And that's where the at this
• 30:13
  point, that's where things take off, like calling the symbol a
• 30:17
  black sun. Yeah.
• 30:19
  And then I guess the various modern fascinations starts to
• 30:23
  build from then. But it turns out at no point was
• 30:26
  there any good reason to think the symbol was ever meant to be
• 30:30
  a black sun. There was no s s documentation
• 30:35
  that ever survived explaining what the symbol was meant to be.
• 30:40
  And and then just, yes, I guess it was something like as to how
• 30:45
  I guess this black sun came, it was, I guess maybe, like I said,
• 30:49
  late 80s people like Serrano and maybe others are like, they
• 30:53
  become fascinated with the symbol and I guess someone
• 30:56
  starts calling it a black sun because they don't know what to
• 30:59
  make of it. And for better or worse my view,
• 31:03
  worse the name, the name just sticks and it becomes a a point
• 31:06
  of fascination afterwards. Wow, do you think sorry, cut in.
• 31:12
  Do you think that it has anything to do with the fact
• 31:14
  that the symbol itself is a repeated are is it?
• 31:23
  Are they they're Armenian or Armenian runes, right?
• 31:26
  The Seagull rune that just repeats itself in a circle?
• 31:32
  And with its potential connection to the actual Solulu
• 31:38
  or Soul Rune for the Sun, do you think that there's any potential
• 31:44
  connection as to how that became its name?
• 31:50
  I'd say probably not. I think maybe just the general
• 31:54
  notion that it kind of, it does look like I guess kind of a sun
• 31:58
  wheel because there are there are older archaeological finds
• 32:02
  like sun wheels loosely similar the.
• 32:06
  Slavic's the Slavic, I don't forget its name, but there's the
• 32:11
  Slavic has like a sun wheel symbol that is historically I
• 32:16
  think attested on on on their side.
• 32:19
  It's either Slovic or Baltic. That could be wrong.
• 32:21
  You know the one I'm talking about.
• 32:24
  I think so. Yeah, and Sun Wheels are not
• 32:28
  uncommon in a lot of cultures, a lot of ancient cultures.
• 32:32
  I mean, just the the symbol of the sun wheel, you know, that
• 32:34
  that circular with with like a cross section in the middle,
• 32:39
  it's been painted and stuff and different Paleolithic places
• 32:44
  too. So but yeah, I was just curious
• 32:48
  if if in your research or if you're digging around with this,
• 32:50
  how with this, you know, black sun, you know, how that came to
• 32:54
  be, if it was because of that in perhaps that, that the soul or
• 32:58
  the seagull rune that gets repeated in in in that fashion.
• 33:02
  So. But you're saying?
• 33:03
  Probably not. No, I don't think it was
• 33:07
  necessarily. I think it was just because of
• 33:08
  the the general overall way the shape looks.
• 33:12
  As you said, it compared, it is there's some broad similarities
• 33:14
  to, I guess those Slavic or Baltic fence.
• 33:17
  This it does have broad similarities to historical sun
• 33:22
  wheel designs. So I think it was nicknamed a
• 33:25
  black sun from that. And of course, I, I guess where
• 33:29
  they, where they get to the idea of calling it Black Sun is,
• 33:33
  well, I mean, maybe they're just trying to be edgy because of
• 33:35
  course, like the actual symbol in the floor of the castle is
• 33:38
  like a greenish marble. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:42
  It's interesting how things start off with like, you know,
• 33:45
  people want to put so much stock into something thinking that
• 33:48
  it's important. And then as it could potentially
• 33:51
  turn out, it was just, it was not even that.
• 33:54
  And what you've did, what you've maybe I don't deduce, or what
• 33:59
  you've perhaps uncovered is the potentiality of this supposed
• 34:05
  black sun in in Willowsbury Castle would better be
• 34:08
  understood as as Himmler's own interpretation of King Arthur's
• 34:12
  Round Table and the Holy Grail, I think is what you get into
• 34:17
  with this. So what first made you question
• 34:21
  this prevailing narrative that that that brought you to this
• 34:24
  point? OK, let's see.
• 34:27
  I think I'm, I mean, I've known for a very long time it was
• 34:31
  definitely not a black sun. And that the, I guess the, the
• 34:34
  identity of the black sun was a completely baseless
• 34:37
  interpretation. I'm a little less remember, I
• 34:41
  recall a bit less as to when exactly when that, how long I
• 34:44
  knew that or when I got the idea that this thing might be the
• 34:49
  round table or somehow connected to the round Table.
• 34:52
  But I'd seen the idea thrown around like random corners of
• 34:56
  the Internet. They'll try to connect it to
• 34:59
  like, you know, you know, 12 knight because of, because of
• 35:01
  course, the 12 arms. Some try to connect like 12
• 35:03
  Knights to the round table or even the 12 apostles.
• 35:08
  There's a verse. Oh yeah, I've heard that, yeah.
• 35:10
  Yeah, there's a weird graphic depicting this with like images
• 35:13
  of the 12 apostles, I guess to try to make the point that it's
• 35:18
  no, yeah, Hemar didn't like Christianity that much, but
• 35:23
  that's that's that's a bit of a side.
• 35:24
  Let's see. And then?
• 35:28
  Yeah, so he wasn't trying to preserve or connect it to any
• 35:30
  sort of Christian lore, right? I guess, yeah, some might say,
• 35:36
  like the king, the Arthurian mythos is somewhat
• 35:39
  Christianized, but I think, well, that kind of loosely.
• 35:46
  Yeah, it's almost, it's, you know, it is loosely because you
• 35:48
  mean the whole, you know, Dragons and Wizards and witches
• 35:52
  and, you know, sorcerers, Like that's not very Christian, you
• 35:55
  know? And of course, all all this, all
• 36:01
  the Authorian mythos, it's kind of like flourishing in the High
• 36:03
  and Middle Ages. So naturally, they're going to
• 36:05
  have to imagine them as Christians in some fashion.
• 36:11
  Yeah. That was the prevailing theme at
• 36:13
  the time that was coming into its blossoming, I guess you
• 36:17
  could say. But yeah, for, I guess for a
• 36:20
  while I had gotten the idea to try to write an essay on this
• 36:24
  symbol, the so-called Black Sun. And I think I'd had that idea at
• 36:29
  least since maybe 2019 or 2020, but had never gotten around to
• 36:34
  it. And then I thought I was just
• 36:37
  going to write a cute little essay about a funky symbol and
• 36:42
  probably not say much anything new.
• 36:46
  I guess it was finally just during the parts of when I was
• 36:49
  researching it about in April of 2025, but I guess I came to the
• 36:56
  discoveries that changed it to instead of Leo cute essay about
• 37:02
  a funky symbol, it changed to I'm going to proclaim that I
• 37:05
  solved this mystery. Yeah, Yeah.
• 37:09
  I have two questions, but the first one would be is so since,
• 37:13
  so since then, since you, you know, kind of drummed up some
• 37:16
  attention about this because this is really nothing new.
• 37:18
  I mean, how how long have you been at Heathen?
• 37:21
  And then how long have you seen this symbol getting tossed
• 37:24
  around in various conversations or online forums as some sort of
• 37:28
  ancient Germanic, Norse, whatever?
• 37:32
  It's it's kind of a it's a, it's a horse that's been beaten to
• 37:35
  death in in that aspect, right. So how has the response been
• 37:41
  that you've noticed to your proclamation, as it were your
• 37:46
  declaration or this this whole thing like what's the feedback
• 37:49
  been like for you? Let's see, I think you'd
• 37:55
  probably consider it surprisingly muted so far.
