Yngona Desmond

[yngona]

I am Vinland’s Volva, an honorary title of respect and recognition, gifted me by Sámi Noaide (‘shamans’; This does not make me a Sámi, just recognized by them).  I have been a Heathen for 36+ years, of the Euro-tribe: Heithni.  Currently, my tribe consists of some 200+ folk living mostly in the Southeastern United States.

I am a spiritual traveler and sacred pilgrim, visiting and honoring sacred sites across
continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia.  I have lived in Europe and spent extensive
time in Ireland, Italy, Spain and Wales.  In 2005, I lived and learned, laughed and loved,
with Sámi Noaide in Finland.
 
At all times, my overall focus is on the Folksoul of my people.  Secondly, it is on education.  My other interests include: the active monitoring of Ley-lines; the use of Galdr (chant/charm) to
re-tune and re-align sacred sites; aiding local Guardians with energy clean up; the
study and praxis of ancient energy healing techniques – or, Forn Þreifa; and the support of other cultural groups seeking to maintain their heritage and traditions. 
 
Having never been Christian, my worldview is unique in that I have a deeply rooted
connectedness and profound sense of understanding to the seemingly impenetrable depths
of Heathen mysticism, Seiðr philosophy, and Female Mystery Traditions.
 
I am the founder of the Georgia Heathen Society and the Southlands Tribal Alliance; a
Brother within the Brotherhood of the Sacred Hunt (BOSH); a fellow of the American
Academy of Religion, and member of the World Congress of Religions.  I have a masters
in Religious Studies and a doctorate in Philosophy.  My book, _Völuspá - Seiðr as Wyrd
Consciousness_, is considered the “definitive??? guide on Seiðr study and praxis.
http://tinyurl.com/h75d6
 
I am a full-time writer and lecturer, have just completed two more books, and maintain a blog here:
http://vinlands-volva.blogspot.com/
 
My husband Tim and I are the proud Lord and Lady of Heimat Hof – the only 501 (c)
Heathen ‘church’ in the United States (located in Georgia).
 
For additional information, my email address is:
yngona@yahoo.com

Live Deliberately!
Yngona Desmond

[Freija]

I am Vinland’s Volva, an honorary title of respect and recognition, gifted me by Sámi Noaide (‘shamans’; This does not make me a Sámi, just recognized by them). 

Hi and welcome!

Didn´t know that the Samis had a "Völva" as their beliefs were quite different to other people in Scandinavia and Finland. Never heard about that, so...interesting. Could you tell us more about it?

[Barnaby_McEwan]

At all times, my overall focus is on the Folksoul of my people.

http://www.ecauldron.com/reconnorse.php

Curiously, many people who would turn away anyone deemed insufficiently Northern European from joining their Kindred would adamantly deny any racism. My theory is that a significant number of people have managed to internalize the idea "racism = bad", without this preventing them from behaving in a discriminatory fashion towards others! Or, a dear friend puts it, "Identifying as folkish is a way of saying that you're a racist without actually admitting to yourself that you're a racist."

Take your phony whites-only religion and shove off to Stormfront, where it appears people have heard of you:

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:b4mvRJKzOCYJ:www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php/siedr-357493p3.html&strip=1

Don't even think of sneaking back here with a sock-puppet ID and trying that "Heathens are just proud of our ancestors" bullcrap. Every neo-nazi enjoys putting on a hurt expression and saying the same thing.

[Kevin]

Brotherhood of the hunt, eh?  sounds like poachers to me  LOL

The Heathen Society of Georgia - hmmm, sounds like a gay chain gang if you ask me doing hard time for fraud and other nefarious acts

this can't be real, I just came across it    what a laugh!!

[educatedindian]

You might not be that far off the truth Kevin. When I was in Sweden there happened to be a march of neo Nazis near where I was speaking. I was amazed at their wimpiness. They actually had a gathering listening to their supposed traditional music, which turned out to be corniest soft folk music I'd ever heard. Imagine a very limp version of Kum Bay Yah, sung in Swedish. And this bunch of neo-Nazis (maybe 100 or so) were all holding hands listening to it...I thought I was in a Monty Python movie or something.

Racist pagans looking to fantasies about NDNs for validation is as old as Hitler's love of Karl May books. I can't think of any other reason she'd come here.

