Faith and Magic in Early Modern Finland by Toivo Raisa Maria

Author:Toivo, Raisa Maria
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137547286
Publisher: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

The neighbours also admitted to celebrating St George and St Olaf with special ale. Usually the celebrations included psalm singing and prayers. In a couple of cases, the lay people were also reported to have celebrated an ‘irregular Mass’ – these descriptions include elements of blasphemy, although at least one of these celebrations seems to have been done in all earnestness.90 These are all features that also emerge in other types of magic and could be considered suspicious under certain circumstances. These features also likened the celebration in various ways – by dress, and singing and by prayer – to the celebration of holy days in church.

The special beer or ale was also a reference to the ‘toasts’ mentioned earlier. Toasting in honour of the Virgin Mary or the saints had been an important part of convivial piety throughout Europe, and especially in the late medieval Baltic region, most importantly Livonia,91 but ritual toasts were also offered to Ukko and possibly other non-Christian deities. The toast to Ukko was a special feature in the Tavastia region, intended to bring about rain in dry summers. Those toasting were seldom described as settling for one toast; the amount of drink consumed was thought to procure a corresponding amount of good luck and protection.92 A special meal was also a common feature: a lamb or a calf was slaughtered and prepared beforehand to be consumed in honour of the saint, especially St Catherine or St Olaf. Sometimes the meals took place in the cattle sheds, sometimes in the house, and sometimes these included presentations in specially built or ad hoc offering places.93

The syncretistic mixture of religious reference to Catholic guild piety and saints as well as to non-Christian deities, and their very loose connection to modern forms of the Lutheran Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, have led to discussion of the meals and toasts as part of the animistic culture of Finland. Both the meal and the ale were symbols that had carried multiple meanings throughout the late medieval period and did so also in early modern Protestant culture. Both referred to the communion and to more secular celebrations, as well as also to a variety of traditions that never sought to distinguish the sacred or the sacramental from the secular and mundane in the way theologians insisted. Whereas there is currently rather a lot of scholarly insight into the medieval and Tridentine Catholic concepts of communion, works on the Protestant concepts of communion have only recently proliferated. There are, however, a number of works that make use of ritual theory to examine the physical spatiality and setting as well as the gestures and visual cues of the Protestant communion service.94 One of the visual cues suggested by Luther was the arranging of communion at the front of the church so that the communicants could be seen by all the congregation.

Both the Lutheran and Catholic reformers strove, at least on the theological level, for a more individualistic concept of the communion, one oriented towards the relationship between the individual and God.

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