Wisdom & magic of Kalevala

[Nefastos]

"My Nature I shall try to raise, I shall summon my genius: my Nature, from the hole arise, my Haltia, from under the fallen tree, my Helper, from beneath a stone, my Guide, from out of the moss; come, dread-inspiring Death, come at the time of anguish dire, to give support, to safeguard me, to help me and the strengthen me for the work that must be done, the hurt that must be known about."
- Traditional Finnish spell (compiled by Lönnrot & translated by Abercromby in the 19th century)

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Inspiring Kalevala Day for you brothers and sisters!

I'd be interested to hear if people outside Finland have researched - or even come across by chance - the ancienct teachings of Kalevala and the Finnish bards?

I think it's very interesting that H.P.Blavatsky chose quotation from Kalevala for her magnum opus' second book, Anthropogenesis. It's the same year, 1888, that both Secret Doctrine and the 1st edition of Kalevala in English were published.

[Jiva]

I have read the Kalevala before. I had about an hour to kill and was browsing a bookshop where the Kalevala was too cheap to not buy. At the time the only motivation for reading it was due to bands such as Amorphis, Turisas etc.

There are some striking similarities with Hinduism, particularly the eggs of creation Blavatsky referenced and the Hiranyagarbha. Unsurprisingly, due to geography, I see more similarity with Norse mythology than any other mythology I know of. Aside from the more obvious equivalents, Vainamoinen/Odin and Lemminkainen/Thor, the similarity of Louhi and Laufey (the mother of Loki) is interesting to me from an academic perspective.

Recently I've been reading stuff about alchemy so the tale of Ilmarinen creating a woman and a sun and moon of literal gold and silver rather than with the symbolic qualities of the metals has been in my mind lately. Additionally, my impression of the battle between Louhi and Vainamoinen is that Ahto and the depths of the sea are the primary beneficiaries when the Sampo falls into the water which ultimately benefits the all by proxy. Later, Ukko's replacement sun also falls into the waters and burns the materialistic Ilmarinen when it is retrieved.

On a more prosaic level I really enjoyed the style of the poem, although of course I am reading it as an English translation. The 'othering' of the Lapps (in the translation I read, which I guess corresponds to the Sami?) has made me interested in reading some of their mythology to see if they have any opinions regarding the Finns .

[Nefastos]

The 'othering' of the Lapps (in the translation I read, which I guess corresponds to the Sami?) has made me interested in reading some of their mythology to see if they have any opinions regarding the Finns .

From one lecture of the Sami mythology I seem to recall that stallo or the witch-trolls of the Sami people were sometimes pictured in garb that was similar to their neighbouring people. But such a thing would be only natural, eh?

You mentioned similarity between Finland & India in some points, and there seems to be some similarity between the fates of the original Sami people in Finland and the original Dravida people in India. In India, Dravidians were force to move souther & souther on as the Vedic Aryan culture caught more & more foothold from the north, and while much of their religion persisted to this very day, they became both outcasts and at the same time like lore-holders for certain more matriarchal esoteric traditions. Something similar seem to have happened with the Sami people: they were the more original people with their shamanistic tradition, who were harassed by the more modern newcomers, this time from the south, alienated and at the same time became - ironically enough - something like wizard archetypes for the Finns, who themselves were often wizard archetypes for the people around them.

It's interesting to see how much there is difference between the mythology of Kalevala (Southern Finland?) in the book with the same name and Sami mythology, like already two distinct cultures; but it remains controversial how much that dualism was made intentionally at the later times. For example, Lönnrot sometimes edited Kalevala's poems with quite a heavy hand. They were separate poems beforehand, so in order to make a story, some storylines were intentionally emphasised as late as the 19th century.

[Jiva]

I haven't read into how Lönnrot edited the poems together. However when I was reading the Kalevala I thought it was fairly obvious that the story of Kullervo was completely isolated from the main narrative.