• 37:58
  I mean, perhaps you saw the brief social media campaign I
• 38:03
  had leading up to the launch of the book I did back in October.
• 38:09
  It might have been around that time that I that I commented on
• 38:14
  one of them to say I'd love to have you on this show to, to
• 38:17
  talk about this. Maybe it won't be so muted now,
• 38:21
  but OK. We'll see and then, but let's
• 38:26
  see, I guess some that's the kind of response at the time, I
• 38:32
  guess it, it was kind of muted. And then I'm, I, I did mean to
• 38:36
  follow up a lot of the launch with more stuff.
• 38:39
  But I think around, yeah, shortly after the launch I
• 38:42
  realized that was a bit, I was a bit burnt out.
• 38:45
  And then I guess I had a lot of other things suddenly going on
• 38:48
  in my life. So there hasn't been, I've not
• 38:52
  made much of a follow up in terms of promotional campaign,
• 38:55
  although I am getting ready to start an ad campaign soon.
• 39:00
  So I haven't heard really that much.
• 39:03
  There's been very little since mid-october.
• 39:09
  Well, now that this episode's going to be out and you're about
• 39:12
  to, you know, get into thinking about, you know, drumming up
• 39:14
  some attention through ad campaigns, it'll be interesting
• 39:17
  to see, you know, what that response is like.
• 39:20
  And I'll definitely be keeping an eye.
• 39:23
  And I would encourage the listeners and the viewers to to
• 39:26
  because I always like to, you know, especially when we're
• 39:30
  talking about such controversial or contested things.
• 39:34
  I love to see the so-called, you know, social media experts or
• 39:43
  Internet experts come out of the woodwork to try and, you know,
• 39:47
  and it's almost like, OK, buddy, you know, are you, Are you ready
• 39:51
  to get thrown against the wall and see what sticks here?
• 39:54
  Because you know, you're going up against, you know, this ain't
• 39:59
  this ain't no scrub. You know, Irex's been doing this
• 40:02
  for a while and, and has got the credentials to to back it up.
• 40:05
  So I would I would say. To those perhaps naysayers or,
• 40:09
  or, or what do you call them doubters out there, you know, go
• 40:13
  into this with an open mind and, and try to learn something.
• 40:17
  And then there was also something I wanted to ask you,
• 40:19
  Eric, we, we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, like
• 40:23
  the approach to these things. And you and you mentioned
• 40:26
  something that I keyed it on about, you know, finding what we
• 40:30
  know exists before going into things that we don't know.
• 40:35
  So I'm paraphrasing, but you, you know, what I'm talking
• 40:37
  about, what you said earlier, right?
• 40:39
  So with the, you know, approaching the, the, the symbol
• 40:43
  in Wolvesburg Castle as it's not the black sun, never has been,
• 40:47
  never was meant to be what it actually is is, you know,
• 40:50
  Arthur's round table and this Holy Grail thing.
• 40:55
  What do you have or, or, or is there anything that could
• 41:01
  perhaps be like a, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not so eager
• 41:05
  to say historical because we're talking about, you know,
• 41:07
  Arthurian myth and legend, but something along those lines that
• 41:12
  could potentially be like either historical or, or, or symbolic
• 41:15
  parallels that support the identification of, of this
• 41:20
  symbol as a round table thing. Like is there anything that you
• 41:25
  found in your research that would back up this this claim?
• 41:31
  OK, yes, OK. And this is OK, this this goes
• 41:35
  to the part where I tell you where my essay changed from cute
• 41:39
  little essay to proclaiming that I solved mystery.
• 41:43
  Because I guess you know, as, as I mentioned that there's been
• 41:46
  things on the Internet here and there about trying to like
• 41:50
  thinking the symbol was meant to allude to the round table.
• 41:53
  But like none of those ever get around to asking the question of
• 41:56
  like, if you believe it's the round table, then how might like
• 42:01
  Himmler and the s s have actually seen images of the
• 42:04
  round table. How would they get there to the
• 42:06
  round table? They want to make a round table.
• 42:08
  You know, you can just, you know, type into Google today and
• 42:12
  like search for round table and get gazillions of images.
• 42:15
  But if you were like late 30s Germany, yeah, how would you,
• 42:20
  how would you know what Arthur's round table looks like?
• 42:24
  Yeah. And so I guess that's where the
• 42:26
  idea I, I started on it and I, and I found what I considered a
• 42:30
  very shockingly plausible means by which Himmler and company
• 42:35
  would have gotten all the materials they would have needed
• 42:38
  to see in order to make a round table design.
• 42:43
  Certainly has. They've certainly like the s s
• 42:47
  and the rest rest of Nazi Germany certainly had a penchant
• 42:50
  for like using historical and mythic materials from propaganda
• 42:55
  purposes and otherwise. And so I went looking to see to
• 43:03
  find like, OK, so if it's the round Table, would there be any
• 43:06
  books in like that would have been available in the where
• 43:09
  might they have seen such images in like books in the early 20th
• 43:12
  century? And I turned up a book published
• 43:19
  in 1938, which was loaded with Arthurian images, I believe, I
• 43:26
  believe the author's name, Roger Loomis, I believe.
• 43:29
  OK. It.
• 43:31
  Was this big compendium of our 3IN art and like a commentary on
• 43:34
  it. He like literally has, and this
• 43:36
  is quite a an amazing thing for the time, a book with 400 / 400
• 43:41
  images of like medieval manuscript art and other
• 43:45
  sources, including some very striking round table images.
• 43:52
  Right. Which would have been obviously
• 43:54
  an artistic drawing or representation from that late
• 43:58
  medieval period or beyond, right?
• 44:00
  Yes. Yeah.
• 44:04
  And I guess once I understood what was in this particular
• 44:07
  book, I think that's what that's what flipped the switch for me.
• 44:12
  I realized that there was with with about four particular round
• 44:18
  table images from this book. This was more than enough to
• 44:22
  account for a number of mysteries about the symbol.
• 44:25
  In other words, like one in particular, you know, just just
• 44:31
  from this one book in the number of images you can, you can get
• 44:35
  directly to the answers to a number of mysteries.
• 44:38
  One of which is there was, there was an oral tradition that the
• 44:43
  Vadelsburg symbol had a gold disc sitting in the middle of
• 44:46
  it. I guess when the s s still had
• 44:49
  the castle, there was like, it was, this was in a Hoiser,
• 44:56
  Hoiser or Hoisler. That was the name of the guy.
• 44:59
  And it was, they had no idea where this came from.
• 45:01
  It was, it's, it's just this random throwaway thing, almost
• 45:06
  random throwaway detail. You have to wonder where it
• 45:07
  comes from. And I found like, yes, I, I
• 45:10
  found what would be an exact answer in an image of the round
• 45:13
  table where there's an image of the round table that actually
• 45:17
  has a gold disk at its center. That was what we One of the big
• 45:23
  surprising things for me is the finding finding the first ever
• 45:28
  source for this gold disk tradition.
• 45:32
  You point to something that says say.
• 45:34
  This is where I think it came from.
• 45:36
  Yeah. And then and then the the other
• 45:38
  big one has to do with they're called Sirshiba.
• 45:42
  There are these archaeological finds around like all over
• 45:48
  Europe, little sun they they look like little sunwheel discs.
• 45:52
  Some, some go to the Merovingian period.
• 45:55
  And it's, it's been commonly, commonly thought that the
• 45:59
  Availsburg symbol strongly resembles these discs.
• 46:05
  But it turns out which it does, but it has a very, it has a
• 46:08
  number of very, very peculiar deviations from we know that the
• 46:13
  s s were, were aware of these discs and their, their research
• 46:18
  division, the on and Erba was even discussing or writing about
• 46:21
  some of the disc discs. So we we know conclusively they
• 46:25
  were aware of these discs and so on.
