Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion
Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion (previously Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion) is published by the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion. The journal was founded in 1965 as a joint publication with the learned societies of Comparative Religion in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to promote the research and communication of ideas between scholars. Temenos publishes scholarly articles, academic discussions, conference reports, book reviews and thematic issues within the field of the study of religion and culture. Temenos is peer reviewed open access journal. In the Finnish Publication rating system it has been rated on top level (3). We are currently in the process of digitizing back issues, and past articles will be published in the archives section of this website as the project progresses. Please note that article abstracts are available only from 2005 and forward.
the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion
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Religious Dream Imagery in the Light of Cognitive and Evolutionary Theory
Dreams and dreaming are universal human experiences that form notable cultural themes in most folk traditions, traditional societies, and world religions. Scholarly attention has long emphasized the significance of dreams and dreaming in the study of beliefs and practices related to religious phenomena. Indeed, even in the early days of anthropology scholars proposed that dreaming was a primary source of religious belief and practice. By adopting some key observations and tenets of the naturalistic approach of cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion (CESR), this research article uses explanatory models of the salience, recurring structures, and functions of supernatural dreaming. These include imageries of supernatural/human agents, ritual actions, the use of experience, and more broadly, purported cultural transmission (factors) associated with dream representations. The article aims to address (a) lesser-known aspects of the cognition of supernatural agents in religious dreaming; and (b) lesser-known or unknown aspects of dream imagery about ritual interactions. These aims are also related to (c) the context of the cultural transmission factors of dream beliefs more broadly. These topics of religious dreaming are primarily addressed with reference to several research projects among Nepalese Hindus, ranging from pilgrimages to counterintuitive dreams and Covid-19 pandemic dream research.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andreas Nordin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Tiptoeing around Religion’ in Adult Migrants’ Education
In this article we examine accounts in interviews with Finnish educators of adult migrants in relation to religion. We argue that a historically constructed normative and affective Finnish lens on religion that is closely tied to notions of whiteness and racialization shapes these accounts. Rooted in the intertwined history of Lutheranism and secularism, this lens favours private, personal, and low-key expressions of religion, forms that are seen as more compatible with Finnish societal norms. While culturalized aspects of Lutheranism such as holidays and traditions are accepted as educational content, educators are concerned about whether the practice of Islam and its approach to time are compatible with Finnish working life. This concern reveals that the model for understanding religion is both normative and affective. As divergent forms of religion are subdued in the public sphere, religious minorities therefore negotiate their positions within unequal power dynamics. Our findings suggest that the interviewed educators’ prevailing understanding of religion is aligned with the racializing structures of migrant integration. They privilege forms of religion that benefit the assumed white, Lutheran, and secular majority, and (Muslim) migrants are accordingly viewed primarily as the future workforce.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miitta Järvinen, Terhi Utriainen, Marja Tiilikainen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Benny Grey Schuster: The History of Easter Laughter: Johannes Oecolampadius’ De risu paschali from 1518 with an Introduction, Annotated Translation, and an Account of the Cultural, Ecclesiastical, and Theological Transformation of Laughter
Book review of Benny Grey Schuster, The History of Easter Laughter: Johannes Oecolampadius’ De risu paschali from 1518 with an Introduction, Annotated Translation, and an Account of the Cultural, Ecclesiastical, and Theological Transformation of Laughter. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2024, 386 pp.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ingvild Sælid Gilhus https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Organized Asatru is estimated to include no more than 20,000 members worldwide, and between 1,000 and 3,000 in Denmark, but it is well known that there are people outside organized groups who identify as Asatru. Yet no one knows how many, who they are, and in what they believe. Here, we examine the demography and spiritual life of this broader group of Asatru for the first time. Of 23,326 participants from a Danish national cohort group (EXICODE), 94 (0.40%) self-identified as Asatru, which extrapolates to 15,000–23,000 Asatru individuals in Denmark alone. Compared with other Danes, matched by age, gender, and ethnic/cultural background, these self-identified Asatru respondents tend to be single younger males with lower income and education. This invisible group of Asatru shares several characteristics with the more visible organized Asatru, including active spiritual lives, a tendency to turn to nature, and opposition to the church. Importantly, our data indicate that the vast majority of self-identified Asatru exists in unorganized, fluid, and less visible forms. Indeed, we argue that Danish Asatru may best be understood as a pyramid with different levels of investment and organization, ranging from a few highly invested and organized neopagan Asatru at the top to a much wider group of less invested and unorganized cultural Asatru at the bottom.
