Ásatrú

Ásatrú, also known sometimes as Odinism, has its basis in Germanic Neopaganism but sprouts tentacles off in many different directions with many different factions, many of whom don't always see eye-to-eye.

In very general terms, Asatru is a polytheistic faith, centered around worship of the ancient Norse Gods and Goddesses. Many of the names of these gods and goddesses remain part of our modern culture, such as in the days of the week: Wednesday is Woden's (Odin/Wotan's) Day, Thursday is Thor's Day, Friday is Freya's Day. Ásatrú - the true Ásatrú - is open to everyone, regardless of gender, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, language, sexual orientation, or any other divisive criteria.

The current leading Ásatrú organization seems to be Ásatrú Alliance, which succeeded something called the Asatru Free Assembly which was also succeeded by something else called the Asatru Folk Assembly. According to Wikipedia, the Asatru Alliance was founded by Michael J. Murray, the former Vice-President of something else yet again, called The Odinist Fellowship.

Confused? Me too. It's like trying to sort out a bucket of nightcrawlers. At night. Let's not even get into the more hardcore "Odinist" types like The Odin Brotherhood, The Odinic Rite, The Odinist Fellowship, Holy Nation of Odin, and Wotanism.

The problem with Asatru/Odinism is that it's too "open source" a concept - the danger with starting a religious organization that you can't maintain strict control over is that before you know it, all kinds of kooks are starting rogue versions of your religion, and using it for unsavory purposes that you didn't intend. And so we have people out there calling themselves Odin worshippers who couldn't be more different from one another, ranging from young left-wing hippie girls to ultra-right-wing shaven-headed nutcases. Still others are merely attracted to the swords and the costumes and the mead, and would probably be better off visiting a Rennaissance Fair than changing their religion.

Because of its anglo-centric nature, it has attracted both gentle Wiccans and psychotic "White Power" supremacists - neither of which, needless to say, want to have anything to do with each other. For the most part, the peaceful ones just want to be left alone, and it's the stupid skinheads with skulls tattooed on their necks who stir up trouble and give the larger body of Ásatrú a major PR liability.

It's enough to make an Ásatrú practitioner throw up their hands and say "to hell with it, I'm just going to go over here and start my own personal Scandinavian-flavored thing and stop using the names "Asatru" or "Odinist" entirely".

And many, in fact, are increasingly doing just that, preferring to keep it vague and unaffiliated, and just calling themselves "heathen" or "pre-Christian" and leaving it at that. Many keep their groups tightly-knit among a close circles of family and friends, and have moved past the idea of belonging to over-arching all-encompassing organizations where you end up side by side with people whose reasons for interest in all things Germanic may be more sinister than yours.

Kentucky has a local Ásatrú chapter located in Hazard, called the Kentucky Ásatrú Alliance. According to their website (which is currently offline for some reason):

"More and more people are moving away from universal religions that assert their path as the "one and only right way" for all humanity, and returing to the tribal paths of their own ancestors. These ancestral "folk ways" are after all, an expression of the totality of the people who developed [with] them as ways of understanding and expressing existence. Since much of our being (both physical and psychological) is passed on to us from our ancestors, their natural spirituality is surely the most compatible with our own instinctual being."

Another site of theirs, FrithNet, is still online but doesn't look to have been updated in over a year. And it in turn links to a worldwide Ásatrú auction site called FeeFum, which shows a little more activity, but not much, and the items being auctioned are predominantly jewelry. And yet another site, Samfelag, ostensibly for networking, also seems little-used.

Does this mean that the Ásatrú faith is in decline? No, far from it. I'd say it most likely means that the kind of people drawn to true Ásatrú would be the kind of people who don't spend a whole lot of time fiddling around on the internet - and for that, I say more power to 'em. Then again, they are on Facebook, which is unfortunate.)

Other Ásatrú organizations around the world seem to still exist - such as Asatru Alliance in Arizona, Asatru Folk Assembly (though their site still says 2008 at the bottom), The Troth in Connecticut, Irminsul Ættir in Washington state, and The Canadian Asatru Portal, who provide an exhaustive array of further Asatru links here.


Given that most seem to be sticklers for historical authenticity, something tells me they're not going to like the upcoming Thor movie, which bases itself on the highly off-model Marvel Comics version and takes it even further off-model.