• 46:27
  But then there's a, there's a gap here.
• 46:30
  These discs, and this is a thing that most people looking at the
• 46:33
  symbols seem to miss, is that the discs, the Zershiba, they
• 46:38
  have access to, there's some very significant key differences
• 46:42
  from those discs and what we see on the symbol itself.
• 46:47
  And it's very seldom acknowledged how many
• 46:49
  distinctive differences there are between the Zershiba and the
• 46:53
  Sun Wheel. And I think that's and I think
• 46:58
  that needs to be explained because you, you, you can't just
• 47:01
  you, you, you, you can't just take these like 5 or 6 Azure
• 47:04
  shy. But and then, you know, someone
• 47:06
  is magically going to come up with the Walesberg symbol
• 47:10
  without nothing on its own. Like, yeah, that doesn't I think
• 47:15
  that's that's that, that would be like, that's an art.
• 47:17
  That's an art history thing. That doesn't happen.
• 47:19
  There has to be reasons to get from those discs to the actual
• 47:23
  design on the floor and to loop back to the sources I found one
• 47:31
  of these medieval manuscript images has a depiction of the
• 47:35
  round table on it that looks very shockingly like one of
• 47:39
  these Zeroshiba in a very rough fashion.
• 47:44
  So I considered this was a case of this is an image that would
• 47:48
  make Himmler and Filigoot I believe.
• 47:52
  I guess it would probably be the main designers of the symbol.
• 47:54
  This would be an image that would make them think that these
• 47:57
  Zeroshiba disks were meant to be depictions that look little
• 48:01
  round table depictions. So this was another particular
• 48:07
  significant link missing link in my Cos like, why would you use a
• 48:12
  Zeroshiba to depict the round table?
• 48:15
  And that this was in in this image here, as I think this is
• 48:17
  this is exactly the answer because he's looking at these
• 48:20
  manuscripts images where he sees things that he thinks are
• 48:24
  Zeroshiba and they're depicting round tables.
• 48:29
  Wow, yes, I think there was and I guess the other.
• 48:34
  So those are the the two main probably the two biggest points
• 48:38
  I got out of the other. The other round table images,
• 48:41
  they contribute other things. I think all the distinctiveness
• 48:45
  for the most part of the symbol can be explained from just a
• 48:49
  small number of these images that they would find in this one
• 48:52
  book that would have been published in 1938.
• 48:58
  So at the time it would probably have been all the rage and I
• 49:01
  guess. Yeah, hot off the press kind of
• 49:04
  thing. I can only imagine the reaction
• 49:07
  like these, these are people that they're, they're trying to
• 49:11
  mine like myth and history for I guess propaganda or other
• 49:14
  purposes. And then they they, they hear of
• 49:16
  this thing that has 400 medieval images in it.
• 49:20
  Yeah, yeah. It's like a goal.
• 49:23
  It's like you hit the jackpot kind of thing.
• 49:30
  Go ahead. I said maybe, perhaps in future
• 49:32
  times if I, if I, I don't know how to look for hard things, but
• 49:35
  but maybe there will be evidence somewhere out there like that
• 49:38
  the s s on and Urba had specifically discussed or had a
• 49:41
  copy of this book. I mean, that would be a thing to
• 49:45
  perhaps information I could hope to find someday in the direction
• 49:49
  of where I'm going with. This, yeah.
• 49:50
  Like that's what they're that's what they were basing it off of
• 49:52
  for sure, you know? Yeah, well, so have you, and
• 49:59
  maybe this is answered in your book or not, but it you know,
• 50:02
  I'm, I'm thinking here. So it's like, OK, so we have
• 50:06
  almost, you know, unequivocal confirmation that Himmler was
• 50:12
  looking at images of tables and based the the the the symbol in
• 50:16
  Wolvesburg Castle off of these things and that it's definitely
• 50:19
  a table. It's not a sun ever was ever has
• 50:23
  been. It was it was a table.
• 50:26
  Why? Why go into Arthurian legend
• 50:30
  with what the s s was doing right?
• 50:33
  Why? Why?
• 50:34
  What was the the significance or importance to frame what they
• 50:39
  were doing around this, these legends, these myths?
• 50:44
  OK. And that goes into the the other
• 50:47
  angle to approach this from and that's the context for the
• 50:50
  symbol. And that's the thing that, you
• 50:52
  know, all the blacks, all that, all that black sun nonsense over
• 50:56
  the years, it if it completely ignored the context in this
• 51:00
  castle in the sense of like, you know, OK, this, this symbol was
• 51:05
  found. It's in the north tower of this
• 51:07
  castle was never found anywhere else.
• 51:09
  It's becomes a matter of like, OK, what, what, what is this
• 51:11
  castle for? And then like, what is this
• 51:15
  tower for? And then what's this room for?
• 51:18
  And when you, when you put them all together, it it is, it is
• 51:23
  perfectly compatible with the idea of, of that symbol being
• 51:26
  the round table. OK, look, I guess the first
• 51:30
  level, like the castle itself. I mentioned this in the in my
• 51:34
  essay. Then when Himmler acquired it,
• 51:38
  it was meant to be what kind of an s s leadership school?
• 51:43
  But it's like, I used to look for like, you know, training the
• 51:45
  top S S leadership. And I guess it, I guess it takes
• 51:50
  him a while to get there 'cause like, I guess early on it's
• 51:53
  clearly the castle's being used for more prosaic things.
• 51:57
  He has some like scholarly researchers in there.
• 52:00
  I mean the, I mean, when he did, when he took over the castle,
• 52:03
  the north tower was basically a burned out shell 'cause it had
• 52:06
  been struck by lightning or something.
• 52:10
  I think it it takes a he's trying to turn it into like this
• 52:15
  kind of leadership school, like spiritual headquarters to the S
• 52:18
  S but I guess it takes a while and he never really gets he
• 52:21
  never gets it all the way finished before the war is over.
• 52:25
  Gotcha. That's, but even very early on,
• 52:28
  it's meant to go in that way. And then then their key part of
• 52:32
  the context is the north tower itself from the architectural
• 52:37
  plans that we see for the redesign of it.
• 52:40
  And actually, let me back up to the whole site.
• 52:45
  As you get into the early 40s, some very grandiose
• 52:49
  architectural plans are made-up for the site.
• 52:52
  It's not going to just be a castle, but it's going to be the
• 52:54
  castle would be at the center of a very sprawling complex that
• 52:58
  goes on the like the whole nearby village would have had to
• 53:02
  been completely resettled in order to realize the grand, the
• 53:07
  grandiose design for it. So this was, I mean, this is so
• 53:12
  this was meant to be an yes, yeah, there certainly I'm, I'm,
• 53:18
  I'm sure Handler is regularly accused of grandiosity and
• 53:21
  there's no shortage of that. That's yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 53:24
  It's kind of went. Hard in the paint with that,
• 53:26
  yeah. Then of course the north tower,
• 53:31
  from the architectural plans, we know them.
• 53:33
  There are names given to some of these rooms that were like it's
• 53:37
  partially or mostly remodeled. The lower one was in the
• 53:42
  basement area was called the Gruft or crypt.
• 53:45
  And then the ground floor 1 where the symbol is located is
• 53:48
  called the Obergruppenfuhrs Hall, which is commonly
• 53:52
  translated to something like generals Hall.
• 53:56
  This and this was the this was the second highest rank in the s
• 54:01
  s after Himmler himself for most of the time.