Copyright (c) 2026 Uffe Schjødt, Henrik Reintoft Christensen, Helene Støttrup Andersen, Niels Christian Hvidt, Tobias Anker Stripp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Climate Change, Civil Disobedience, and Pepper Spray
This article examines the different framings of Elokapina’s Hätäjarrutus demonstration in October 2020, at which nonviolent civil disobedience activists were pepper sprayed. The research questions focus on the justifications of the activists’ nonviolent civil disobedience (NVCD) and the police’s use of force, as well as the media’s role in representing the events. The source material consists of news articles and material by Elokapina and the police, which are analysed using framing analysis. Theories of nomos and liminality are applied to explain the actions of both parties. Elokapina is interpreted as challenging the nomos, or the shared societal order, perceived as toxic and exacerbating climate change. The police interpret this demonstrative act as liminal, or beyond the normal societal order, and resort to unusual methods to control the situation. Media framing influences how the event is understood. While most articles are neutrally descriptive, both parties’ narratives are also presented, offering readers the tools to draw conclusions about which party to sympathize with. Applying theories of the study of religions deepens the understanding of climate actions and the sentiments they generate. This article highlights the role the study of religions can play in interpreting the most urgent questions of our time.
Copyright (c) 2026 Joona Vuorinen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, arguing that religious socialization and radicalization within the movement are essentially manifestations of the same process, and demonstrating how educational and communal narratives may normalize militaristic and messianic themes, establishing conditions conducive to radicalized identity formation. We examine how pedagogical strategies and narrative frameworks promote fervour and activism among Jewish youth while creating a narrative environment in which extremist ideas may circulate, without implying a direct causal pathway to radicalization. Educational materials, including books, comics, and audiovisual content, serve as conduits for transmitting Chabad Kabbalistic political theology to children and adolescents, emphasizing messianism, militarism, and Third Temple aspirations. This study highlights the significant role prominent figures, most notably Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, play in crafting a binary worldview that sharply delineates ingroup and outgroup dynamics. By examining these processes, we illustrate the contextual narrative conditions that may predispose individuals to radical interpretations, without asserting a definitive causal link.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hannes Sonnenschein, Tomas Lindgren https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Sofia Sjö, Minna Opas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Andrea Franchetto: Rituals of Perceptual Presence: Space, Material Culture, and Efficacy in Late-Medieval Learned Magic
Book review of Andrea Franchetto: Rituals of Perceptual Presence: Space, Material Culture, and Efficacy in Late-Medieval Learned Magic. Stockholm: Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University, 2024. 316 pp.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lauri Ockenström https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
While suffering the consequences of climate change, traditional lifeways in Sápmi are also under pressure from state-based plans for an energy transition, including large wind turbine parks in reindeer-herding districts. Critics speak of green colonialism and climate injustice, structurally connected with former modes of colonial intervention. Conflicts have played out in the courts, politics, and news media, mostly in secular terms, but increasingly in religious registers. I cover some of these grounds through a two-part agenda. The first exemplifies the presence of religion in nature-related conflicts in Sápmi. The second explores the wildcard dimension of such a presence. As a recent player, what can religion enable, facilitate, and contribute? What does indigeneity add? More broadly, what are the spaces of opportunity and limitation for indigenous religion(s) on nature-based conflict grounds?