Kentucky's Own Hell

Many people have heard about the infamous underground coal mine fire in Centralia, PA, which has been continuously raging since 1962 and necessitated the total evacuation of the city. It is currently considered unstoppable and is burning for miles under the surface. The Centralia underground fire has been the subject of numerous documentaries, news stories, and articles.

But how many know that a very similar subterranean catastrophe is taking place right here in Kentucky?

The Tiptop underground mine fire in Bulan, KY (Breathitt County), also known as the Lost Mountain fire or "the Ruth Mullins fire" for the lady who discovered it, is burning out of control just below the Earth's surface and has been for apparently many years.

But how did this happen? Details are sketchy. An article in Discover doesn't really delve into the fire's origins. According to Earth Magazine, "No one seems to know how long it’s been burning, how much coal it has consumed, how it started or the dangers associated with it."

A report of scientific analysis of the outgassing fumes from the Tiptop fire paints an ecologically troubling picture:

At the time of our visits, concentrations of CO2 peaked at 2.0% and > 6.0% (v/v) and CO at 600 ppm and > 700 ppm during field analysis in May 2008 and January 2009, respectively. For comparison, these concentrations exceed the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) eight-hour safe exposure limits (0.5% CO2 and 50 ppm CO), although the site is not currently mined. Mercury, as Hg0, in excess of 500 and 2100 μg/m3, in May and January, respectively, in the field, also exceeded the OSHA eight-hour exposure limit (50 μg/m3). Carbonyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfide, carbon disulfide, and a suite of organic compounds were determined at two vents for the first sampling event. All gases are diluted by air as they exit and migrate away from a gas vent, but temperature inversions and other meteorological conditions could lead to unhealthy concentrations in the nearby towns.

There are at least nine sites with major openings in the ground where the Ruth Mullins fire is venting, extending over a huge area that occupies both Breathitt and Perry counties. Many researchers believe that underground coalmine fires such as this (there are many around the world, especially in China) could be a major culprit in man-made global warming.

On the other hand, such fires can also be a part of mother nature's plan. An enormous mountain in Australia, once thought to be a volcano, has turned out to be a naturally-occuring underground coal-seam fire that has been raging for over six millenia.

And if, as many Native Americans believe, coal has a mind of its own, then the coal spirit may be well pleased by its own blaze of glory.

MIssing Plane in Hazard Area

From the Associated Press:

HAZARD, Ky. -- Kentucky State Police are searching an area in eastern Kentucky for a plane that may be missing.

Trooper Jody Sims at the Hazard post says officials have spotted something that could be wreckage and are investigating whether it's related to a report of a plane possibly missing.

Trooper Tony Watts says the Federal Aviation Administration in Indianapolis notified police Tuesday afternoon that a plane may have been lost in the vicinity of Clay, Owsley and Leslie counties.

Rescuers are searching the area, but Watts says they can't get an aircraft in the air to help look because of the weather.

Author Walks from Kentucky to Oprah's Chicago Office

From NBC:

Like millions of other people today, Sam Neace will walk through the Chicago Loop.

But chances are that Neace is the only person who walked 500 miles to get here.

Today marks the end of Neace’s journey from Hazard, Kentucky to Chicago, Illinois to raise money for Relay for Life, a cancer charity affiliated with the American Cancer Society.

The survivor would like to hand deliver his published book of short stories, Neace's Pieces, and the manuscript to his novel, Bad Boy to Oprah Winfrey at Harpo Studios.

If he timed it right with his 25 mile per day pace, he’ll show at Harpo studios between 4pm-5pm on Tuesday, October 13th.

Neace talked to NBCChicago on a cell phone about two hours from his terminus, "somewhere on route 41." He’s not sure if Oprah will be there to greet him.

“Whether or not Oprah knows, I have no idea,” Neace said. The fine folks at Harpo studios said they hadn't heard about his walk and that they're not in the habit of meeting viewers who aren't on the official agenda.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. The important part is all the money Neace has been able to raise for Relay for life, which he estimates in the thousands.

“The walk was rough,” Neace said. “I walked through rain storms and over mountains and whatever you can imagine. It’s been in some ways the most inspirational experience of my life. But also my most challenging.”

Kentucky Earthquakes

You may have heard about the New Madrid Fault Line, which runs underneath this very region we occupy, my fellow Kentuckians.

Although not much of major seismic importance has occurred in our lifetime, we still must take note that in 1812, the New Madrid quake was an estimated 8.0 or greater. Described as "the most intense intraplate earthquake series to have occurred in the contiguous United States", it was powerful enough to make church bells ring in Boston.