• 54:05
  And so these were, and this was so it was basically named yeah,
• 54:09
  it was named after an s s rank. And then the room above it was
• 54:13
  called the group Gruppenfurazal, which was named, which was the
• 54:16
  rank immediately below these generals.
• 54:21
  So what we have right there suggesting that these rooms in
• 54:24
  this tower are meant to be important specifically to the S
• 54:28
  S men who held these ranks. Yeah.
• 54:34
  And then and then the rest of the and we'll get back to this
• 54:38
  ground floor room. It's and then from pictures of
• 54:41
  it, it's it's been frequent to make the comparison to say that.
• 54:44
  And there is a there is a resemblance there that the room
• 54:47
  where the sun wheels located has a striking resemblance to the
• 54:51
  Grail hall from the parts fall opera.
• 54:55
  There's a late 1800s like depiction of that.
• 54:59
  I put that in the essay and that the there are so there's some
• 55:03
  striking resemblances of that to where the where the symbols
• 55:08
  located in Baiblesburg. So it's it's certainly not a new
• 55:14
  idea that it's thought that this looks like a the grail hall from
• 55:18
  that opera. And I think so ultimately I see
• 55:24
  these, I guess this side these parts of the context referring
• 55:27
  that this was to be kind of a the castle itself is a like
• 55:31
  spiritual headquarters to the order.
• 55:34
  And then the room itself is aimed toward like the top of the
• 55:38
  very top of the hierarchy. Yeah.
• 55:41
  And but then going the other direction, to take other
• 55:45
  context, is Himmler certainly had a fetish for using various
• 55:50
  kinds of, you could say mythological or symbolic
• 55:55
  motivation. Or is there the right word I'm
• 55:58
  looking for? Maybe just mythological is the
• 56:00
  word. But with I guess be we see in
• 56:07
  his writing pointed at his writings, his aim.
• 56:09
  He wanted to create, I guess, The Ultimate Warrior elite, the
• 56:14
  theme that keeps going over and over again and and he various
• 56:17
  some OK mythopoetic ways of motivating that we have heard
• 56:21
  about. There's these, the famous S S
• 56:23
  Death's head rings. Yeah, the skull and crossbones
• 56:28
  with the yeah. Yes, so there's so there's
• 56:30
  there's particular texts that go with these explain the symbols
• 56:34
  and I guess these are meant to and and then there's also
• 56:37
  daggers that certain members of the s s got.
• 56:41
  So I guess these these are, I guess, kind of the little
• 56:43
  examples for I guess these are meant to try and all this, both
• 56:48
  of these centre around the idea that it's meant to like inspire
• 56:52
  these people to be so I guess to to be a part of a warrior elite.
• 56:57
  And they're meant to be impressed upon that.
• 56:59
  They're supposed to occupy a high station as part of this
• 57:04
  warrior elite. And so these are, in my view,
• 57:09
  these are so these he put all this into like, even for like
• 57:13
  and for the daggers in the rings.
• 57:14
  These were like fairly low ranks.
• 57:17
  Lots of people could perhaps, and in the s s perhaps aspire to
• 57:21
  be considered worthy of one of these things at the time.
• 57:26
  So for me it became the idea of a natural progression that as,
• 57:30
  as you would go up the hierarchy, you would have
• 57:33
  something to say to the various other levels.
• 57:37
  And so I consider that then with the the sun wheel, this is meant
• 57:40
  to be the very highest level. Like the yeah, like yeah, yeah,
• 57:44
  you've reached the pinnacle of excellence, that sort of thing.
• 57:48
  Gotcha. And so the pinnacle here in this
• 57:52
  case, and it's certainly it's certainly no contradiction to
• 57:56
  Himmler's grandiosity ever Wells, is that his highest 2
• 58:00
  generals were ultimately meant to think of themselves as
• 58:03
  members of a new Knights of the Round Table.
• 58:08
  Yeah, that's where I was hearing you talk about this.
• 58:10
  It was like, yeah, it's like, you know, you're my Knights and
• 58:12
  this is our third, but it's our version of it kind of a thing.
• 58:17
  Yeah. Very interesting.
• 58:21
  I would say that the interesting part on this, I think is this is
• 58:23
  the part where I'm perhaps maybe I'm going at this high level.
• 58:28
  Himmler perhaps bit off a bit more than he could chew on this.
• 58:31
  I think with some of the other design elements, when you go
• 58:35
  down to the rings and stuff he has he's he's perhaps at that in
• 58:41
  that that that context succeeded in making the symbols
• 58:46
  subservient to his causes. But here he's trying to bite off
• 58:53
  something way bigger than himself.
• 58:54
  And I think that's what it comes down to.
• 58:57
  I don't think he's tried to invoke spiritual forces a bit
• 59:01
  bigger than himself by calling upon the Round table.
• 59:04
  I would say certainly the evidence of history shows that
• 59:09
  they certainly did not try to help save him.
• 59:12
  Yeah, well, it's almost antithetical in a way, if you
• 59:17
  look at like the whole purpose of the round table from
• 59:20
  Arthurian myth anyway, is that we're all equals.
• 59:25
  And, and, and, and the the s s and, and what was going on at
• 59:29
  the time. It's it's very hierarchical,
• 59:31
  which goes back to more, I think of the the war band warrior
• 59:36
  elite, you know, where your loyalties are and, and and stuff
• 59:41
  like that. It's it's there, there's levels
• 59:44
  and there's ranks, you know. Whereas in the Arthurian side of
• 59:50
  it it's you know, where Arthur and his Knights met at the table
• 59:54
  as equals. Ranks and stuff didn't matter.
• 59:59
  At least unless I'm miss. Unless I'm misunderstanding the
• 1:00:02
  the mythos behind it all. I guess it can be.
• 1:00:05
  I guess it's, yeah, more or less it can get to be alone and some
• 1:00:15
  of the various Arthurian tales you can get to be a bit some
• 1:00:18
  more fine distinctions on some of this.
• 1:00:22
  Well, yeah, sure, maybe, maybe so.
• 1:00:23
  I mean, obviously Arthur's king, some of the Knights have higher
• 1:00:29
  reputation. Maybe they they, they, you know,
• 1:00:32
  Lancelot and Galahad or whoever, you know, had more stuff talked
• 1:00:37
  about them than maybe some of the others in that way.
• 1:00:40
  But I don't know. I guess in, in specific, I'm
• 1:00:43
  thinking of a particular, a particular manuscript I did cite
• 1:00:47
  in the essay and mentioned. There's one of the tales, it's
• 1:00:51
  one of the Robert De Borean cycle tales, which he talks
• 1:00:54
  about like he says, I guess, yeah, I guess the 12th.
• 1:00:59
  Yeah, yeah. So basically that's where he
• 1:01:01
  establishes the number 12 or one of the places.
• 1:01:04
  Basically the, I guess the 12 peers will sit at the table with
• 1:01:07
  me. So he's establishing, I guess
• 1:01:09
  that's, I guess that's the closest part.
• 1:01:11
  There was like 12 nights at this round table that it's big enough
• 1:01:15
  to sit 12 people, but then there were far more people who would
• 1:01:18
  also carry the device or symbol of the Round table.
• 1:01:24
  Yeah. And be considered, I guess, part
• 1:01:26
  of this company? Yeah, part of the order, right.
• 1:01:31
  The because didn't wasn't Arthur Pendragon.
• 1:01:34
  So the order of the Pendragon was like, I guess the larger
• 1:01:37
  community or the larger collective, and then those 12
• 1:01:41
  elite had that had the privilege to to have a seat at the table
• 1:01:49
  through maybe higher virtuous deeds or renowned works of
• 1:01:53
  whatever, I don't know. So does in your view, like does
• 1:02:02
  as, as we talk about like more or less, you know,
• 1:02:05
  reinterpreting popular thoughts or ideas, whether they're backed
• 1:02:11
  in anything solid doesn't seem to be right.
