[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

Will we ever be able to decipher whatever meaning these markings on the 11,000-year-old Shigir idol carry? I would like to believe that it can be done.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

Left: a 3-D model of the 11Kyo Shigir idol.

Right: a recent Khanty spirit doll.

Continuation of not just form but arguably also function, at least to a degree.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

“Christian societies have never come to the realization that the Mosaic covenant is nothing but a program for world domination by the Jewish nation. That is because it is written right under their nose, in a book whose malice they cannot recognize because they have been told it is the Word of God. It takes a free-thinker like H. G. Wells to see the biblical idea of the Chosen People for what it is: ‘a conspiracy against the rest of the world*.’”
― Laurent Guyénot, Our God is Your God Too But He Has Chosen Us

*Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1935, p.128. (archive.org)

Image: Esau sold his birthright by Matthias Stom

A couple of rather interesting and controversial — if not sensational — statements from a hand-annotated copy of Christfrid Ganander's 1789 Mythologia Fennica:

Ukko är icke någon egen Gudamakt, utan synes utgöra endast ett nomen genericum eller rättare ett epitet till de äldre Gudamakterna, ibland hvilka Väinämöinen var den förnämsta. Äfven ibland råa folkslag har en hög ålder något vördnadsvärdt med sig och se där anledningen till detta ärefulla binamn som finnarne gåfvo sina förnämsta, äldsta Gudar.

[ Ukko is not a separate divinity, but seems to constitute only a generic name or rather an epithet for the older divinities, among whom Väinämöinen was the most prominent. Even among savage peoples, great age has something venerable about it, and that is the reason for this honorable epithet that the Finns gave to their most prominent, oldest gods. ]

Akka, så väl som Ukko voro epiteter som tillades flere äldre Gudinnor och Gudar, i synnerhet Väinämöinen och hans hustru Rauni (maan emoinen) och är ett uttryck af den vördnad som man bar för deras höga ålder, vidsträckta erfarenhet, och vishet.

[ Akka, as well as Ukko, were epithets given to several older Goddesses and Gods, especially Väinämöinen and his wife Rauni (maan emoinen¹), and is an expression of the reverence held for their great age, extensive experience, and wisdom. ]
___
¹) 'Mother Earth'

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

A Poem on Gypsies.

A black-blooded brood, the Gypsy,
A slothful folk of wanderers,
Who possess that foreign tongue,
Unknown to all the people,
Never asked in any schoolhouse,
Nor mastered in the learning-halls;
Yet with loud and lofty voice
They speak it boldly and with flourish,
Brazenly they brattle it.
A black-blooded brood, the Gypsy,
A toiling-not, ever-roaming people,
Who neither sow nor ever plough,
Nor reap, nor set in order,
Yet eat their bread like Hell’s own hound,
And keep the choicer morsels
More so than the toil-worn elder
Who strains with his strength
And drives his work into sweat.

Where the Gypsy comes to dwell,
There the thieves are set a-watching;
When the Tartar enters the house,
A whip comes with him;
A cruel blade under his arm,
Expressly for a fight.
What is it the fellow growls for?
First, the fodder for the horse;
And the woman — what asks she?
From there, the fodder for the hog?
Not yet does the hostess know,
For the tale is not yet ended,
What demands are made therein —
Whether the wool be claimed at last,
Or flax atop of all the rest.—
There come first the benedictions,
Crooning charms and mutterations,
And swift behind them curses follow,
If the mood be not well-pleased.

A marvel has it been my lifetime,
A wonder to my very mind,
How so long the nation’s people
Have borne with such a tribe,
(Men of no account whatever,
Women wholly without power)
Tramping round and wandering,
Rummaging and roasting,
Taking off and thieving,
Laying hands on others’ goods;
Why no craft is taught unto them,
Why not made to ditch and dig,
Nor fitted out as fighting-men.

Go and ask the village elders
Whence the Gypsy gets his victual,
Whence his finery has risen.
They have surely coats of gentry,
Yet are all their tricks but Gypsy’s;
They have shirts of flaxen linen,
But beneath it fool’s-hide nestles;
They have still the lady’s kerchief,
Though the neck is raven-black,
Raven is their tongue and temper,
Wholly raven is their nature—
Lurking, lurching, snatching booty
With their very hands unbidden.

