Pagan Tree Worship in Finland

Описание: This slidshow is about pagan tree worship in Finland in old times, but today there are also neopagans who follow in the footsteps of our ancestors and who revive these traditions in different ways, adopting them (consciously or unconsciously) to the humanistic and (lets face it) christian values that rule the thinking of our modern Western society.

This video is about tree worship in Finland, but basicly the worship of trees have also existed in other Nordic counties like Sweden, and in fact all over the world.

I chose to focus on Finland, since I have more information about how treeworship worked in Finland and since the Finns belong to a different language groop than the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes. Antropologists have found out more about tree worship among the Finns through comparing words and customs with related (Finno-Ugrian) tribes that live in Russia and other Baltic countries. The model for a sacred grove is in fact adopted from groves that still exists among some of our distant relatives in Russia. The rites that have to do with the killing of a bear are, as far as I know, also somting that can't be found in among Swedes, but mostly among arctic people around the world.

In the video I speak of trees in general, but the species of tree also seems to have been important to some extent. In Finland, whit our relatively cold climate, the most common sacred trees were spruce, pine and birch, but rowan seems to have played an important part too.

The pictures in the slideshow are illustrations to the facts not always exactly picturing what the text is about.