• 1:02:13
  The the popular opinion of the Black Sun has been in in just
• 1:02:17
  this episode. It's it's kind of been shot
• 1:02:19
  down. Obviously you have a lot more
• 1:02:22
  time and research put into this proclamation through your book
• 1:02:27
  and and studies. So do you think like an
• 1:02:29
  interview? Does this, does this
• 1:02:31
  reinterpretation change how we nowadays should understand Nazi
• 1:02:39
  myth making the, the propaganda, the how they, they, they shape
• 1:02:43
  these things? I mean, does it, does it really
• 1:02:46
  change, you know, or does this reinterpretation change that or
• 1:02:51
  does it simply clarify what sources they were already
• 1:02:55
  distorting like they, they, they were starting off with this and
• 1:02:58
  then and bastardizing it or distorting it from the get go?
• 1:03:04
  Let's see. I think I'm, I think for the
• 1:03:09
  most part, I would say I, I would come back to what I would
• 1:03:11
  say. I would view it as a cautionary
• 1:03:12
  tale of, as I said, of attempting to use especially
• 1:03:18
  something like the Round Table because I guess for a long time
• 1:03:21
  it was, it was acknowledged that this, that the symbol was an
• 1:03:24
  abuse of the Zerashaiba archaeological finds, but it was
• 1:03:30
  just not, it was not, it was not realized that it's also an abuse
• 1:03:34
  of like a Round table imagery. Yeah, 'cause I mean, I want
• 1:03:39
  like, I hear what we're talking about now and I, like, I'm, I'm
• 1:03:43
  also like thinking outside a little bit going, well, who
• 1:03:46
  could potentially say, well, now Arthurian myth is Nazi bullshit,
• 1:03:51
  you know, or whatever. Like they, you know what I mean?
• 1:03:53
  Like how people can think that way, Like they'll, they'll,
• 1:03:55
  they'll, they'll take because the Nazis misappropriated
• 1:03:58
  something. Now all of a sudden that's the
• 1:04:01
  stigma. That's the problem with it.
• 1:04:03
  It's like, well, no, it wasn't that way to begin with.
• 1:04:06
  They just got their hands on it and distorted it and made it a
• 1:04:10
  problem. So we're discovering this now.
• 1:04:13
  We and and and I guess that kind of almost goes into the next
• 1:04:16
  thing is like, do you think that reclaiming or reframing these
• 1:04:19
  symbols is even possible? Let's see, I'm certainly on my
• 1:04:28
  certainly on a number of them. It's it would be a tall order.
• 1:04:31
  Yeah. I'm I'm very thankful that I
• 1:04:33
  have not had any kind of inspirations regarding
• 1:04:37
  swastikas. You're saying what I was
• 1:04:40
  thinking because that's that's that's been that's been like the
• 1:04:42
  biggest elephant in the room. You know, we know that that
• 1:04:47
  symbol is predates Nazi Germany by how many millennia, you know
• 1:04:53
  what I mean? In in into like Indo European
• 1:04:55
  sides of things. Like it's it's old as shit, you
• 1:04:59
  know, old as dirt, as they say. But yeah, that's one of those
• 1:05:02
  things where because of that, you know, period of history it
• 1:05:08
  yeah, I I personally don't even think that that's a a
• 1:05:11
  possibility to reclaim or reframe that particular symbol.
• 1:05:15
  You know, maybe, maybe it's maybe it's not so much that
• 1:05:18
  maybe it's more just understanding the understanding
• 1:05:22
  them historically and then the limit, you know, or, or the
• 1:05:27
  capacity, the limit of of what should be done with them.
• 1:05:32
  I think I'm, I guess there's yeah, I think there's, I would
• 1:05:37
  say with you certainly with, you know, trying to reclaim the
• 1:05:39
  swastika. I mean that, I mean, if you go
• 1:05:41
  100 hundreds enough years, I think it will eventually happen.
• 1:05:45
  Maybe not with any of our lifetimes or any of our
• 1:05:47
  descendants, but I mean. So.
• 1:05:51
  Well, I mean just even like go 100, I mean like and not very
• 1:05:56
  little. We like we like to imagine our
• 1:05:58
  modern world is having a certain permanence, but no, it's.
• 1:06:01
  Not no, that's a good point. Because when you do, when you
• 1:06:03
  put it all into perspective, we're we're talking about a
• 1:06:06
  symbol that had a history of thousands upon thousands of
• 1:06:09
  years that got twisted and bastardized and and distorted
• 1:06:14
  within the last 100. So proportionately speaking,
• 1:06:17
  relatively speaking, that ain't, that's not, that's not a whole
• 1:06:21
  lot. So what's another 100 years
• 1:06:23
  going to do, you know? So it's a big part of that.
• 1:06:26
  It's it's, it's left such a a stamp in in the the annals of
• 1:06:30
  history, as it were to make a difference.
• 1:06:34
  Yeah, certainly. I think with the certainly with
• 1:06:36
  the case of a swastika, this was a case where it became its, its
• 1:06:39
  national symbol. They put it on banners like
• 1:06:42
  marching it with armies and stuff.
• 1:06:44
  Yeah, I think there's there's that aspect too.
• 1:06:46
  But there's a lot of other things I think I think people go
• 1:06:50
  over maybe a little overboard for things that were like, I
• 1:06:56
  don't think you should raise it to that importance.
• 1:06:57
  Like, it's like, I mean, it's, it's the point where, you know,
• 1:07:00
  if like the Berlin dog catcher had like a special runic
• 1:07:04
  Insignia, probably people would be making a stink about it
• 1:07:07
  today. Yeah, well, I mean, you talk
• 1:07:10
  about runic symbols in the wolf's angle, right?
• 1:07:14
  Like that was, that was a thing that that appeared in some like
• 1:07:19
  folklore. Then again, the s s or, or, or
• 1:07:23
  the maybe not the s s, but you know, Nazis got a hold of it and
• 1:07:27
  then turned it into something of their, their, their propaganda
• 1:07:32
  or their, their symbolism. You know, I'm talking about
• 1:07:36
  right, The, the wolf angle, the wolf hook thing.
• 1:07:40
  Yeah, I've had, I've had those debates that it's a ancient
• 1:07:46
  runic symbol. No, it's not.
• 1:07:48
  So I think a lot of the, but as far as the as far as what I now
• 1:07:52
  call the now call the symbol as the round table sun wheel, I
• 1:07:56
  think a lot of, I mean, this was a case.
• 1:07:59
  I mean, what's happened to him in the post war period was I
• 1:08:02
  think this was largely the largely unfortunate result of
• 1:08:05
  not knowing what it was. I mean, this was not a symbol.
• 1:08:09
  It was never put on banners. It would never have been, never
• 1:08:12
  marched before armies. And then, I mean, we were
• 1:08:15
  probably never meant to see it like that, you know what I mean?
• 1:08:19
  If, I mean, like, I guess if the Nazis had won the war, I think
• 1:08:24
  maybe eventually they would have.
• 1:08:26
  The USS Generals might have been wearing the symbols and Insignia
• 1:08:31
  in that place. But like the castle itself, I
• 1:08:33
  mean, it would have never been a place that like any little
• 1:08:36
  people would have ever gotten to see.
• 1:08:38
  Yeah, because of their status, because of what it was intended
• 1:08:42
  for to begin with. Yeah, Yeah, I get what you're
• 1:08:46
  saying. Yeah, so it's in.
