The Asatru Folk Assembly, or AFA, an organization of Germanic neopaganism, is the US-based Ásatrú organization founded by Stephen McNallen in 1994. Gardell (2003) classifies the AFA as folkish.
The AFA has been recognized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit religious organization, or church. It is based in Nevada City, CA. The organization denounces racial supremacism.[1]
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The Asatru Folk Assembly is a successor organization to a group called the Asatru Free Assembly founded by McNallen in 1974 and disbanded in 1986, splitting into the "folkish" Ásatrú Alliance and the "universalist" The Troth. The Asatru Free Assembly had been an outgrowth of a group called the Viking Brotherhood founded by McNallen together with Robert Stine in 1971.
The defunct Asatru Free Assembly is sometimes distinguished from the modern Asatru Folk Assembly by the usage of "old AFA" and "new AFA", respectively.
From 1997-2002, the AFA was a member organization of the International Asatru-Odinic Alliance.
According to the AFA Declaration of Purpose, its goals are:
On October 24, 1996, McNallen and the AFA filed suit in U.S. District Court in Portland (Asatru Folk Assembly v. United States) to attempt to stop the US Army Corps of Engineers from turning over the prehistoric remains of the Kennewick man to local Native Americans. Several prominent scientists and archaeologists also filed suit, to block the reinterment of the remains. Kennewick Man was the oldest intact human fossil ever found in the Pacific Northwest. Genetic tests to identify ties to modern people or tribes were inconclusive due to the deteriorated condition of the remains. McNallen became embroiled in the Kennewick Man issue and appeared in Time Magazine, The Washington Post and on television, arguing that modern adherents of Ásatrú have more in common with the prehistoric Kennewick Man than modern Native Americans. This claim, as yet, cannot be established without DNA tests on the remains.
After a protracted legal battle, the court ruled that the human remains were not "Native American" within the meaning of NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). The remains currently are curated at the Burke Museum in Seattle. As a direct result of his portrayal by the media, McNallen later stated that he no longer advocates public Ásatrú rituals or media presence at Ásatrú ceremonies.[2]
McNallen has coined the term "Metagenetics" in a 1985 essay outlining the philosophical principles of AFA, stating that "there are spiritual and metaphysical implications to heredity".
In a 1999 article, McNallen restated his position, invoking Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields and Carl Jung's collective unconscious as "very close to the Germanic ideas surrounding the Well of Urth", and presented a definition of "metagenetics" as:
"The hypothesis that there are spiritual or metaphysical implications to physical relatedness among humans which correlate with, but go beyond, the known limits of genetics."[3]