She's also scheduled to be the honored guest at a pagan "Gathering of Tribes" run by Betsy Ashby. The older members will remember Ashby as a seething racist and big fan of Brooke Medicine Ego, so big a fan she tried to shut us down repeatedly for daring to criticize that fraud, even using a sleazy lawyer who ran and hid when we wanted to get him disbarred for his unethical tactics. Looking at the festival this year, Ashby no longer claims to have any NDN shamans in the lineup. Maybe she learned her lesson, or more likely no NDNs in the area want anything to do with her. So now she's using "folkish" types like Desmond who have appeal for Stormfront racists.

That claim of having over 200 members in her "tribe" looks to be wishful thinking. Probably the number of people who have ever expressed any interest. Their own website says they have seating for 30 to 60 people.

[ska]

What's with all the gay-bashing?  ska

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Whoa there. Gay-bashing? I think there's a difference between that and highlighting the homoerotic undertones common to ideas of maleness in the overlapping nazi and 'heathen' scenes.

[educatedindian]

NAFPS has long had gay members, and does not tolerate prejudice against them or any others.

Just like with Yeagley, I enjoy holding white racists up to ridicule for their hypocrisy. If you can't make fun of Nazis holding hands, what's the world coming to?

[Moma_porcupine]

I know less than next to nothing about what is being discussed here, but I guess that puts me in the position of being able to say I'm not sure what is being said  ...

Is everyone who uses the term Volva or folksoul , involved with a group that excludes people who aren't White?

Is the term "folksoul" the same as the term "folkish"?

I can see wanting people who really do have the heritage a group represnts, and not people who are pretending. This would only seem  racist if say someone who was 1/2 Black and 1/2 Northren European was excluded from participating . 

Just because some people abuse this , or some White supremacists mention the book this person wrote, would not , in itself mean the group is racist , anymore than finding a bunch of exploiters of Native traditions who mention a book about Fools Crow means that Fools Crow was an exploiter.

Someone reading through this who hasn't got a clue , such as myself , may get the impression what has been said here is not warrented by the facts that were presented. I know a few times stuff has ome up like this and Ihave thought maybe people who said it were just over the top, but as i learned more i found out you all knew what you were talking about. I am guessing this is the same sort of situation .. Just, it hasn't been clearly explained to the average uninformed reader .

And I think maybe Ska was just refering to a few possibly disrespectful comments aimed at gays that have been made over the last couple weeks... by various people . None were as obviously disrespectful as some I have seen edited here in the past but they did make me wonder ...

[frederica]

I looked up 'folksoul' when it started and here is what I came up with. http://marklander.ravenbanner.com/faithhw.html    After that I let it alone, was over my head  or I lost interest. I don't know how the person was using the term. But if someone read the literature and said it was racist, I might take their word for it.  It's kinda like people thinking eugenics and genetics are the same thing, and a lot of people do, as that is what they want to believe. But is the leader believes something, you can count on a certain number of people following. I have never heard of them and do not know anyone that has.  So I have to rely on people that have a background in that or those practices.

[Barnaby_McEwan]

I got a 'not found' error for that link, Frederica.

Anyone curious about whethe Desmond identifies as 'folkish' can take a look at these posts on her blog:

http://vinlands-volva.blogspot.com/2006/05/folkish-versus-universalist-if-value.html

http://vinlands-volva.blogspot.com/2006/05/folkish-versus-universalist-part-two.html

http://vinlands-volva.blogspot.com/2006/05/folkish-versus-universalist-part-three.html

http://vinlands-volva.blogspot.com/2006/06/folkish-seir-versus-universalist.html

They feature the kind of bile often found in the writings of neo-pagan sectarians. In this context 'universalist' means Nordic neo-pagans who don't put enough emphasis on what everyone else thinks of as race. Those universalist fools let anyone in! If they're not careful they'll pollute the purity of the, er, northern European heritage. Desmond's message is 'folkish good, not-folkish bad'.

'Folk' in this context is an approximation of the German word Volk, which has unsavoury connotations not present in the English word folk. Desmond and her mead-quaffing buddies are using it in a technical sense which includes those connotations, because they don't have a problem with them. Race would be a more honest translation, but that would cause severe cognitive dissonance.

'Folk-soul' is a term used, rather coyly these days, by followers of the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner. It is a translation of the German word volkseele, or 'national soul'. Steiner's racist consmology is populated with these imaginary beings, which are supposed to guide the destiny of nations. Before he became the leader of an occultist sect, Steiner was a racist agitator in the pre-WW1 pan-Germanist movement. His antisemitism and racism survived the transition from hack to guru intact; he claimed that if white women read 'negro novels' they would give birth to 'mulattos', that 'the continued existence of the Jewish race is a mistake of world history', etc etc.