Copyright (c) 2026 Siv Ellen Kraft https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
John Björkman: Healing Springs and Haunted Woods: Sacred Sites of Folk Belief and Spatial Order in Southwest Finnish Village Societies
Book review of John Björkman: Healing Springs and Haunted Woods: Sacred Sites of Folk Belief and Spatial Order in Southwest Finnish Village Societies. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University, 2024, 201 pp. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-4419-3.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tuukka Karlsson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Knut A. Jacobsen: Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence
Book review of Knut A. Jacobsen: Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence. London: Routledge, 2025, 203 pp.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tuomas Martikainen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Religious Difference and Democratic Pluralism: Some Recent Debates and Frameworks
While until quite recently debates in political philosophy on questions of pluralism, tolerance, and liberal governance foregrounded notions of culture and cultural difference, today it is religion that increasingly provides the historical and conceptual resources for the contemporary reassessment of the pragmatic and philosophical conditions for pluralist democracy. Drawing on a few recent writings in the field of political theology, this paper explores some of the analytical directions that this repositioning of religion within contemporary narratives of modernity has opened up within political philosophy. As I seek to demonstrate, the domain of political theology has become the problem space, where the tensions and contradictions between a simultaneous insistence on Europe's secular identity and its Christian one are being elaborated. Through a ceratin double movement, secularism and Christianity have become productively fused within the writings I address, in a way that repeats the story of European exeptionality while inscribing the essential otherness of the Muslim populations within its borders. In the second part of the paper, I want to contrast these reflections from political philosophy with debates in postcolonial Egypt around issues of religion and the possibility of democratic pluralism.
Copyright (c) 2008 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Globalized Islam in Europe: The Cartoon Crisis as Transnational Politics
The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed distinctive examples of a global politicized Islam: Islamic controversies originating in the actions of non-Muslims. The most important of these has been the 'cartoon crisis', originating in the cartoons of Mohammad published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten. The article describes and analyzes the reactions of Muslims as they developed in the context of the cartoon crisis. The significance of the Islamic public sphere in understanding the crisis is discussed in theoretical terms. It is argued that the crisis demonstrated the significance of a mass effect as a prducer of global Islam, of the struggle for control of public sphere, and of the creation of counter-publics. The analysis deals with the nature of the political activity connected to the crisis. Themes discussed in the article include the politics of recognition, community victimization, the principle of collective responsibility, and processual politics.
Copyright (c) 2010 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Muslim Ritual Practices and their Multilayered Messages in a Non-Muslim Environment: Examples from the Dutch Context
Many Muslims in the Netherlands want to live according to the prescriptions of their religion, but are trying at the same time to accommodate themselves to Dutch society in everyday life. Accommodation also seems to occur in the area of Muslim ritual practices, even though most orthodox and orthoprax Muslims are convinced of the 'unchangeability' of Islamic rituals. The study of Islamic rituals and changes in them in a non-Muslim Western environment have therefore become very popular among Western researchers. Most studies have focused on the relation between ritual, social cohesion and group identity. By focusing on certain Muslim ritual practices in the mon-Muslim environment of the Netherlands, this article draws attention to the role of ritual as an expression of faith on part of the individual beliver, thus stressing the multilayered messages conveyed by ritual practices.
Especially Loved by Allah: Muslim and LGBTQ in Istanbul
The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork within the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer) milieu of Istanbul. It is based on material collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with people who at the same time selfidentify as practicing Muslims and have romantic and sexual relations with people of their own sex. The protagonist of the article is a pious Muslim woman who can be placed in the category of LGBTQ Muslims who do not seek coherence and are not involved in a reinterpretation of their Islamic tradition. The article explores the complex ways in which this woman handles the potential conflicts between her sex life and her religious beliefs, and points specifically to the way she supports herself on the firm belief that Allah loves and protects her.
Copyright (c) 2011 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Ambiguous Legitimation: Grassroots Roman Catholic Communities in Italy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies
The article deals with the complex and multifaceted relationships arising between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and grassroots Roman Catholic communities, the so-called New Catholic Communities (NCCs), founded in Italy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and variously inspired by it. Two issues of particular importance in the sociological literature are addressed. The first concerns the criteria with which to construct a typology which can embrace the extreme variety of NCCs in existence today. Adapting a classic distinction drawn by Weber, the paper introduces and discusses a model which distinguishes among communities according to the twofold criteria of ascetic vs. mystical and this-worldly vs. other-worldly. The second issue concerns the recognition that the NCCs are able to obtain from the Catholic Church. It is argued that the negotiations entailed by such recognition are often rendered lengthy and tortuous, both by the controversial nature of the institutional, organizational and liturgical innovations adopted by the Communities and by the existence within the Church of several sources of legitimating authority. Torn between the duty to disavow excessively radical innovations and the desire to prevent open confl ict, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy often resorts to forms of ambiguous legitimation, where it is not clear whether the Church’s silence amounts to tacit condemnation or tacit approval of the new communities. The paper concludes by exploring the advantages that the NCCs can bring to the Church, and the consequent reasons that induce the relevant authority to abandon its proverbial prudence and grant rapid recognition.