A University of Kentucky website calls the Western Kentucky area "the most seismically active region in the United States east of the Rockies". And if that wasn't bad enough, to the East, we're bounded by the Southern Appalachian Seismic Zone, which is also extremely active and produces tremors that affects Kentucky greatly. We're surrounded.

July 27, 1980: Sharpsburg, in Bath County, was struck by an earthquake that measured 5.1 on the Richter scale. This quake put a huge deep crack across the back concrete patio of the my parents' home in Richmond.

June 6, 2003: an earthquake struck Bardwell, measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale. Considerable damage was caused.

June 19, 2005: Blandville was hit by an earthquake of 2.7 magnitude. Blandville had also already been affected by the Bardwell quake two years prior.

September 2005: Sharpsburg was hit again with a 2.5 quake, 25 years after the 1980 incident.

January 02, 2006: an earthquake measuring 3.6 was recorded in Equality, Illinois (very close to the Kentucky-Illinois border). Shaking was felt in many neighboring Kentucky counties.

April 2008: The Kentucky-Indiana border at Evansville was hit by a 5.4 earthquake. The quake was powerful enough to shake skyscrapers in Chicago, 240 miles north of the epicenter, and in Indianapolis, about 160 miles northeast of the epicenter.

May 8, 2009: an earthquake measuring 2.3 was felt in Kentucky, at 36.92N 83.67W, approximately 20 miles North of Middlesboro and 35 miles Southwest of Hazard.

May 10, 2009: a 1.1 earthquake hit near Jellico, TN along the Kentucky border.

Despite its strongest shocks having taken place a century ago, some say the New Madrid Fault is just getting warmed up because it's such a very young geological feature. Wikipedia says:

Because uplift rates associated with large New Madrid earthquakes could not have occurred continuously over geological timescales without dramatically altering the local topography, studies have concluded that the seismic activity there cannot have gone on for longer than 64,000 years...

Blue People of Kentucky

This subject has always been one of the trickier ones for me to write about. Although the blue people of Kentucky are a real phenomenon that has been well documented and written about in all manner of publications from science journals to mass-market magazines, I really don't want you goofballs loading your cameras and going on a gawking spree, bothering innocent people. But it’s too fascinating a story not to tell:

From at least the year 1800 to the 1960s, multiple families of blue-skinned people made their home along Troublesome Creek near Hazard, KY. Local superstitions and rumors about them were rampant, and included theories that they were either aliens, angels, or a separate race of humans. Apparently, it all began with a blue-skinned family called the Fugates, who came to the Hazard area in the late 18th or early 19th century. They descended from one Martin Fugate, who supposedly came from France (just like the alien Coneheads from Saturday Night Live!)

In the 1960s, a Lexington hematologist named Madison Cawein suggested the blueness could be caused by an extremely rare disorder called methemoglobinemia, in which the patient has an abnormally high level of methemoglobin in the blood. This in turn causes one's skin to be tinted blue.

Cawein injected a chemical dye substitute for the missing enzyme into some test members of the Fugate family, and within minutes their skin turned pink. Many of the blue Kentuckians came out of rural seclusion to seek the treatment, but others, it is said, chose to remain blue. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no reliable sightings of them since 1979. And the very few old family photographs known to exist of the blue-skinned people were taken in the 1940s and 1950s with, alas, black and white film.

It is unknown how many, if any, blue-skinned people still exist in Kentucky, but their lack of visibility would seem to indicate they want to be left alone. There’s a story about a Hollywood camera crew getting shot at and chased away by dogs when they trespassed on a blue person’s land.

According to an article in Science 82 magazine, these families were intensely inbreeding and intermarrying, which perpetuated the methemoglobinemia gene on both sides.

Despite what we are told about the disastrous effects of inbreeding, these people did it consistently for generations with seemingly no ill effects: the Fugates were not impaired in terms of mental or physical abilities in any way. One woman (with the wonderful name of Luna) gave birth to 13 healthy blue children and lived to be 84. And while most people with methemoglobinemia acquire it through health-threatening circumstances such as heart and artery defects, nitrate poisoning (“Blue baby syndrome”) or respiratory problems, the Fugates and the other blue families were in perfect health and lived long robust lives.

And thus another wonderful bit of human uniqueness is eradicated by modern technology. Me, I’d love to see deliberately induced blueness become a new fad in body modification.