Before the invention of metals, people thought that the dome of the sky was made of stone. However, as forging became a thing, the sky god Ilmar(inen) begame a forger who had forged the dome of the sky. He was not really prayed to even though he was the creator; other gods on earth and down in the underworld were more important for that. Understandable, I guess. When you're a hunter-gatherer, the sky is just there. The goddesses of animal species are way more important. This would all change if you invented agriculture, however, which is very dependant on weather and climate.
By interacting with your neighbours, you get ideas of a new kind of sky deity. One who keeps up the whole world, like a world pillar ("Vironvipu") or its guardian at the same time. With rain and thunder, he gives your fields fertility. (Although thunder used to be the duty of kokko, a fire spewing bird). Your neighbours call him Frauja or Freyr, "Lord", and veraldar god, "god of the world". You start calling him Virankannos ("the one who holds up the world") or simply just Ukko ("Lord"). Maybe the name Rauni for him was also loaned from neighbours. He became connected to Jumala ("god, celestial") like Ilmar(inen) had once been. He was present in fertility rites of the youth which involved dancing, partying, and sleeping (chastely!) together. His phallus, Jumi's mallet, stood at the center of the fields, bringing further fertility.
Suddenly, a different group of people start reaching out to you from your neighbours' lands. They speak of this Lord, celestial god, as the only god. They say, see, you already had this creator, this Lord (Ukko) in your ancestors' beliefs. We come to bring joyful news about him and his son. And it's easy for them to convert you into their new view of
UkkoHerra, a new word for "Lord" they also brought with them. You still keep remembering Ilmar(inen) as a smith, even a controller of winds since he has those smith's bellows. Ukko, Jumala, Jumi, Virankannos, Rauni... he gets new roles originally belonging to this other Herra, nobody mentioning that he's actually some other guy named Yahweh. Yahweh and Ukko are almost fused into one.
And this Herra, he had a son, Jesus, our saviour! He rose from the dead. And you start thinking about Ukko's son, similarly fertility connected Lemminkäinen. In addition to fertility, he is also connected to fire and the sun: fire itself was Ukko's son but the creation of Päivätär (sun goddess). The stories get muddied up, further influenced by your northern neighbours, the Sámi. The Sámi are powerful shamans like nobody else around these parts, which you have huge admiration for. They do tell a warning tale, however: if the shaman's helper is not able to awaken the shaman from his trance, he will get stuck on the other side, his soul elsewhere while his body rottens. In your admiration, and your own practices which developed from earlier shamanism, you start seeing Lemminkäinen as a shamanistic hero. After all, your western neighbours have a story of how their Freyr got a bride from another world, the icy Jötunheimr. And the icy world, Pohjola, is obviously the underworld. And who is able to travel to the underworld? Why, a shaman of course.
So Lemminkäinen also goes to the icy land of Pohjola to look for a bride, and he is able to cross that border with his shamanistic abilities. But he is the son of the Lord (Ukko)... it just so happens that while he is trying to hunt a swan (sin!!!), the Lady of the underworld, the goddess of death herself, struck Lemminkäinen dead and dismembered his body into the river of the underworld. Luckily for Lemminkäinen, he also had a mother, and mother's love knows no bounds. Though it's not common to speak of a female shaman, Lemminkäinen's mother is a master shaman, transforming into a bird to look for her dead son. She finds his dismembered body, puts him back together and resurrects him with Sacred Mead. The Son of God has risen. (Mead is made with honey, similarly sacred, bees being connected to the forest and sun goddesses. Wasps, however, are
explicitly connected to the same family of fire as Lemminkäinen.)
The stories of the shamans stuck on the other side stays with you. In some retellings, you say that Lemminkäinen's mother is not able to awaken her son whose body has already rotten and been claimed by death. It kind of defeats the purpose though, doesn't it? You have forgotten whose son Lemminkäinen was. Something about the world, Viro, Vipu... Whatever those words mean! You only know of the Lord. So you change up the tale: Lemminkäinen's father was a shaman named Vipunen! And HE is the one who got stuck in a trance and died. His first name was probably Antero or something, like the Sámi shaman Ikämieli/Akmeeli/Antereeus who got stuck as well.
(We still don't know what the "original" first name was before it was misinterpreted as Antero (Christian name). Possibly Angervo ("meadowsweet, dropwort") or Kanderva (
kanta "base" like a pillar would have yk)).
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This is my theory for the confusing oral myths about
Lemminkäinen,
Virankannos,
Ukko,
Vipunen and
Jumi. And according to my theory, the last four of those names would be the one and the same being... well, until Vipunen branched off to become its own thing.
The oldest mentions of Finnish Native Faith are from 1551 by the Christian bishop Mikael Agricola. He wrote the first books in Finnish, but his language quickly became quite difficult to understand as ortography developed. He said:
Quin Rauni Ukon Naini härsky /
ialosti Wkoi Pohiasti pärskyWhatever that means! The century after Agricola, these lines were interpreted as: Ukko was a thunder god and he had a thunder goddess wife Rauni, and it was thundering when they fought. And this stuck SO DEEP. So deep that majority of Finns probably still think this was the case! (Disastrous.) It prompted Jacob Fellman to invent a rowan goddess Ravdna as the supposed wife of the Sámi thunder god. It caused researchers of Norse mythology to assume that Thor's wife Sif is supposed to represent a rowan! It's a centuries long shit train of misinformation.
And by the way: Agricola also mentioned Virankannos as the "protector of oats". Therefore, it IS possible that Virankannos (and therefore Vipunen etc) is not the same as Ukko. However, oral tradition from many places such as Ladoga Karelia
SPECIFICALLY calls Virankannos the High God Ukko. So just throwing that out there.
I strongly disagree with the common interpretation of Agricola's lines (and of course I'm not the only one or the first one to do so. I read scholars I swear.) I think it should be understood that Rauni refers to Ukko himself, and when his (unnamed) wife becomes horny, it causes them to copulate (Ukko "splashing from the bottom"... weird but I think it refers to the increasing fertility of the fields and land. Or increased fertility from the direction of the underworld or something, not important.) So Ukko is not a thunder god or whatever. He is, first and foremost, a FERTILITY god who is able to increase fertility with rain and sunshine: by controlling the weather. With weather, he also started to be seen as the one in control of thunder. But that is SECONDARY to his role.
I can't even go on Wikipedia and write "Ukko is a fertility god" or whatever because I HAVE NO SOURCE. The thunder god stuff is so deeply ingraned in literature about this topic even Martti Haavio, who guessed a lot of bs but was on the correct path with this one!, did not dare to state that Ukko himself was a fertility god, simply stating that these lines were referring to a fertility god separate from thunder god Ukko.
How I wish to find a scholar's text agreeing with my view here, or for some scholar in the future to write it. So it would gain legitimacy as an opinion. For now, it is a view that exists only in my sect of Finnish Native Faith, the only member being myself.
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