Rehabilitated Returners: Why Some Older Women Re-affiliate to the Christian Church
Much has been written about the persistent and rapid decline of churchgoing among all sections of the British population, women as well as men, although women still constitute the majority in most congregations (Brierley 2003; 2006; Brown 2001; 2006; 2010; Bruce 2002; Crockett & Voas 2006; Heelas & Woodhead 2005; McLeod 2007). Rather less attention has been paid in Britain to returning to churchgoing. The article considers the cases of a small group of women, aged 40 and upwards, part of a larger study, most of whom have returned to church after a considerable absence, and the reasons they give for their return. Five newer approaches to the study of religiosity are then briefly introduced, the better to explain and analyse the forms taken by this particular renewed commitment within the Christian church in Britain today.
Rethinking 'Religious' Cognition: The Eliadean Notion of the Sacred in the light of the Legacy of Uno Harva
The article discusses methodological similarities and differences between Uno Harva and Mircea Eliade, with the objective of reassessing the value of their comparativist programs for the study of religion in general and of 'religious' cognition in particular. The Finnish scholar Uno Holmberg-Harva (1882-1949) was a predecessor to Eliade as a scholar of Asian and European religious history. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the academic study of religion was still maturing in Europe, Harva expanded considerably the field of the ethnological study of religion with his religio-phenomenological monographs Der Baum des Lebens (1922), Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology (1927) and Die Religiösen Vorstellungen der Altaischen Völker (1938). Harva was a towering figure in Finnish scholarship. Originally a Protestant theologian and Lutheran minister, he resigned from his ecclesiastical position to become a historian of religion, field ethnographer, ethnosociologist and folklorist under the tutelage of Edward Westermarck and Kaarle Krohn. Harva's influence on the work of Eliade has been almost entirely ignorant by historiographers of Religious Studies.
Copyright (c) 2007 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
The Rebirth of Cultural Colonialism as Religionswissenschaft: Rudolf Otto's Import House
During his 'world journey' of 1911-1912, Rudolf Otto came to embrace a form of German cultural colonialism which assigned the study of religions a key role. Concern for this colonial program guided his activities unitl the outbreak of World War I, when German colonial ambitions became unrealistic. Although it is difficult to argue that this colonial project had a major impact on Otto's conception of religion, it did alter his scholarly practice with regard to it, transforming him from a liberal systematic theologican into something more akin to whht we know today as a scholar of religions. For 25 years, from 1912 until his death in 1937, much of Otto's professional activity was taken up with importing religions materials from elsewhere, especially from south Asia - mostly texts but also material artefacts. This article reads Otto's colonialism and its rebirth as Religionswissenschaft against the grain of Otto's self-coneption and the coneption of others at the time. While cultural colonialism insisted upon its distance from the activities of the business classes, this article reads those activitites in mercantile terms, In doings so, it suggests that such a re-reading might be profitably applied not just to conceptions of scholarly activity but also to other areas where it has been customary to insist on distance from economic activity, specifically, the way in which scholars of religions have conceived what we usually call religion.
Religionswissenschaft as Colonialist Discourse: The Case of Rudolf Otto
The dominant approach to the study of religion known as the phenomenology of religion's core assumption was that underlying the multiplicity of historical and geographically dispersed religions was an ultimately metaphysical, trans-historical substratum, called 'man', Geist, or 'consciousness'. This transhistorical substratum is an expressive agent with a uniform, essential nature. By reading the data of religion as its 'expressions', it is possible to sympathetically understand their meaning. Geist, or 'man', then, is both a philosophy of history and i hermeneutical theory. It also forms a systematic set of representations, which replicate the structure of the asymmetrical relations between Europeans and those colonized by Europeans. The metanarrative of Geist is a narrative of the supremacy - their term, not mine - of white, Christian Europe over black, 'primitive' Africal and 'despotic' Asia. Spirit moves from the South to the North; away from the East to the West. This paper locates Rudolf Otto's work within the structure and history of phenomenological discourse and argues that the science of religion as described there conforms nearly perfectly to the structures of colonial discourse as this has been discussed and analyzed by theorists such as Jaques Derrida and Edward Said.
