The Personal Rituals of the Finnic Peoples with Forest Trees

Abstract

The article examines communication with trees in Votian and Vepsian folk culture. Two cases are discussed when a person gathering mushrooms and berries in the forest has made sacrificial gifts in the form of produce to a tree to request a good mushroom and berry harvest or for good health. In the Votian case, persons who have gone missing in the forest are memorialized. Trees are regarded as not only a conversation partner or a mediator, but in a broader religious (cosmogonic) and ritual context as well. These incidents are significant for how they reflect the animistic worldview of the Finnic peoples. A discussion of Finnic ontology is invited, suggesting that the cultural type centered on the folk healer [the-one-who-knows] came to replace the shamanic cultural type latest in the Iron Age.