• 1:08:48
  It's very, it's turned out that now the now the symbol has been
• 1:08:51
  seen all over the place, and now it gets one of the weird ironies
• 1:08:55
  of history. It gets used in a lot of bizarre
• 1:08:57
  ways, even some outright ridiculous.
• 1:09:01
  Like I also believe in this past year.
• 1:09:05
  Or was it 2024? Not earlier than 2024.
• 1:09:09
  You've heard of Danzig? Yeah, of course.
• 1:09:12
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:09:14
  What the hell did he get put up on the cross for?
• 1:09:19
  What was it He. He he put this.
• 1:09:22
  Black it was. It was the same symbol, wasn't
• 1:09:24
  it? Yes, he put it on his tour
• 1:09:26
  merch. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:28
  Go up and see how the tour merch, you know, I mean, that
• 1:09:30
  looks, that looks especially ridiculous now when you realize
• 1:09:33
  the symbol's really the round table.
• 1:09:36
  It really does. It really does now, yes, like
• 1:09:40
  that's just kind of the cherry on top.
• 1:09:45
  That's hilarious. Do you think that there's like a
• 1:09:48
  an inherent danger in over sanitizing history in an attempt
• 1:09:52
  to distance ourselves from uncomfortable associations?
• 1:09:59
  OK, yes, I would say this probably works exactly like, I
• 1:10:06
  guess there's there's individual notions of like, like in
• 1:10:10
  psychology we talk of like repression and projection
• 1:10:13
  dynamics. Yeah, I think you know what you
• 1:10:16
  described there. This would be a good way.
• 1:10:17
  It's a good way to like whip it up on a larger societal level
• 1:10:21
  scale than rather just an individual phenomenon.
• 1:10:25
  Yeah, I, I tend to agree. So with that being said, you
• 1:10:31
  know, with, with, you know, knowing that there's facts, I
• 1:10:35
  mean history, what we know of things that have happened,
• 1:10:38
  right? Things that make people
• 1:10:41
  uncomfortable, right? There's, there's been seemingly
• 1:10:45
  a very recent angle to take or push to avoid that or even erase
• 1:10:53
  those uncomfortable things, things that make you
• 1:10:57
  uncomfortable, right? So what?
• 1:10:58
  What would your view be on the role that discomfort should play
• 1:11:04
  in serious spiritual and mythic study?
• 1:11:12
  Discomfort, there's certainly, I think there, there certainly
• 1:11:21
  needs to be a lot of that, but it becomes a balance.
• 1:11:26
  One has to be, I think, very careful with, I guess,
• 1:11:30
  interrogating one's discomfort because if you know, the
• 1:11:36
  discomfort, if it's not sufficiently interrogated, can
• 1:11:38
  just lead to a kind of repression, right?
• 1:11:43
  You if you shy away too much from some of the discomfort
• 1:11:46
  areas. And then also it's a case of you
• 1:11:50
  have to get to the things when you're ready.
• 1:11:52
  So I guess This is why I guess with, I guess the way certain
• 1:11:56
  like occult training programs go, because it involves like
• 1:11:59
  what Jung says, making the unconscious conscious.
• 1:12:03
  And I guess if you're doing this in a good structured pattern,
• 1:12:10
  you do kind of start with the easy stuff so that you build up
• 1:12:14
  and the you start with the easy and slow stuff.
• 1:12:16
  In certain practices, you build it up easy and slow.
• 1:12:19
  And so that way you don't so that you have basically safe and
• 1:12:25
  have minimal danger to yourself. And that's where you get things
• 1:12:28
  with the idea if you, if you go into the proper like Indian
• 1:12:33
  Hindu basis of this called the left hand path, this is about
• 1:12:38
  using extreme or dangerous methods to do these things much
• 1:12:43
  more quickly. And these, so these are like
• 1:12:46
  quicker paths to enlightenment, but they're also correspondingly
• 1:12:50
  more dangerous. Yeah, like, you're not gonna,
• 1:12:54
  you know, you're not gonna jump into the, you know, you're not
• 1:12:57
  going to climb Mount Everest without having walk around the
• 1:13:00
  Greenway a few times, you know what I mean?
• 1:13:01
  Like, you got to start somewhere.
• 1:13:02
  You can't just jump off into the to the to the abyss and expect
• 1:13:09
  to get anything out of it. You're probably going to get
• 1:13:10
  destroyed, Destroyed. I.
• 1:13:13
  Mean there there may be some people suited to some of these,
• 1:13:16
  like quicker dangerous paths, but think for the most that
• 1:13:20
  they're probably tend to be a rare minority.
• 1:13:22
  Right. Yeah, Yeah, I would tend to
• 1:13:25
  agree. So we're getting close.
• 1:13:28
  I was just checking our time and stuff.
• 1:13:29
  I want to be respectful. We've, we've gone a little bit
• 1:13:31
  over an hour, so I wanted to kind of move towards wrapping
• 1:13:34
  things up a bit. This has been really insightful.
• 1:13:36
  I, I just want to say, you know, for the folks that have listened
• 1:13:38
  and watched up to this point, I hope that you all have gotten,
• 1:13:43
  you know, that, that, that, that the wheels are starting to turn.
• 1:13:45
  You know, we just kicked off, you know, 2026 for goodness
• 1:13:49
  sake. You know, we, we're, we're,
• 1:13:50
  we're right. You know, we, we just kind of
• 1:13:54
  got into that, that full moon cycle.
• 1:13:55
  We're getting to that. I guess it's the waxing side of,
• 1:14:00
  of, of the moon cycle. But you know, Wolf moon, new
• 1:14:02
  month, new year, all this new stuff.
• 1:14:05
  We got Iric, you know, Skull the eagle talking about all these
• 1:14:08
  discoveries and these things that are that are making sense.
• 1:14:13
  So Iric, I wanted to ask you real quick too, you know, as
• 1:14:15
  someone who has worked for years with, you know, skull it poetry
• 1:14:22
  as a practicing heath and yourself symbolic materials,
• 1:14:26
  obviously studying things pertaining to symbols that get
• 1:14:30
  misstated or misused or misunderstood.
• 1:14:32
  You know, you you are creating content.
• 1:14:37
  You know, whether you call yourself a content creator.
• 1:14:39
  I don't personally, even though I'm creating content, I'm
• 1:14:40
  putting a podcast that I'm having guests, we're having
• 1:14:42
  discussions. You are publishing material.
• 1:14:45
  You're you're sharing knowledge. You're, you're putting yourself
• 1:14:49
  in the in, in the space of other content creators.
• 1:14:52
  You've been on other podcasts as well.
• 1:14:54
  So in your views, like what responsibilities do writers and
• 1:15:00
  other content creators have in kind of shaping the, the modern
• 1:15:07
  heathen movement or modern heathen understanding?
• 1:15:10
  What responsibilities do you think that folks like yourself
• 1:15:13
  and maybe other people out here that are doing things in this
• 1:15:16
  space, what their what responsibilities we have I.
• 1:15:21
  Think I would say certainly to I guess beyond just like the
• 1:15:31
  information being accurate, I guess that's, I guess that could
• 1:15:34
  be the kind of base level that. But also I think beyond just
• 1:15:39
  that, there certainly needs to be a lot of aiming higher, like
• 1:15:41
  the things can be inspiring and I think transformational.
• 1:15:46
  I think there's a sense of, I think, and not just creating
• 1:15:54
  content just for the sake of creating content, but I think
• 1:15:58
  the idea that there should be a vision behind it.
• 1:16:01
  Yeah. And I think certainly for many,
• 1:16:04
  many people perhaps may start without having a clear vision
• 1:16:08
  and and that that's perfectly all right.