The Part of the Whole. Cosmology as an Empirical and Analytical Concept
In the study of Old Norse religion, mythology and cosmology are two core concepts frequently used in inter-disciplinary discussions as to the content, changes and spread of the pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia. The article discusses the concept of cosmology in relation to religion and world-view, with examples from picture-stones and from mythological and heroic texts. Cosmology is not a criterion of religion, any more than the occurrence of an explicitly formulated cosmology necessarily implies that the aim in presenting a world-view is exclusively religious. We may be justified in looking closely at a body of material that is to be studies and asking ourselves where its systematicity is formulated: in the researcher’s argumentation, in a compiler like Snorri, or in the emic tradition? And not least, which individual narratives in the local tradition are singled out as cosmological? Hybrid forms are rarely identified by studying cosmologies as doctrinal systems. The representation of world-views can take other forms than systematised accounts, but then they are less easily accessible to research. In a discussion of the concept of cosmology, there may be good reason to ask what motifs in text and image recurring over a long time imply for different interpretations and what their ambivalence means for their analysis today. The as now, there is a wide range of possibilities when it comes to the interpretation of individual expressions. The explanatory value of concepts such as cosmology, or for that matter mythology, is sometimes obscure, since the terms are used to capture a particular type of empirical material rather than to answer an analytical question. Cosmology and mythology thus refer to a certain kind of content in narratives rather than to the normal meaning of the term cosmology, i.e. a coherent doctrine of the universe that takes into consideration both the spatial aspects of the word cosmos and systematic knowledge, logos.
Copyright (c) 2009 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
From Goddess to Prophet: 2000 Years of Continuity on the Mountain of Aaron near Petra, Jordan
The Mountain of Aaron (Jabal Haroun) near the ancient city of Petra, Jordan, is the traditional burial place of the Old Testament prophet and a site considered sacred by the three world religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Since 1997, a Finnish archaelological project has been investigating the mountain through the excavations of a Byzantine pilgramage complex on its high plateau and an intensive survey of its surroundings. In the course of the excavations, it has become clear that the Byzantine structures were preceded by a monumental building, probably a temple of the Nabataean-Roman period. Moreover, already in the pre-Christian period a pilgrim route probablty led from central Petra to Jabal Haroun. The article explores the history and archaeology of Jabal Haroun, which shows a remarkable degree of continuity and opens up the prospect that the local folk tradition may preserve elements of Nabataean religion. Using contemporary rituals and beliefs associated with the mountain as a reference point, we suggest that the pre-Christian 'deity of Jabal Haroun' can be identified as the Nabataean goddess al-'Uzza.
Cognition and Religious Phenomena - A Response to Håkan Rydving
'Two Cultures' in the Study of Religion? - A Response to Håkan Rydving
Theoretically and methodologically, students of religion are grouped in a borderland with a great variety of competing approaches. Most of these offer heuristic tools for the interpretation of those human activities that we group together with the help of the concept 'religion'. Others present religion as a 'real phenomenon' and offer explanations. The purpose of this article is to discuss some aspects of the most influential of the approaches in the second group, the 'congnitive science of religion'.
The Grave as a Doorway to the Other World: Architectural Religious Symbolism in Iron Age Graves in Scandinavia
During the last twenty years, the category ‘grave’ has been the subject of increasing debate in Swedish archaeology. It has been recognized that monuments commonly regarded as graves are sometimes also found in cultic contexts other than those associated with death and burial. In many cases, for instance, monuments similar to graves have been erected at cult sites, and seem to have been used in sacrificial practices rather than for burials. According to archaeological, textual and onomastic sources, it was common practice in Old Norse religion to suspend sacrificial victims from trees of from upraised posts, or to deposit offerings at the base of sacred rocks and boulders. In all these cases, the trees, posts and boulders seem to be representation of the World Axis, depicted in cosmological myths as a Cosmic Tree, Pillar or Mountain. I argue that these various representations of the World Axis are also incorporated in the architectonic symbolism of several forms of grave monuments in pre-Christian Scandinavia. The architectonic shape of these monuments could thus be used in several different contexts, since they represented a ‘Cosmic Center’ and a ‘doorway’ to the Other World.