A black-blooded brood, the Gypsy!
Men are naught and good for nothing,
Women helpless, void of counsel.
If the best man among them be,
He is hailed a gelding-master,
They will call him cutter-fellow:
He takes the stones from off the stallion,
And even from the ram if needed,
Were he summoned to the task—
Yet never has a man among them
Been of use in any other
Business in this knavish crew.
There’s a Gypsy wife — one woman —
When she divines with cards in hand,
To the peasant’s daughter promises
Some high and happy fortune,
Match and marriage excellent,
And for this she gains great wages;
Such the help the women offer.

A mighty tribe the Gypsy’s folk,
Quick enough at propagation,
Swift and early to be wedded.
The cranes proclaim the banns for them;
Thus the vaunted wise are wedded,
Strengthened well beneath the wrapping,
One at first and then another,
Whosoever, wheresoever,
Bartered off by shift of fortune.

Paawo Korhonen (1845)

Transl.: [ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

First public writing in awhile due to long hiatus! Slowly getting going again. Hope to be back with you more regularly soon! Missed everyone!

Follow me - @OakwiseBecoming

Same name on FB and Subscribe Star!

☀️ 🦋 🌷 🐣 - CE

https://hubpages.com/holidays/halloween-more-than-celtic-samhain-day-of-the-dead-across-pagan-europe

Hello and welcome 🤗 I admit it's not so easy starting up again after complete deplatforming, targeted harassment, and long term illness but I am surprized and very happy to see some folks have turned up! Thank you!

I'm not yet up to the rigorous work I used to do in the past, but I am working on new material as and when I am able.

Here is a new poem written for the holiday. If you follow this link to my Subscribe Star, I have made the Halloween essay a FREE PDF download 🎃 If you like it, you can subscribe super cheaply! I think you can sub for free also if you want the occasional freebies 👻

https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/2122655

Thanks so much for SHARING my posts to help me rebuild 💝

☀️🌷🍀🦋 - CE

Follow @OakwiseBecoming

www.facebook.com/OakwiseBecoming

www.subscribestar.com/OakwiseBecoming

Excerpt from "What Makes You Pagan" by CE

"Animism is the foundation of Paganism. Fundamentally, first and foremost, we are animals living on Earth among other animals. Everything else is downstream from there. Our freedom to identify as unique ethnic groups, right to protect and preserve our identities, our shared genetics, and the cultural practice that bond us together are next on the pyramid of hierarchies.

Foundationally, the heinous cruelty to nature is one important ethical distinguishing characteristic of Abrahamism which Pagans should instinctively resist and actively oppose from our very core. Those who don’t feel this on a visceral level are enacting some kind of performative LARP of a religion under a Pagan costume."

Follow @oakwisebecoming

Full PDF for subs: www.subscribestar.com/OakwiseBecoming

FB www.facebook.com/oakwisebecoming/

IG www.instagram.com/oakwisebecoming/

A fossil of Ice-Age cosmology surviving on opposite sides of the world

Left: Among the Magar people of Nepal, a shaman apprentice must climb a pole, the «cosmic tree», and stay there for several hours as part of his initiation.

Right: In Central and Northern Ostrobothnia, Finns erected a peeled Midsummer spruce with its tufted top intact. Boys climbed it for sport — a folklorized echo of a much older cosmological symbol tied to the solstice¹. The tree was left standing until fall, or even Midsummer the following year.

These are scattered remnants of the same Ice-Age animism continuum — a symbolic system once shared across northern Eurasia. The parallels, down to the stripped trunk and the tufted crown², point to a shared origin dating back roughly 12,000–20,000 years³, when the first peoples crossed Beringia into the Americas.

In Finland the outward form persisted even after its ancient meaning had been forgotten.

___

¹) Archaeoastronomist Marianna Ridderstad suggests the Finnish Midsummer spruce may descend from Baltic debranched solar poles, possibly linked to the astronomical orientations / alignments of the Neolithic “Giant’s Churches” (ca. 2000 – 3500 BCE).

²) The stripped trunk + tufted crown morphology appears widely in Siberian shamanic iconography and even in certain Amerindian solar/vision-quest poles.

³) This symbolic cluster — world-tree form, ascent initiation, liminal timing — is characteristic of the Late Paleolithic northern hunter-gatherer cosmological package.

Picture credits:

• Magar shaman apprentice on the “cosmic tree” initiation pole. Photograph by Michael Oppitz, Takasera, Nepal (1970s). From fieldwork associated with Shamans of the Blind Country. Reproduced in Hoppál (1994).

• Midsummer spruce in the Silvasti yard, Kalajoki, Metsäkylä (1924).
Photograph by Samuli Paulaharju.
Museovirasto – Kansatieteen kuvakokoelma, KK3490:3268 (CC BY 4.0).