Nowadays his followers, like the more hypocritical 'folkish heathens', waste huge amounts of bandwidth arguing that it is not racist to assign differing spiritual characteristics based on, for example, the colour of someone's skin or their ancestors' religion.

I can see wanting people who really do have the heritage a group represnts, and not people who are pretending.

The 'northern European heritage' these groups claim to represent is simply a code phrase for 'white', and that's how it works in practice in those groups which are not openly racist (the openly racist don't bother with code phrases). They'll look applicants up and down and see if they pass as sufficiently white. The pseudo-archaic slang, the beard-growing, the dress-up-box-raiding is really dressing up an attempt to extend modern constructions of whiteness and more generally 'conservative values' back into the distant past. In the more recent past there's too much nasty stuff associated with 'Nordicness' which nice people don't like thinking about while they're enjoying being white.

Finally, WTF is someone doing talking about 'Vinland' on an Indian forum? That's an expression of white ownership.

[Moma_porcupine]

Thanks for providing more of a background for your comments Barnaby. What you are saying now makes a lot better sense to those of us who haven't done as much research in that area as you have .

 

[frederica]

humm, I get "Some thought on the Basis Premises of the Faith", by Huikar.  http://marklander.ravenbanner.com/faithhw.html

[Ingeborg]

Is the term "folksoul" the same as the term "folkish"?

It is a translation of the German word 'Volksseele' and thus not the same as the term folkish. The link Frederica provided explains the term and a few others; the text starts, however, with an explanation of how the different 'races' developed differing characters due to their respective environments. This is in short what part of the (Neo)Nazi movement proclaims in order to ban imigration totally: people from other parts of the world cannot adjust to 'our' environment, any attempt to do so must fail, so everyone should stay where they were born and especially not mix.
Terms like folk/Volk (=people) or Northern European are also used in favour of more outspoken terms which will instantly denote a racist background, and in order to avoid a respective identification by others.

Whenever one sees a person claiming to be a heathen and mixing various Northern European traditions plus a few German words, then it's high time for the BS detector to ring loud and clear.

The Desmonds did not choose a Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish term for their 'church' but a German one, but claim they follow Northern traditions. 'Heimat' is the German word for 'homeland', 'Hof' is German for 'farm' and can also mean 'court'. I suppose we see the Desmonds' titles as 'Lord' and 'Lady' simply because they don't know the German translations.... In fact they know even less, as their version of 'Heimat Hof' is spelled wrong.

When you google for Ms Desmond's name, you get 11 pages of results, and google deletes 7 results; when you google 'folksoul', 10 links out of 5 pages are deleted. Ms Desmond also owns a blog named "Thuleheim" and this name is not all that unsuspicious (e.g. cf Thule Society), and once again it is a German word. The google search also comes up with several contributions in yahoogroups and blog entries in which Ms Desmond prefers to speak of Mr Desmond as 'meine man' or 'meine mann' (although spelling did improve somewhat, she still doesn't get it correct, plus that, given he claims the title of a lord, he should be 'mein Gatte' - wonder whether we'll see hasty adjustments in her blogs - LOL), and in her blogs, she refers to various heathen clans with the term 'Sippe' - again this is a German term. She even brags about having furnished her home with a German corner bench (which are viewed as really outdated over here...). Right, all this fondness for things German or German terms means something when one claims to be into Northern European religion.


Here's an excerpt from Ms Desmond's bio:
http://yngona.livejournal.com/profile

Yngona Desmond was raised to value both Celtic folklore and Theosophy. For over 35 years she has lived, studied, and taught a mystical and spiritual lifestyle. Independently, she has been a student and practitioner of yogic traditions since childhood.

So a change from Celtic folklore to Germanic Volksseele must have taken place some time. Theosophy has been covered at NAFPS before, especially its racist concept of so-called root races according to which American ndn nations are doomed to vanish while certain others are seen as 'superior'.

[frederica]

I checked with the Southen Poverty Law Center. They are not on any active hate group or Neo-Nazi lists. So they are just to themselves right now.   http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp#s=GA           http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/type.jsp?DT=9 We had someone here last year that was "leader' of a stone age tribe from Northern Germany.  Valley of the Moon People or something. An article was posted that she gave a speech in Germany and was confronted with the same thing by someone in the audience.