The Sacred Flame
The Sacred Flame Podcast explores our ancestral story-worlds: the ancient foundation narratives that helped guide our ancestors in life. In this podcast, we reinvigorate the modern world with those stories and bring us back to a place of balance through an archaic revival, a new force that is sourced from the old, forgotten knowledge that was once transmitted in living stories in sacred settings. We gather by the sacred flame and revive the old ways of creating community in the world; by listening to nature and reestablishing the ties that let us realize that we are connected with everything that exists.Our ancestors knew that cultivating the right relationships with the other-than-human beings in the world is the key to living a good life. In this podcast, I am retelling and reconnecting the Nordic story-world with our current reality and offering my thoughts on how you can use these stories to reflect on what it means to exist in the modern world.
The Sacred Flame
The Last Elder: Snorri Sturluson and the Fantasy of Heaven and Hell
In this episode I take a dive into the life of the creator of parts of the Nordic story-world, Snorri Sturluson. We'll look at his life, his intentions, his interests, and some of the things he did that changed the Nordic story-world forever. I consider Snorri the last elder of the Nordic story-world. He was the last elder for good and for bad. He was one of the last few who carried so much knowledge of the Nordic story-world in his head and could work with it creatively. He also belonged to that last generation of Icelanders who kept the flame alive. But as much as we can thank him for writing down some of the Nordic story-world, so that we would have it today, he was also of that generation of Icelanders who had lost their way and stopped caring about the future of their children as much as their own wealth and fame. He belonged to that generation of Icelanders who left tradition behind to join the Norwegian kingdom and a new world order. The result was devastating to Icelandic culture, the new generations, and the Nordic story-world. It was a loss of intergenerational care, intergenerational storytelling, and continuity. It was a cultural Ragnarok for Iceland. Today, we're faced with a similar cultural Ragnarok as the bonds between generations are failing. We are also faced with a climate catastrophe Ragnarok for those same reasons.