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

“Few nations can say that the products of their popular tradition — kept faithfully by the common people from an earlier age of their own culture, even as foreign civilization outwardly held sway — are as historically significant to their educated classes as our Finnish folk-poetry is to ours.

It is therefore not too much to expect of us, the educated, that we should do what we can: first, to make use of this rich national material in the service of world scholarship, in science and in art alike; and second, to return it, in its renewed form, to that part of the people in which the roots of the old national culture — though the trunk was cut — have remained most intact, and which, now growing again, has the right to enjoy its fruits.”

— Kaarle Krohn (1863 – 1933), folklorist, professor and developer of the geographic-historic method of folklore research. Transl. from Tutkimuksia suomalaisten kansansatujen alalta I, p. III, 1887.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

A horse sacrifice of the Altai-Turkic Sagai tribe. In 1914 the young ethnologist S. D. Mainagasev photographed and made phonograph recordings of local customs among his own people. The dark color of the sacrificial animal suggests that it was intended for the Earth Mother.

Although the Sagai language is unmistakably Turkic in its grammar and vocabulary, the conceptual universe it expresses is profoundly Siberian. The Sagai and their Khakas relatives maintain a classic North-Eurasian shamanic cosmology — complete with a tiered universe, an Earth-Mother figure, horse sacrifices, and the ritual centrality of the sacred birch — onto which only a thin layer of Turkic theogonic terminology has been added. In other words, the ritual structure remains Siberian, while the names of the Gods and certain pastoral elements reflect later Turkic influence.

Their material culture and social organization display the same pattern: pastoral practices and some religious terms are Turkic, but the deeper symbolic system, ritual logic, and shamanic repertoire remain rooted in the indigenous Siberian substrate. For this reason, Sagai culture is most accurately described as a Turkic-speaking people living within a fundamentally Siberian cosmology.

Genetically, too, the picture aligns with cultural evidence. The Sagai and broader Khakas populations are overwhelmingly Siberian, with only a secondary admixture from historical Turkic steppe groups. Thus the synthesis is layered: Language = Turkic; Religion = Siberian; Culture = Siberian with Turkic pastoral overlays; Genetics = largely Siberian with Turkic components.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

“Saami cosmology as it is articulated by the shaman displays the symbolic structure characteristic of all cultures in polar regions. The shaman, while in religious act in the kota, is located at the center of the world. The holy corner, boasso, as well as the smokehole, are manifestations of the symbolism of the center located at the meeting point of the three cosmic planes along the mythic World Tree, the Axis Mundi, having as its center the Pole Star (the Northern Star) around which the heavens revolve. For it is through the center of the world and along the Axis Mundi that men and gods — through the mediator — maintain communication with each other. The Pole Star was, typically enough, called in Sámi language Weralden tjuold, or Māilmi tšuolda, meaning literally the world pole.

Along the same Axis lies also 'the hole of the spirit' through which the shaman can descend to the underworld, to the realm of the dead where, according to Saami belief, the departed live under the two-bottomed lakes. These special lakes are called Saivo. Through the hole of the spirit the Saami shaman crept down to the Saivo-people in the guise of a fish, as a saivoquolle, also known as passevārequolle, for there is in the Saami religious tradition an additional realm of the dead in the sacred mountains (passevāre = sacred mountain).”

— Juha Pentikäinen: “The Shamanic Drum as Cognitive Map.” In Mythology and Cosmic Order, Studia Fennica 32. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society (SKS), 1987.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

To enter the lower realm, the shaman becomes the chthonic pike — a being of the depths.

The fish in the petroglyph does not represent a shamanic helper spirit. The shaman is the fish. The direction of the shamanic journey — downward, into the chthonic realm — is thereby made explicit.

Images:

• Rock painting, Juusjärvi, Kirkkonummi, Finland (c. 4000 BCE).

• Sámi cosmogram, Mythology and Cosmic Order (1987) [manually colorized].

• Sámi shaman with drum, Johannes Schefferus, Lapponia (1673).

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

[ ZIP 🔗 ] @mythlib

Gustaf Retzius, quoting August Ahlqvist, wrote in his 1881 book Finland i Nordiska Museet that “the stone axe was in all likelihood known to ancient Finns, but the name of this implement has been lost”.

Elias Lönnrot, however, in his 1874 Suomalais-Ruotsalainen Sanakirja / Finskt-Svenskt Lexikon, casually records the Finnish word for a stone axe: kiura. He further gives kiuranen (“small stone axe”), and even throws in kiuraton (“without stone axe”) for good measure.