• 1:16:10
  But I think at some point, probably everyone in this sort
• 1:16:15
  of milieu with, I guess, content creation and the the kinds of
• 1:16:20
  things that you and I do here probably needs to I guess ask
• 1:16:23
  themselves, I guess, what their vision is.
• 1:16:27
  Yeah. 'Cause it's certainly a long
• 1:16:29
  road and I think that's something that will help inspire
• 1:16:34
  one to keep motivated and keep producing more and better
• 1:16:38
  things. Yeah.
• 1:16:40
  And I know the purpose and and plan that purpose accordingly.
• 1:16:44
  I think that's a great summary of, you know, 'cause there's so
• 1:16:48
  many people out here doing different things and you know,
• 1:16:51
  it's, it's, you know, it can be daunting in a way.
• 1:16:53
  I think for, for folks to, to see, you know, and it's easy to
• 1:17:00
  compare also that that's a trap that I feel is, is easy to fall
• 1:17:04
  into is to, is to compare what other people are doing and their
• 1:17:08
  responses and, or their success in it.
• 1:17:11
  And to be like, well, I want, I want to do it.
• 1:17:13
  I want to do that and it's it, that's not what you should be
• 1:17:16
  doing it for, right? It, it, you can be inspired by
• 1:17:20
  what other people are doing. But but if, if what, what is,
• 1:17:24
  what is your purpose? All right.
• 1:17:26
  And to find that and to feed that and to be true in that and
• 1:17:29
  to and to really hone in on it. And part of it is, at least it
• 1:17:33
  has been for me, is to, you know, have those difficult kind
• 1:17:36
  of introspective moments and, and really be like, what am I
• 1:17:40
  even doing this for? Am I doing it for the clout?
• 1:17:43
  Am I doing it for the likes? Am I doing it for the views, for
• 1:17:45
  the subscribers, for the this, for that?
• 1:17:47
  Or am I doing it for the right, you know, why am I doing this?
• 1:17:51
  Really have those kind of difficult conversations with
• 1:17:54
  oneself and be genuine and be true.
• 1:17:59
  No, I'm glad you said that, man. Appreciate that.
• 1:18:05
  So OK, we're going to wrap things up.
• 1:18:06
  I got, first of all, was there anything else that we may have
• 1:18:09
  missed or glossed over that you wanted to dive into a bit more
• 1:18:12
  before we kind of go into just more of some casual rapid fire,
• 1:18:17
  what's on your mind kind of thing when I ask you a question
• 1:18:19
  before we wrap this up? Was there anything that you had
• 1:18:22
  that I maybe didn't give you enough space or time to to go
• 1:18:24
  over before we get into that? Let's see.
• 1:18:28
  OK. I think we got into most of it.
• 1:18:37
  Because we did a great job, man, for, you know, for just a little
• 1:18:39
  over an hour. I'm, I'm thoroughly satisfied
• 1:18:43
  with, with places that we went. We didn't really go too far into
• 1:18:47
  the weeds with things. It was it was a good flow, but I
• 1:18:50
  and I appreciate it. Thing to mention I guess on my
• 1:18:55
  with regards to other books because I I did publish 2.
• 1:18:58
  I guess I'll show the other one real quick here.
• 1:19:02
  Yes, this was a. Shining Mead, yes.
• 1:19:06
  Yes, this was a a dual release. This is a poetry book, so I
• 1:19:12
  guess. And then many of the poems in
• 1:19:15
  Shining Mead are in fact inspired directly by some of the
• 1:19:18
  essays in a cult Mead. OK, so I do have an essay on the
• 1:19:22
  round or I do have a poem on the round table Sunwheel.
• 1:19:25
  And then there's poems for other things like on the Moldavite and
• 1:19:28
  then the Eagle and Guard. And I do consider it in many
• 1:19:31
  ways a companion book. So it's like I said, it's the,
• 1:19:36
  it's the poetic parallel to the, I guess, prose messages and a
• 1:19:40
  cult made. Gotcha.
• 1:19:42
  So you recommend getting them both to get the most out of it?
• 1:19:48
  I guess so. Very cool.
• 1:19:52
  Yeah, man, I'm definitely we're going to put the links for for
• 1:19:54
  both of those publish publications down in the show
• 1:19:58
  notes or description. So folks.
• 1:20:00
  Be sure to, if this is something that that appeals to and you
• 1:20:03
  want to check out more of, just find it down there or over here,
• 1:20:07
  wherever it is. All right, Eric, as we go into
• 1:20:11
  wrapping things up, we're just going to do some random rapid
• 1:20:15
  fire questions, right? First thing that comes to your
• 1:20:18
  mind, you don't have to put too much thought into.
• 1:20:20
  It's really just meant to be a fun sort of thing that we as as,
• 1:20:25
  as we wrap it up. So as a poet, as a skaldic eagle
• 1:20:29
  yourself, Odin or Broggy? Odin.
• 1:20:40
  Favorite Arthurian figure? Parts of all.
• 1:20:46
  OK, if you could recommend one book that every heathen should
• 1:20:52
  read, even if they would argue with it, talking about that
• 1:20:57
  whole discomfort thing, facing the hard things.
• 1:21:00
  If there was one source or one piece of literature or one book
• 1:21:04
  that every heathen should face or read, even if they disagree
• 1:21:07
  with it. What would you say?
• 1:21:12
  OK, I'll have to qualify that too.
• 1:21:14
  Like I guess some the modern authors 'cause like obviously we
• 1:21:18
  should, we should all read the others, but OK to, to narrow
• 1:21:21
  that down to specifically, I guess modern authors writing on
• 1:21:24
  heathen read. OK, I'll go with this one.
• 1:21:30
  OK, OK, Edrin Forrest in a Book of Truth.
• 1:21:34
  Oh, wow, That is very that, that's funny you should say
• 1:21:39
  that. I yeah, that that is a that is a
• 1:21:41
  controversial kind of contested read or or source, if you will.
• 1:21:45
  So yeah, OK, very cool. Good to good to hear you say
• 1:21:50
  that symbolism, right? Is there a symbol that you think
• 1:21:54
  gets most misunderstood within heathen spaces?
• 1:22:00
  Most misunderstood within heathen spaces.
• 1:22:16
  OK, I'm I'm not really sure I'm. I know it's it's random, but
• 1:22:21
  it's more deep than random I guess.
• 1:22:23
  I guess. I mean like I guess symbols
• 1:22:27
  within heathen spaces. I mean beyond, I mean beyond the
• 1:22:31
  main 2. I mean like I guess the hammer
• 1:22:33
  or the volknot. I guess that's what I think of
• 1:22:36
  the main ones. I guess maybe you'd have to go
• 1:22:40
  to like maybe the equal armed quadrilateral sun wheel or
• 1:22:44
  something like that. Sure, I guess.
• 1:22:47
  Obviously, obviously. I'm the opinion of course, that
• 1:22:50
  of course the Babelsberg symbol does not in any way count as a
• 1:22:54
  heathen symbol at this. Point right, but it tries to get
• 1:22:57
  like people in the heathen space try to and they have yeah, kind
• 1:23:01
  of get thrown in there. So we're talking about that now.
• 1:23:03
  Obviously it was kind of the theme of the of the podcast, but
• 1:23:06
  yeah, I can see the Vulcanate too being, you know, getting an
• 1:23:10
  honorary mention, as it were. So for you, you're the best
• 1:23:15
  places that you find to think deeply to get really into that
• 1:23:22
  inspirational mind. You know where when the meat is
• 1:23:26
  flowing, when that when that when the when the author arrear
• 1:23:28
  is really flowing kind of thing. Where is that space for you?
