A couple of pictures that I took in '17 of The Smithy.

Oakwood Forest her latest video is only 5.15 hours long....guess she wanted to keep it brief😄😄😄.

I got this beautiful belly jar from a friend. Now I use these in a ritual to sing a welcome to a new baby into my family. Hope to be an aunt soon.

I remember a feminist telling me that the era before the Indo-Europeans was matriarchal and peaceful. Well....wrong😄! Archeological evidence proves thats not true. People in the Stone Age could be pretty violent too. Multiple excavations found people slaughtered, often in groups. In Austria (Asparn/Schletz) 67 bodies were found with clear signs of a violent death. This video tells more about this Stone Age battle/massacre and shows what kind of weapons people used back in those days. Pretty brutal! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1DMqKVCpAE

Gimbutas' later work is flawed in that she came under the influence of the Californian Goddess Cult, but, her early work investigating the early Neolithoc Vinca and Cucuteni cultures in the Balkans is, imo, pretty top rate. Even Colin Renfrew agreed in the end that her theory of different waves of Kurgan infiltrations into Europe via Anatolia was more than likely correct rather than his own hypothesis. Of course, the possible IE spread to the NW atlantic seaboard came much later and I would think that it was less of an invasion but more of a mixing between 2 similar (maybe3) European peoples. This resulting in the quite obvious 2 different strains of stories and pantheons in our region. Schulting needs more looking into imo as does his co-author who I havent looked at yet. Thanks to Tribe of the Fox for bringing this to attention.

The world of pagans and heathens knows a lot of folklore, deities and other spiritbeings. Some deities are very well known and honoured in a large part of Europe and others are more local. The Tribe of the Fox gave attention to Nehalennia (goddess of the Northsea) and to Baduhenna (Frisian wargoddess) and made interesting video's about them. The Antlered One made a video about Rübezahl, a being more known to the Silesian part of Europe. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EvQUUkEqZ8

Sometimes it's just fun to make a heathen fieldtrip. Thats what Dirkje and me like to do so i went by train to Dirkje to visit one of the nicest parts of the Netherlands....the Veluwe. Here we encountered ancient burial mounds and a heath that had an obvious 'Underworld' energy to it. The burial mounds were excavated in the early 50's and here archeologists found a body of a woman and named her 'Jantje van Speuld'. Over the years most bodies decayed so much that only the imprint in the earth is left. This is called a 'shadowcorps'. We enjoyed ourselves very much and we made a video on location of our roadtrip. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNzJLT-kzNA