The Concept of Religion in Current Studies of Scandinavian Pre-Christian Religion
In recent Swedish studies of Scandinavian pre-Christian religion of the late Iron Age, various scholars have questioned the utility of the concept of religion in this field. According to these scholars, the concept of religion obscures the specific character of religions of the small-scale non-literate societies of the pre-Christian Age. In the article, I critically examine suggestions that we abandon the academic concept of religion and replace it with an emic concept, or a concept derived from an emic context. I further argue that this strategy implies an inappropriate dualistic opposition between Scandinavian pre-Christian religion and so-called world religions. I conclude with a critical evaluation of problematic formulations of religious change and variation, presented by the same scholars who criticize the use of the academic category of religion. I try to draw attention to certain problematic implications of these demands. I conclude that we should continue to employ the concept of religion in connection with the religious worlds of pre-Christian societies. The strategy proposed by these scholars may turn out to be merely one more way of imposing misconceptions on this period.
Dwelling on the Borders: Self. Text and World
In spite of secularist predictions, religion on a global scale has not gone away and shows little sign of dimnishing. Within the context of the renewal of interest in religion and the assertion of religion in the public realm, I seek in this article to explore the ways in which the self has been (and continues to be) formed in religious traditions. Drawing on substantive examples from my work on textual traditions in India and Europe, the article argues that 'religious reading' is central to the formation of religious traditions and the formation of the religious person, and that this has an impact upon discourse in the public realm. The process of religious reading itself occurs in a borderland between text and world and between self and world. Through 'religious reading', or more precisely textual reception, we can understand the ways in which forms of inwardness are constructed in tradition-specific ways and such inwardness too has an impact on public discourse. I therefore attempt to examine three traditional borderlands - between inwardness and externality, between text and world, and between private religion and public governance - in the light of religious reading.
Something Old, Something New: Excursions into Finnish Sacrifical Carins
The article approaches the archaeological phenomenon known in Finland as 'sacrificial cairns' by examining the scholarly history and by placing these cairns in the context of the recent theoretical discussion concerning the essence of ritual and secular in prehistoric socities. 'Sacrificial cairns' are traditionally considered to have been Iron-Age altar-like constructions for the worship of various supernatural powers. This view started to develop already in writings on the Finnish 'ancient religion' (Fi. muinaisusko), and was made explicit in antiquarian and then archaeological scholarship. The grounds for identifying sacrificial cairns were sometimes very slight, but they nevertheless influenced future research. Later, secualr perspectives were added to ritual ones. I argue that the scholarly tradition and the consequent archaeological attributes of sacrificial cairns are an over-simplification, and that there is thus reason to re-examine the old interpretations. Although the existence of prehistoric cairns as places of sacrifice is implied by the ethnographic record, the same evidence also suggests that the relationship between cairns with sacral and secular functions is far less straightforward than has previously been thought. Following the recent discussion, some of the cairns traditionally identified as sacrificial might perhaps better be defined as structured depositions, possibly resulting from practices in which the ritual and the secular were inseparable.
The Late Iron Age Bear-Tooth Pendants in Finland: Symbolic Mediators between Women, Bears, and Wilderness?
In the article I discuss the different functions and meanings of bronze bear-tooth pendants in the Finnish Late Iron Age (800-1150/1300 CE). I first focus on an analysis of the pendants in terms of archaeological methodology: chronology, typology and find context. The second focus on attention, and in this article the most important one, is on the interpretation on these pendants. They are usually interpreted as magical items, amulets. In my opinion this is not the only possible interpretation. I suggest that the pendants can be interpreted as magical or religious, but that their possible protective use as amulets does not exclude other functions, such as a decorative and/or social one. I emphasise the possibility that bear-tooth pendants may be linked to a symbolic form of expression involving the idea of control of the forest and wilderness. Finnish folk tradition and mythology point to a metaphoric and metonymic relationshiop on the one hand between the bear and the wilderness, on the otehr the bear and women. The bronze bear-tooth pendatns - possibly worn only by women - may have carried a symbolic message of control over the wilderness; this control could have been mythology-based and practised by ritual acts; at the same time it could also take the form of concrete acts, such as utilization of the wilderness: a fur-based economy and control over the fur trade.