• 1:23:33
  Forest library late night desk, sitting by the river, walking
• 1:23:37
  down the road. Like what's?
• 1:23:38
  What's your most inspirational place to think deeply?
• 1:23:44
  OK. I would say I'm OK, I guess.
• 1:23:48
  Yeah, just out on the front porch, perhaps with a drink or
• 1:23:52
  and a nice cigar. My man, my man, like I, I, I
• 1:24:00
  could, you know, I like a pipe. I do love cigars, but man, I
• 1:24:02
  like a good pipe too. So kind of on that same vein.
• 1:24:06
  But yeah, just kind of sitting outside in that.
• 1:24:10
  Are you a morning or an evening kind of thinker?
• 1:24:12
  You know, do you, do you get your do you get your juices
• 1:24:15
  flowing when you know in the early parts of the day or in the
• 1:24:18
  when things kind of wind down in the latter part if.
• 1:24:25
  There seems to be a tendency toward the evening, though.
• 1:24:27
  I feel like you're going to be all over the place at times.
• 1:24:30
  Yeah, yeah. When inspiration hits, it hits,
• 1:24:33
  right? Doesn't matter really what time
• 1:24:35
  of day or night or anything. Like you might just wake up in
• 1:24:38
  the middle of the night sometimes and be like, I need to
• 1:24:40
  write this down or I need to, you know, record this or
• 1:24:43
  something. This is, you know, more of a
• 1:24:49
  personal question, so feel free to answer it if you want to or
• 1:24:52
  not. But it was if there's one thing
• 1:24:54
  that people get completely wrong about you, maybe a
• 1:24:58
  misunderstanding or or or or whatever, what's one thing that
• 1:25:01
  people tend to just get completely wrong about you?
• 1:25:13
  That that may actually be a tough one.
• 1:25:18
  I can. I think I certainly have the
• 1:25:21
  sense that there probably, there probably is a good answer to
• 1:25:24
  this question as to what people get completely wrong about me,
• 1:25:28
  but it may be that I don't act that I'm not.
• 1:25:30
  I don't actually know what it is, and it would be helpful if I
• 1:25:33
  did. Yeah, man, 'cause I don't know,
• 1:25:37
  Like, you know, we all have this and I think this is maybe just
• 1:25:41
  human nature, but I think we we kind of posture ourselves in
• 1:25:45
  certain ways when we're interacting with a certain
• 1:25:48
  audience. You know, for people that don't
• 1:25:52
  know me, they only know what they have seen or heard from my
• 1:25:56
  content online. And you also create content, but
• 1:26:02
  in a much more behind the scenes, less face kind of, you
• 1:26:05
  know, like you've been on some podcast, mine included.
• 1:26:08
  I think you were on the Northern Northern mythology podcast once
• 1:26:11
  too, right? I.
• 1:26:12
  Think actually twice, Yes. Twice, yeah.
• 1:26:15
  So I mean, you've had FaceTime, obviously, but that's, that's,
• 1:26:19
  that's, that's, that's one of those things that I think about
• 1:26:20
  like, man, like people that catch this stuff, maybe it's,
• 1:26:24
  you know, through listening or watching, you know, they're
• 1:26:26
  really only, they're only getting that a certain
• 1:26:31
  percentage of ourselves, you know, because we talk in, in a
• 1:26:35
  way or we posture in a way, we present ourselves in a way as
• 1:26:39
  genuine. I feel as, as we want, as, as we
• 1:26:42
  choose to be. I, I believe I like to count
• 1:26:45
  myself as being very a genuine person.
• 1:26:47
  What you see is what you get, but you're also going to get a
• 1:26:52
  different version of me in person.
• 1:26:54
  You know, if I get to sit on your porch, I, I can and have a
• 1:26:57
  drink and smoke a cigar with you, right?
• 1:26:59
  Well, it'll be a different exchange than it is, you know,
• 1:27:02
  long distance on screen or at an event, you know, where you're
• 1:27:07
  having a, you know, you're, you're, you're speaking on
• 1:27:09
  something at an event or whatever the case may be.
• 1:27:11
  So it's an interesting question. I think to, to think about, you
• 1:27:14
  know, how we're, how we're presenting ourselves, how we're,
• 1:27:21
  yeah, just in the public space. So man, I do appreciate your
• 1:27:28
  time and being here for the last hour and some odd minutes.
• 1:27:33
  I think it's been like what hour and hour, almost hour and a half
• 1:27:36
  now. So yeah, we're going to go ahead
• 1:27:38
  and, and, and wrap things up before we do though, I, I did
• 1:27:41
  mention before that all of the links for where people can find
• 1:27:44
  your book, your website. I think it's, it's Skaldic
• 1:27:49
  eagle.com. But is there anything that you
• 1:27:52
  would like to plug for people to get a hold of you or to follow
• 1:27:56
  your projects that I didn't mention already or that we can
• 1:28:00
  include in the show notes and description for for the
• 1:28:03
  listeners and viewers? Well, yes, I guess, yeah, you
• 1:28:05
  said, I guess the main, I guess kind of the central hub for my
• 1:28:11
  net presence. It's the site, the Skaldic
• 1:28:13
  eagle.com. I'll have all that things.
• 1:28:16
  And I guess also, as I said, yes, there's the books.
• 1:28:19
  I could be the my my available Spurge essay is also available
• 1:28:23
  as a stand alone essay purchase. So they'll be giving you that
• 1:28:28
  link as well for that. But I think yeah, the main one
• 1:28:32
  to like to get to find to get all my stuff.
• 1:28:35
  And I'm even including in the root source to go all the things
• 1:28:39
  including like American food. I just start with the skull of
• 1:28:41
  eagle.com. Yeah, yeah, that's the last
• 1:28:45
  thing we talked about when you came on the last time was the
• 1:28:47
  American Futh Arch. So yeah, there'll be a link for
• 1:28:49
  that. You can watch that episode or
• 1:28:50
  listen to that folks. But everything that I Rick is
• 1:28:55
  involved with, yes, the Scully eagle.com links for that will be
• 1:28:59
  in the show notes in description below.
• 1:29:01
  So check it all out. I Rick, thank you very much for
• 1:29:04
  your time. Stick around for just a moment
• 1:29:06
  as I wrap this up. Won't be taking much more of
• 1:29:08
  your time, but we're going to go ahead and sign everybody off
• 1:29:10
  here. So for the folks that have tuned
• 1:29:12
  in for episode 1 of season 7, I hope you've all enjoyed this.
• 1:29:17
  Do be sure to show your support with what Irek is doing in any
• 1:29:21
  way that you can. Get his books, visit his
• 1:29:23
  website, do all the things that you can to support what he's
• 1:29:27
  doing. And if you're listening to this,
• 1:29:29
  head over to patreon.com/midgard Musings.
• 1:29:31
  Become a patron at the Carl tier.
• 1:29:33
  It's just a dollar pledge for watching these videos.
• 1:29:35
  It's a great way to show your support and bring your friends,
• 1:29:39
  bring your kids, bring your parents, bring your pets, bring
• 1:29:41
  whoever wants to shed a dollar here or there.
• 1:29:44
  But thank you all very much for your support.
• 1:29:45
  It's been great. Thank you, Eric, for being here.
• 1:29:48
  So for everybody else, you've been great.
• 1:29:51
  Here's the next, the next however many episodes of season
• 1:29:55
  7 that we have coming on. Until we talk to each other
• 1:29:58
  again, may the gods continue to notice you and may your
• 1:30:02
  ancestors smile upon you. And we'll see you in the next
• 1:30:05
  one. None.