Magic Body And Social Order

Magic rituals and belief were an important part of everyday life in rural Finland, surviving even into this century. Numerous descriptions of Finnish women's magic rituals have been recorded over the past 150 years, yet we actually know little about the unusual world of women's private magic and women's own motivations in performing it. This book focuses on magic rituals practised by and for women, as well as pollution beliefs about women, and explores how these rituals and taboos reveal gender dynamics and symbolism in traditional Finnish culture. By applying anthropological perspectives to the folklore materials, the author provides new insights into concepts of body and pollution, female sexuality, and gender inequality. Many of the original source materials on women's magic rituals are translated into English for the first time here. This book will be of major interest to students and scholars of Finnish folk belief, gender studies, and women's folklore.

An important collection of essays that use a variety of different approaches and sources to uncover the continued relevance of witchcraft and magic in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.

Contrary to previous assumptions, magic remained an integral part of everyday life in Enlightenment Europe. This book demonstrates that the endurance of magical practices, both benevolent and malevolent, was grounded in early modern perceptions of an interconnected body, self and spiritual cosmos. Drawing on eighteenth-century Swedish witchcraft trials, which are exceptionally detailed, these notions of embodiment and selfhood are explored in depth. The nuanced analysis of healing magic, the role of emotions, the politics of evidence and proof and the very ambiguity of magical rituals reveals a surprising syncretism of Christian and pre-Christian elements. The book provides a unique insight to the history of magic and witchcraft, the study of eighteenth-century religion and culture, and to our understanding of body and self in the past.

The religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. But pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends, and lingered for long in folk tradition. Studying religion of the North with an interdisciplinary approach is exceptionally fruitful, in both empirical and theoretical terms, and in this book a group of distinguished scholars widen the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The authors shed new light on topics such as rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and inter-regional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions. The contributions add to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, with relevant new questions about the material and a broad analysis of religion as a cultural expression.

This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft

This book addresses the narrative construction of places, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, the supernatural dimensions of cultural landscapes and wilderness as they are manifested in European folklore and in early literary sources, such as the Old Norse sagas. The first section “Explorations in Place-Lore” discusses cursed and sacred places, churches, graveyards, haunted houses, cemeteries, grave mounds, hill forts, and other tradition dominants in the micro-geography of the Nordic and Baltic countries, both retrospectively and from synchronous perspectives. The supernaturalisation of places appears as a socially embedded set of practices that involves storytelling and ritual behaviour. Articles show, how places accumulate meanings as they are layered by stories and how this shared knowledge about environments can actualise in personal experiences. Articles in the second section “Regional Variation, Environment and Spatial Dimensions” address ecotypes, milieu-morphological adaptation in Nordic and Baltic-Finnic folklores, and the active role of tradition bearers in shaping beliefs about nature as well as attitudes towards the environment. The meaning of places and spatial distance as the marker of otherness and sacrality in Old Norse sagas is also discussed here. The third section of the book “Traditions and Histories Reconsidered” addresses major developments within the European social histories and mentalities. It scrutinizes the history of folkloristics, its geopolitical dimensions and its connection with nation building, as well as looking at constructions of the concepts Baltic, Nordic and Celtic. It also sheds light on the social base of folklore and examines vernacular views toward legendry and the supernatural.

Local practitioners of magic, providing small-scale but valued service to the community, cunning-folk were far more representative of magical practice than the arcane delvings of astrologers and necromancers. Mostly unsensational in their approach, cunning-folk helped people with everyday problems. In a world of uncertainty, before insurance and modern science, cunning-folk played an important role that has previously been ignored.

This book provides a nuanced picture of the notions of body and soul held by the peoples of Europe through the soul concepts associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition and other religions and denominations; and the alternative traditions preserved alongside Christianity in folklore collections, linguistic and literary records. The studies also emphasize the connections between these notions and beliefs related to death and the dead, as well as questions of communication between the human world and the spirit world. The essays here focus on the roles notions of the soul and the spirit world play in the everyday life, religion and mentality of various communities; their folklore and literary representations, as well as the narrative metaphors, motifs, topoi and genres of ideas about the soul and about supernatural communication, along with questions of the relationship between narratives and religious notions. This book will appeal to researchers and students of religion, mythology, folklore and the anthropology of religion, as well as general readers interested in the humanities.