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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/297YKIa:
oooohohohhohhh thank you so much for this ask anon and sorry I took forever but I just can’t pass this with just two or three sentences when Finnish mythology and animistic religion are literally my favourite things in the world 8D
okay I’m just gonna list some things about old Finnish beliefs and such that I find especially delightful and might or might not still believe in
so before Christianity came to Finland, we worshipped a lot of different gods, i.e. Ahti who was the god of water and Vellamo, his wife - if you’re gonna go fishing, you gotta pray/make an offering to those two to get a good haul. or Ukko who was the god of the weather and the sky and harvest and thunder, although his real name wasn’t Ukko (which btw means “old man”) but apparently people were too afraid to say his real name out loud. might be it was actually Perkele or Ilmarinen
yes Perkele hasn’t always been a bad word and people think it means the Devil but it wad most likely the old Finnish god of thunder
oh and bears were holy animals to us. that’s the reason why there are so many words that mean “bear” in the Finnish language; so that you don’t accidentally summon any bears to you. like, when people hunted and killed a bear, they’d celebrate it (it was called peijaiset) and the party ended with the skull of the bear being hung on a tree. sometimes they chose a young girl to be the bear’s bride in the festivities to make the spirit of the bear happy
basically in ye olden times Finns believed in elves of all sorts, like forest elves and house elves and saUNA ELVES and seriously when I was a kid, we were told that there were elves and trolls and hobgoblins and what have you in the nearby forest.
and sauna elves are the best thing because okay obviously Finnish culture has always been very closely tied to sauna, like we would give birth and nurse the sick and prepare the dead for the burial (fun fact: dead people’s legs are apparently still tied together so they don’t rise up and chase after the living) in the sauna. and of course you wash up and relax in the sauna. so sauna elves are these small humanoid gentle creatures that live in saunas (apparently one per sauna) and come out to bathe after the humans have left. also one of my sources says they punished the ones that didn’t behave themselves in a sauna. I don’t know how
and don’t even get me started on Kalevala, like that’s our national epic and it’s entirely written in a very specific form of singing and it tells how the world was made and about our gods and other characters and it’s amazing
and we used to do magic!! in that specific form of singing. we used to sing spells. how cool is that. Finns are all witches and wizards and shamans pass it on
and all in all people might not realize it but a lot of our proverbs and holidays and such stem from the old animistic religion and our culture is still very much tied to the old beliefs and hell even some of our traditions involving holidays are actually old magic, for example we put seven or nine or maybe ten (it kinda changes depending on who you ask) different kinds of flowers under your pillow for the Midsummer night and then you dream of your future spouse
and then someone in Sweden decided that we filthy heathens need to be put in our place and they set out on a crusade to introduce us to Christianity
oh and I also have a few posts in my Finnish mythology tag but it’s not much. but hey thank you so much for asking, anon!! even if I didn’t talk about even half the things that I’d like to talk about but hey I loved it nonetheless 8D
oooohohohhohhh thank you so much for this ask anon and sorry I took forever but I just can’t pass this with just two or three sentences when Finnish mythology and animistic religion are literally my favourite things in the world 8D
okay I’m just gonna list some things about old Finnish beliefs and such that I find especially delightful and might or might not still believe in
so before Christianity came to Finland, we worshipped a lot of different gods, i.e. Ahti who was the god of water and Vellamo, his wife - if you’re gonna go fishing, you gotta pray/make an offering to those two to get a good haul. or Ukko who was the god of the weather and the sky and harvest and thunder, although his real name wasn’t Ukko (which btw means “old man”) but apparently people were too afraid to say his real name out loud. might be it was actually Perkele or Ilmarinen
yes Perkele hasn’t always been a bad word and people think it means the Devil but it wad most likely the old Finnish god of thunder
oh and bears were holy animals to us. that’s the reason why there are so many words that mean “bear” in the Finnish language; so that you don’t accidentally summon any bears to you. like, when people hunted and killed a bear, they’d celebrate it (it was called peijaiset) and the party ended with the skull of the bear being hung on a tree. sometimes they chose a young girl to be the bear’s bride in the festivities to make the spirit of the bear happy
basically in ye olden times Finns believed in elves of all sorts, like forest elves and house elves and saUNA ELVES and seriously when I was a kid, we were told that there were elves and trolls and hobgoblins and what have you in the nearby forest.
and sauna elves are the best thing because okay obviously Finnish culture has always been very closely tied to sauna, like we would give birth and nurse the sick and prepare the dead for the burial (fun fact: dead people’s legs are apparently still tied together so they don’t rise up and chase after the living) in the sauna. and of course you wash up and relax in the sauna. so sauna elves are these small humanoid gentle creatures that live in saunas (apparently one per sauna) and come out to bathe after the humans have left. also one of my sources says they punished the ones that didn’t behave themselves in a sauna. I don’t know how
and don’t even get me started on Kalevala, like that’s our national epic and it’s entirely written in a very specific form of singing and it tells how the world was made and about our gods and other characters and it’s amazing
and we used to do magic!! in that specific form of singing. we used to sing spells. how cool is that. Finns are all witches and wizards and shamans pass it on
and all in all people might not realize it but a lot of our proverbs and holidays and such stem from the old animistic religion and our culture is still very much tied to the old beliefs and hell even some of our traditions involving holidays are actually old magic, for example we put seven or nine or maybe ten (it kinda changes depending on who you ask) different kinds of flowers under your pillow for the Midsummer night and then you dream of your future spouse
and then someone in Sweden decided that we filthy heathens need to be put in our place and they set out on a crusade to introduce us to Christianity
oh and I also have a few posts in my Finnish mythology tag but it’s not much. but hey thank you so much for asking, anon!! even if I didn’t talk about even half the things that I’d like to talk about but hey I loved it nonetheless 8D
