Asatru/heathen question ...?

I went to the Asatru Alliance web site to find out more about this religion. On the home page there is a date (?) ' Mani`s Day, Haymoon 9, 2257 RE' . Is this a date and if so, could you please tell me what it means?

Also there is a really beautiful tree. I'm guessing (again) that it is somehow related to ancestry which I understand (from Boar's Heart's answers is a large part of this religion. Is there a story or symbolism regarding this tree?

The tree is Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil

Yes it's a date. hay moon is July. Do a search on the World Tree of Life in the Asatru beliefs.... Yggdrasill... an ash tree, if I remember right.

Asatru Alliance is kindred-based and has been around since the beginning of the Reawakening, back in the early 70's. As such, for boon or bane, Lil, they're a bit more into the "Viking myths" than some. :-)

Mani's Day, or Mannisdaeg, is of course Monday. Manni is the *male* Norse God of the moon. Our Sun deity is Sunna, a goddess. Norse mythology's distinctive that way.

Haymoon is the name of this month in the ancient Norse or Icelandic calendar . . . our ancestors named months for what was done during them, so there's a Hunting Moon and even a Mud Moon, uric. It's not really part of my Folkway---just extra trappings to me---but I respect what they're doing.

2257 RE is . . . well, it's their own little thing. It sort of dates back to the early days, too. "RE" stands for "Runic Era." Although the earliest known runic inscriptions date to about 200 CE or so, the runes themselves---according to scholars whose occupation is it to know such things, like Stephen Pollington---date to about 250 BCE. So Valgard Murray, the Alliance's founder, started added 250 years to the date and calling it "Runic Era." More Viking stuff . . . the Alliance is pretty big on Folk and Tribe type identity.

The tree is Yggdrasil, upon which Odhinn hung for nine nights to win the runes, and which upholds the universe. It is watered, literally or metaphorically, by our deeds, and . . . well, it's a bit complex but basically, it's the central mythic icon of our cosmology. It's related to the idea of a guardian tree in Germanic culture, and to the Great Oak at Uppsala in which the feast sacrifices were hung every nine years, and to the Irminsul Charlemagne destroyed, and to Finno-Ugric shamanistic practices, and . . . well, you get the idea.

The basic point with Yggdrasil goes back to the first thing I said about it: it is watered with our deeds in this life, and upholds the universe and unites all the spiritual realms. So for us, what we DO determines our reality. We are our deeds, in a very literal way.

I really can't do it justice here . . . but Bauschatz wrote an entire book about it, "The Well & The Tree," that talks about it and how the concept shaped the ancient heathen worldview.