Why A Pagan?

We need not regard the above matters as any mystical intuitions, describing modern scientific hypotheses in ancient folk tradition as expressed by words and concepts used by prehistoric people. Nonetheless, the example is sufficient to show how well the pagan world view fits in with empiric scientific findings and logical reasoning. Incidentally, the dogmas that still possess an official position in the West considerably impeded the advancement of science at the end of last century, and in several places around the world even today.

No doctrine requires a pagan to believe in a flat or a round world, or in created or developed species, according to how certain authorities consider it necessary to accept or denounce information obtained through research. Follow your time, be a pagan!

This claim is no isolated coincidence. People are more interested in the "roots" of the Finns than in several decades. Disinformation and counter-propaganda have also become more efficient since it would be totally unnatural that a people would not be interested in itself. During the years of hangdog attitude towards the East, everything national and Finnish was considered extremist right-wing, and it was fashionable to disparage everything Finnish. Now that "general reasons" are no longer applicable, a renaissance of national history and identity is to be expected, and thus counter-claimers are awake as well.

In addition to the "ignorabimus" claim, also the cultural, linguistic and genetic relations with our cognate peoples are being deliberately obscured in school education and general information. Go ahead and find out about your own background. You are either Finnish or a poor devil without roots. You have no other choices.

The Japanese have never disowned old things when adopting new, or worshiped anything alien although they have received all teachings offered to them. That is why they don't scrutinize themselves with alien eyes, the way some well known North Europeans do. Japanese scientific world is known for its ability to adopt innovations quickly. When something has been invented in e. g. the United States, the Japs get acquainted with the new theory; and if it is good, they adopt it. At the same time, in the country of origin, an innovation may have to fight for decades within scientific social structures in order to win acceptance. Japs who have a healthy national self-esteem do not wait for the acceptance of a new idea elsewhere after which it would be "fit" to adopt it, like spiritually non-independent peoples act and think. Probably you, the reader, can mention examples.

Depreciating one's own cultural heritage produces individuals with scarred identities who uncritically ape alien things and invariably walk in others' footsteps, not ahead of others the way the Japanese do. And Japanese history includes no phase when own original views would have been deemed evil and sinful, and they would have been forced to adopt something alien and incomprehensible. Such a phenomenon leaves a collective imprint in a nation's consciousness and a spiritual burden to every individual. If you don't know the past of your own ethnic group, you are forced to adopt an image made by others even of yourself; and it is a certain fact that such an image does not support your independence, gumption, or your attempts to utilize your full capacity. The Japanese never allowed others to dictate their national self-image. Why should you?

"New Age" includes everything from UFOs to new religions. Shamanists and researchers of their own ethnic backgrounds are a group apart in that their idea is based upon something that already exists and (hopefully) is not the fictitious self-realization of some so-called guru. Unfortunately, even here it sometimes happens that past, the doctrine used as a source for ideas etc. are explained according to one's own preferences and expectations; then wild visions are constructed which may have some "street plausibility" but they have nothing to do with any real spiritual practice that has existed at some point of time, although such claims have been made. An appropriate analogy might be various fabricated orders or knighthoods.

The concept of "Old Religion" appeared here through a feminist aspect. It is supposed that before modern-style patriarchal or male culture, the prevalent custom in Europe used to be a way of life based upon more equal sexual roles, sometimes called a matriarchate although this is a slight misnomer. There have been arguments about this supposition, but at any rate it works as a hypothesis, so it can help explain certain things.

The "matriarchal" period may have possessed a religion in which a goddess had a central position and women acted as priestesses. The best known example is the high culture of the island of Crete, but when "old religion" is mentioned, people mostly mean the cultural area which comprised Southeastern Europe and Anatolia.

The interest in European mythology through the feminist view is a completely positive phenomenon, but there is the danger of an occurrence similar to the one when modern "city shamanism" was imported to Finland. If a subject is studied only through the views of foreign practitioners and in connection with an alien culture, it is not genuinely our own but the same sort of shallow copying which was already mentioned.
This is sad because in Europe, pre-Christian religions were preserved the longest precisely with Finnish peoples. In certain places, the tradition still continues unbroken even today.

It is impossible to obtain a complete picture of European paganism without a knowledge of the Finno-Ugrian tradition which also happens to be the oldest that ever existed on the continent. So if a Finnish practitioner performs rites with an English book in one hand without giving a thought to the fact that this is part of our Finnish heritage, his spiritual integrity will not be developed very much.

> The interest boom in "Old Europe" that was launched by the books by the professor of archaeology, Marija Gimbutas, and Riane Eisler, became known in Finland with a decade's delay. This is partially due to the fact that Eisler happened to say in her work (which was immediately translated into Finnish) something incisive and vitriolic about Soviet Union, so in the 1980's not a word was said about the book in Finland. Gimbutas and Eisler provide rather good coordinates for comprehending the early history of Europe and also certain psychosocial phenomena, but naturally they failed to deal with the ways in which all of this changes our understanding about being Finnish. That remains to ourselves.

There are things in Finnish prehistory and Kalevala which can be opened in a totally new way with the aid of the viewing angle of Gimbutas and Eisler. A good example of rewritten mythology is "Pohjan Akka" (Pohjola's Old Mistress.) When Lönnrot and other collectors of folk poetry traveled in Dvina and other remaining "runo areas" practically at the last possible moment for preserving tradition, the poems written down in their notebooks told about myths which had been rewritten as early as 3000 or 4000 years earlier. Pohjan Akka was a baleful tyrant, unreliable, spiteful, and wealthy. Akka has her headquarters in "Pohjola" (frequently translated "North") which is also a metaphor for Tuonela, or the land of the dead.

Akka (Mistress) and Tuonela (Hades); life and death -- these pairs of concepts are now known in a "patriarchal" way. Death is feared because life is hated. In "Old Europe" woman was the ruler of death and rebirth. Woman who gave birth was the giver of life, a creator. So according to ancient logic, she must have ruled death as well. This thought may have prevailed because balance and harmony were revered. 3000 or 4000 B. C. something went amiss. The harmony was broken.

"Mankind must have been derailed at some point of time," concluded the psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. Otherwise, it was impossible for him to understand the destructive behavior of individuals and societies, of which two world wars served as examples for him during his lifetime. As a psychoanalyst, he saw a deep collective trauma in the soul of mankind but didn't even attempt to understand what had happened. The discovery of Gimbutas and Eisler could be an answer to Fromm's question.

After the old world was in ruins, also myths were rewritten. The series of disasters which ended "matriarchate" is reflected in the battle of the gods and titans of the Olympian mythology and the war of the Scandinavian aesir and vanir. The newest opponents of the male god-rulers were "giants" (translated into Finnish solely as "sons of Kaleva" in his Nomenclatura by Henricus Florinus in 1678, practically the only thesaurus type dictionary ever published in the Finnish language...) and amongst them are active and power-hungry female figures -- such as Pohjan Akka.

The modified Mistress figure is now without a creative and positive aspect. Death and "evil" are no longer the necessary reverse side of harmony which cannot be separated from "good," but an independent negative force. Akka/Mistress has nevertheless still remnants of her old power. Her mansion is situated in the remotest Pohja/North, a land of extremes and contraries where immense riches are awaiting and where "many have traveled but few have returned." A funny coincidence: precisely in the ultimate North we find signs connecting us even with the Minoan-Cretan matriarchal world. So "Old Europe" was even here??

Studying questions like the above without finding out what all of this means to ourselves as Finns and how it changes and constructs our own image remains easily simply the trendy blabbering of an urban intellectual without any purpose. If we manage to avoid such a pitfall, we shall not be stupid.