There has been quite a setback for the coming of spring the last few days; a couple of days with heavy snowfall followed by cold and windy weather.
This is normal though, but the warm period we've had for almost a decade now makes it seem colder than usual and the winter seems longer than it should be.
Apart from that, my ISP has been banned from Hotmail. They(Hotmail) must be a part of the ironic generation. :P So, if you use Hotmail and mail my usual address, but get an answer from a gmail-account, you know why.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Sunday, 15 March 2009
A lecture on magic, here, in the middle of nowhere?
We have a small newsletter with advertisments and announcements and to my surprise I found a small item for a lecture on 'Could the Finns do Magic?'. Since most lectures around here are on (boring) topics such as 'A Photographic Holiday in Holland' and such, this could not be missed.
My son has his track & field practice Sunday afternoons and since the lecture started 5 p.m. today (Sunday), I enlisted my dad as driver and company (our second car is not exactly reliable and won't last much longer). The lecture took place in a small village about 35 kilometres south of here, in typical Forest-Finnish country.
Perhaps a small explanation on what Finns/Forest Finns are might be in place here. Finland was actually a part of Sweden for a long time. Finnish people from the Savolax area migrated to the great forests in the middle of Sweden and the south-east of Norway. They intermarried with Swedes and Norwegians and became bilingual, but retained their own culture. Just as the Saami people in the north of Sweden, the Finns got a reputation to use more sorcery than others.
So, we got there in good time, and to my surprise, there was quite a lot of people, about 50-60 turned up. The lecturer was a fellow from the Norsk Skogsfinsk Museum (the Norwegian Forest-Finn Museum). He started by stating that the magic of the Forest Finns weren't superstitions, as was the case with other kinds of sorcery, and that the reason for that was the 'shamanic' roots of all Finno-Ugric peoples. You who know me, also know that my left eyebrow went skyward at that remark, but I sat back and waited to hear how he would back it up.
He continued by describing the magic as rhymes, mostly similar to prayers, often directed to Christ or the Virgin Mary. It could also be symbols drawn on paper or carved into the wood of buildings and household items. This sounded like regular Scandinavian folk magic to me.
About half an hour into the lecture, he asked if there were any questions. I asked him in what way he considered the Forest-Finns magic to be 'shamanic', since he hadn't described anything even close to the concepts that usually goes under the (careless) term 'shamanism' such as ecstacy, altered states of consciousness, spirit travels and the likes. He went into a long and quite wordy monologue on what 'shamanism' is (and it was the typical core-shamanism รก la Harner he described), ending with the quite surprising conclusion (given what he had said earlier) that the Forest Finns magical practice wasn't 'shamanic' at all.
I also got to ask him what set the rhymes and symbols of the Forest Finns apart from the ones we find in Swedish folk magic. He couldn't really answer that either, since he didn't know much about Swedish folk magic, but he thought it might be that the magic of the Swedes was eradicated by the church much earlier than the magic of the Finns. The was the straw that broke the back of my camel, since the rather large body of Swedish folk magic is collected around the same time and even later than the one of the Forest Finns.
He then went on to show us drawings and rubbings of symbols. They mostly consisted of pentagrams and hands and he didn't say much about them apart from that they probably was for protection. Mostly, it was a parading of the same symbols on different houses, quite uninforming sadly.
When the last part was over, people got to ask some more questions and a lady asked him if there were any sacrifices made. He said that such customs weren't common among 'shamanic' peoples since the didn't have actual deities but instead believed that all objects, living or inanimate, had their own spirits. As I said above, I had already given up on the lecture earlier, but this really deflated the last of it.
After the lecture I asked him how he could say that 'shamanic' peoples didn't have deities or made sacrifices (and gave examples both from the Saami culture and from related cultures in Russia who had/have both deities and sacrificed/s to them). He went all humming and incoherent, so I gave him some tips on literature he might find useful and then me and dad left.
Well, it was a nice ride home anyway, the sun had just set but the light lingered on the snow that still covers the ground here.
My son has his track & field practice Sunday afternoons and since the lecture started 5 p.m. today (Sunday), I enlisted my dad as driver and company (our second car is not exactly reliable and won't last much longer). The lecture took place in a small village about 35 kilometres south of here, in typical Forest-Finnish country.
Perhaps a small explanation on what Finns/Forest Finns are might be in place here. Finland was actually a part of Sweden for a long time. Finnish people from the Savolax area migrated to the great forests in the middle of Sweden and the south-east of Norway. They intermarried with Swedes and Norwegians and became bilingual, but retained their own culture. Just as the Saami people in the north of Sweden, the Finns got a reputation to use more sorcery than others.
So, we got there in good time, and to my surprise, there was quite a lot of people, about 50-60 turned up. The lecturer was a fellow from the Norsk Skogsfinsk Museum (the Norwegian Forest-Finn Museum). He started by stating that the magic of the Forest Finns weren't superstitions, as was the case with other kinds of sorcery, and that the reason for that was the 'shamanic' roots of all Finno-Ugric peoples. You who know me, also know that my left eyebrow went skyward at that remark, but I sat back and waited to hear how he would back it up.
He continued by describing the magic as rhymes, mostly similar to prayers, often directed to Christ or the Virgin Mary. It could also be symbols drawn on paper or carved into the wood of buildings and household items. This sounded like regular Scandinavian folk magic to me.
About half an hour into the lecture, he asked if there were any questions. I asked him in what way he considered the Forest-Finns magic to be 'shamanic', since he hadn't described anything even close to the concepts that usually goes under the (careless) term 'shamanism' such as ecstacy, altered states of consciousness, spirit travels and the likes. He went into a long and quite wordy monologue on what 'shamanism' is (and it was the typical core-shamanism รก la Harner he described), ending with the quite surprising conclusion (given what he had said earlier) that the Forest Finns magical practice wasn't 'shamanic' at all.
I also got to ask him what set the rhymes and symbols of the Forest Finns apart from the ones we find in Swedish folk magic. He couldn't really answer that either, since he didn't know much about Swedish folk magic, but he thought it might be that the magic of the Swedes was eradicated by the church much earlier than the magic of the Finns. The was the straw that broke the back of my camel, since the rather large body of Swedish folk magic is collected around the same time and even later than the one of the Forest Finns.
He then went on to show us drawings and rubbings of symbols. They mostly consisted of pentagrams and hands and he didn't say much about them apart from that they probably was for protection. Mostly, it was a parading of the same symbols on different houses, quite uninforming sadly.
When the last part was over, people got to ask some more questions and a lady asked him if there were any sacrifices made. He said that such customs weren't common among 'shamanic' peoples since the didn't have actual deities but instead believed that all objects, living or inanimate, had their own spirits. As I said above, I had already given up on the lecture earlier, but this really deflated the last of it.
After the lecture I asked him how he could say that 'shamanic' peoples didn't have deities or made sacrifices (and gave examples both from the Saami culture and from related cultures in Russia who had/have both deities and sacrificed/s to them). He went all humming and incoherent, so I gave him some tips on literature he might find useful and then me and dad left.
Well, it was a nice ride home anyway, the sun had just set but the light lingered on the snow that still covers the ground here.
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