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

“Runic Minstrel. Petri Shemeikka represents not only a moribund generation, but still more, a vanishing phase of development. His ancestors have been Carelia's best hunters, in whose snares the deity of the forest himself drove the game; they have been mighty wizards and runic minstrels. Petri also, even as they did, has supported himself by hunting, fishing and clearing woodland; he has charmed the court of the forest-god with incantations and won the mermaid's favour, and in his leisure hours in his cabin he has sung his ancient runic songs. He is the last vestige of this age of fairy tales.

The succeeding generation dwells in bright cottages and reads the newspapers.”

— I. K. Inha: Pictorial Finland (1896)

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

Two expressions of the same ritual logic: Christianity inhabiting a seasonal system (left), and Yule operating on its own terms (right).

Christmas as Ritual Season (Not Doctrinal Feast)

Even among committed Christians, there is no consensus on the origins or historical grounding of Christmas symbols. What is defended is the season itself, not the accuracy of its explanations — further evidence that Christmas operates primarily as a ritual season, not a doctrinal feast.
This becomes clear not through speculative “Pagan gotcha” arguments, but by listening to Christians themselves.

Some explicitly acknowledge that Christmas customs were adapted from earlier seasonal practices to facilitate conversion. Others accept that the date does not correspond to the historical birth of Jesus, insisting instead that “it symbolizes it.” Still others reject pre-Christian continuities outright — while nevertheless continuing to observe the same seasonal behaviors.

That word — symbolizes — is decisive. Symbols do not require historical precision; rituals require only repetition, timing, and social participation.

Ritual Time vs. Historical Time

Ethnographic and folkloric sources consistently show that midwinter was treated as a period of heightened ritual efficacy, long before Christian theology attached new narratives to it.

Nils Lid documents Scandinavian Yule as a complex of ritual acts involving food left untouched for unseen guests, offerings to household and field spirits, fertility divination, and calendrical forecasting tied explicitly to Christmas night and morning. These practices persist well into the Christian period with little theological reinterpretation.

In Finland and the wider Finno-Baltic sphere, Andreas Nordberg records Christmas as a threshold season used for agricultural omens, weather divination, and future prosperity — functions incompatible with a purely commemorative feast.

Douglas Hill's broad comparative survey shows Christmas repeatedly appearing in European folk belief as a power-bearing date:

• weather and harvest omens tied to Christmas moonlight and sunlight

• beliefs about births on Christmas conferring special abilities

• prohibitions against cutting certain trees or burning specific woods during the season

• ritual bread baked on Christmas Day believed to cure illness

None of these depend on the Nativity narrative. They depend on timing.

Just as Italians name weekdays after planetary gods without conscious pagan intent (lunedì, martedì…), Yule — now called Christmas — operates as a functional inheritance rather than a remembered one. The ritual persists even when its older meanings are no longer articulated — or are actively denied.

Hill notes this pattern explicitly: practices once embedded in Pagan seasonal rites are not erased by Christianity, but reframed, blessed, or tolerated as long as they no longer threaten doctrine. The blessing of ploughs, beating of bounds, and seasonal use of greenery survive precisely because they serve social and agricultural continuity, not theology.

Even attempts to reinterpret symbols — such as identifying the evergreen tree with the biblical burning bush — confirm the point: the ritual object predates the explanation.

Therefore it may be reasonably concluded that Christmas did not replace an earlier ritual season. It inhabited Yule.

The Church supplied narrative and doctrine; the calendar supplied power. What endured was not belief, but practice — repeated annually at the moment when the year itself appeared most vulnerable.

That is why Christmas still works, even when no one agrees on why.

Sources:

• Nils Lid: Joleband og vegetasjonsguddom (1928).
• Andreas Nordberg: Jul, disting och förkyrklig tideräkning (2006).
• Douglas Hill: Magic and Superstition (1968).

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]

“Without asserting anything about nationality, it may be stated that the cultural condition of our Stone Age continues in the culture of our Lapps.

The difference, however, is that the greater part of the Lapps have long lived as reindeer herders; in the Stone Age reindeer husbandry cannot have been the principal livelihood. Another difference is that the Lapps long ago abandoned the use of stone and fashioned the tools and implements of daily life from bone.

But if, nevertheless, we wish to give life to the image we have obtained of Stone Age settlement, we do not do so by comparing the life of the people of that time with peasant life in villages, nor even with life on forest homesteads, but with the Lapps — and then the mental image is correct.”

— A. M. Tallgren: Suomen historia I – Suomen muinaisuus (1931)

[ Wäinölä 🇫🇮 ]