I meant to ask this in my original post but forgot: are there any further compilations of Finnish poems that didn't make it into the Kalevala? I have the Oxford World's Classics translation by Keith Bosley which has a map of where Lönnrot and his contemporaries collected poems from i.e. eastern Finland, the border with Russia and northern Estonia. In addition to the north, western Finland is completely neglected.

[Teratokrios]

I meant to ask this in my original post but forgot: are there any further compilations of Finnish poems that didn't make it into the Kalevala? I have the Oxford World's Classics translation by Keith Bosley which has a map of where Lönnrot and his contemporaries collected poems from i.e. eastern Finland, the border with Russia and northern Estonia. In addition to the north, western Finland is completely neglected.

There's tons of stuff, but Im affraid it's mostly been published in finnish. The most monumental is SKVR (Suomen Kansan vanhat runot\Old poems of the finnish people). A book collection which consist of 34 volumes, most of these volumes have a page count between 700 to 1000 pages and they whithold 100 000 separate poems inside their covers from all over the country. They do not cover all of the oral tradition, only some of the kalevala length poems. The poems in the books are split within their geographic "poetic zones" and within these zones they are compiled by their topics. The topics are following:

Lyric
Epic
Certain events (weddings, funerals, lullabies)
Spells and incantations

These poems are also fully digitalized in the SKVR-korpus, but unfortunately even the search function is in finnish. If you're intrested of purchasing books about this subject, SKS (Suomen Kirjallisuuden seura\Finnish literary society) which originally published the SKVR has some good books in their catalogue that you may find to be worthy of your time and interests.

[Jiva]

Thanks for the SKS link, I will definitely be getting some books from there; my reading list grows ever longer .

[Benemal]

If any works of Pekka Ervast are available in english, those are highly recommended and not just by me.

[Teratokrios]

Yes, thank you for reminding me of Ervast, frater! The Key to the Kalevala has indeen been translated to english in seems to go around in pretty affordable prices (amazon seems to sell it in 15$)

Also Salakirjat have published(or rather re-published) a book called "The Magic Songs of the Finns" which by the description contains 639 incantations. Haven't seen (or read) the book yet in real life, but atleast the outer aspects in this book seems to be in order. If a book has woodcuts from the hands of Gallen-Kallela, it can't go very wrong aesthetically.

It seems the afformentioned book is in sacred texts, if somebody want's to check its content before deciding to make purchase: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ms1/

[Jiva]

Thanks for the additiona links. Some of Ervast's books are available for the Kindle format at a cheaper price so I'll definitely add these to my collection. In fact I plan to read one of his books regarding esoteric Christianity after René Guénon's The Symbolism of the Cross; something I've been postponing for some time now.

[Jiva]

I've recently had the joy of being ill for the last two weeks so I've read a lot more than usual, one of these was the Key to the Kalevala by Ervast. Overall I thought it was a very insightful book written in a warm and sometimes humorous manner that serves as a great companion to the Kalevala. A surprise for me was the relatively relaxed attitude towards sexuality and black magic, something I didn't expect from a Theosophist of that era.

I'm also surprised that Runes 47 and 48 were not mentioned. Louhi stealing the sun and moon, thereby motivating Ukko to create deficient replacements, struck me as symbolism prime for analysis. After all, Ilmarinen and the literal gold and silver woman has already happened by this point. However, since Ervast doesn't mention the creation of Väinämöinen's second Kantele either, perhaps these are omitted due to not wanting to repeat issues he already viewed as discussed? Having said that though, I interpreted the creation of the second Kantele as similar to the Hindu adage of the ascetic not literally needing the forest for seclusion – something I can't think of deriving from any other aspect of the Kalevala. Ultimately though I have obviously not studied the Kalevala anywhere near as much as Mr. Ervast, nor even in the original language. Additionally, I had no idea there was a New or Old Kalevala so perhaps these are later additions and therefore considered truly extraneous by Ervast?

The (literal) Theosophical race theorisation and erroneous discussions of Finnish race migration from central Asia have dated fairly badly in my opinion, but it's not really a big deal as it's a small part of the book and kind of understandable when considering the nationalism of the time.