Faith and Magic in Early Modern Finland

Raisa Maria Toivo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137547279
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

Early modern Finland is rarely the focus of attention in the study of European history, but it has a place in the context of northern European religious and political culture. While Finland was theoretically Lutheran, a religious plurality – embodied in ceremonies and interpreted as magic – survived and flourished. Blessing candles, pilgrimages, and offerings to forest spirits merged with catechism hearings and sermon preaching among the lay piety. What were the circumstances that allowed for such a continuity of magic? How were the manifestations and experiences that defined faith and magic tied together? How did western and eastern religious influences manifest themselves in Finnish magic? Faith and Magic in Early Modern Finland shows us how peripheral Finland can shed light on the wider context of European magic and religion.

1
Introduction:
Magic in a Religious Borderland

This book assesses the mutual dependence of lived religion, magic, and superstition in ‘Long Reformation’ Finland. I examine the fluid experiences of faith, magic, and superstition in an area where local communities were constantly influenced by the political and ideological needs of the emerging state, expansionist politics, and, at times, foreign military threats. As such an area, Finland was in no way unique in the early modern period, but I hope that the clarity of the different factors at play in this context will help make their interdependency clear in other areas too.

Finland as a Cultural Geographic Area, and Its Relevance for Historical Study

Early modern Finland is rarely a focus of attention in the study of European history, but it certainly has a place in the context of northern European religious and political culture. During the early modern period, Finland was a part of Sweden, a Lutheran heartland and an aspiring great power. As a part of Sweden, Finland was involved in major developments in early modern Europe, from the development of contemporary controversial theology to the Polish Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War. At the same time, Finland was also a borderland between western and eastern cultures, both politically and religiously. Studying faith, magic, and superstition in this context enables us to identify how the interdependency of these three concepts changed according to the social and political circumstances of the time.

The modern state of Finland we see on the maps of Europe is not the same as Finland of the early modern era. Indeed, in current historiography, when everyone seeks to avoid methodological nationalism, using terms like ‘Finland’ or ‘Finnish’ to refer to periods before 1809 has sometimes been labelled anachronistic. I am fully aware of the problems involved in studying concepts that at the time did not exist, but, for lack of a better term (and to avoid creating a new nationalist result in trying to avoid one), I shall refer to the place that later happened to become Finland as Finland, and the people who lived there, Finnish (unless a finer gradation seems more relevant to the point I am trying to make). While potentially problematic, this position is not wholly wrong. Whether Finland could be said to have been a country or an area of its own during the early modern period depends on one’s approach. Finland – except for the province of Kexholm in Karelia – had not been occupied or conquered by Sweden; rather, it had been included as part of Sweden when the country first organized its government and taxation. Finns usually considered themselves to be selfevidently loyal subjects of the Swedish King and realm. In one sense, Finland was simply a collection of Swedish governmental provinces on the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia. At other times, however, these provinces had a special role and a special place in the realm and its politics, economy, and cultural development, and the provinces were thought of as belonging together. Of course, contemporaries emphasized whichever approach they felt most advantageous to their aims in the situation.

Historical Finland was geographically defined according to three factors: the border between Russia and Sweden, the struggle for access to the Arctic Ocean among Sweden, Denmark, and Russia, and the geographical divisions of government, jurisdiction, and church life within the realm of Sweden. The idea that the provinces east of the Gulf of Bothnia belonged together and formed a place called Finland was – to a great extent – based on language, although Finnish was spoken on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia and in various areas of Russian Karelia and Ingria. Government officials who were placed in Finland were often (but not always) required to gain a working knowledge of the language. Laws and orders were translated into Finnish, and church liturgies and sermons had to be rewritten in Finnish. All materials produced by the local authorities for the purposes of control by the central authorities – like court records, tax records, and communion books – were, of course drawn up in Swedish.

The geographical proximity of the provinces embraced by the northern shores of the Baltic Sea made governmental unity practical, and most of the mid-level state bureaucracy used the Gulf of Bothnia as a main geographical boundary. When Sweden established a system of courts of appeal, one was established in Turku in 1623, and ‘Finland’¹ was established as its jurisdiction. The episcopal seat of Turku covered the whole of Finland until the eastern parts of the bishopric grew too large and a bishop was assigned to Vyborg.

Another factor that characterized early modern Finland was its position as the eastern part and the eastern border of the Swedish realm. During the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this meant it was a theatre for the foreign politics of the expanding Swedish Kingdom: it was a place of war and devastation. To a certain extent, by the sixteenth century this had produced a sense that the elite in Finland had a special interest in eastern foreign politics. If this was true, it was crushed as a result of Charles IX’s bloody purges of his political and religious opponents after the civil war – or the Club War as it has become known – at the end of the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century, the eastern border was a place of relative domestic peace, for, although Sweden’s great power aspirations demanded heavy taxation and continuous conscriptions, troops marched and made havoc elsewhere, in the Thirty Years War and in other battles in Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Norway. In these conflicts, Sweden sought to lead the Protestant forces of Europe. The war efforts were, nevertheless, largely funded by France, and this foreign money bridged the shortfall in Swedish taxation. At least 25,000 Finns served in the Swedish army between 1630 and 1648, some of them as high-ranking officers. As was customary, the officers brought back with them the spoils of war, both culturally and materially.²

Map 1.1 Finland in early modern Sweden

Source: Haapala and Toivo 2007: 87.

Early modern Finland was essentially a rural area. Only about two per cent of the population lived in towns, and the few towns that did exist were mostly small. The rural character of the area gives this investigation a fresh perspective compared to much current research on early modern Lutheranism. Many scholarly works have focused on German towns and cities, with the pragmatics of religious life thus centring on the hierarchies of the workshops and guilds. This book, on the other hand, presents an inherently rural Lutheranism, where the experience and practice of religion is adapted to not only agricultural life – of seasonal and daily cycles, field work, and cattle rearing – but also to long distances, self-sufficiency, material scarcity, and a constant awareness of the fluctuations in life’s fortunes. Even an averagely wealthy farmer in early modern Finland was just a couple of rains or frosts away from penury. Peasant farmers were usually freeholders who held hereditary rights to their land, but, if they failed to pay taxes for three consecutive years, the crown had the right (though not necessarily the desire) to confiscate the farmstead and offer it to somebody else in the hope that they would have greater success in paying their taxes.³ Social mobility was fluid; people could both rise and fall. However, the loss of one would often turn into the gain of another.

Early modern Finland was simultaneously a periphery and an integral part of the central Swedish realm. There were relatively densely built areas in the south and south-western parts of Finland. The shores of the lakes and rivers with easily workable soils had been inhabited since the previous ice age. These areas were an integral part of the realm, and they were in relatively regular communication with the centres of power. Royal orders and stipulations were sent by postal routes to be read aloud by the parish priest every Sunday after the sermon. There were systems of regular market days during which trade between the town and the countryside was supposed to take place, although people tended to travel for trade on others days too. Secular court sessions were held at least three times a year, and episcopal and parochial visitations were conducted at irregular but not infrequent intervals. These areas of Finland were, while not at the centre, relatively well attached to the centres of Sweden and, through it, Europe. Nevertheless, in areas with clay and sandy soils, and in the great forests, there were still unclaimed areas of land where settlers could go to make their fortunes, even in the parishes of Satakunta and Tavastia. In the more northern and north-eastern areas, settlement was still in its infancy, infrastructure was sparse, and people were few and far between. These areas were the true peripheries; a round trip to the nearest church could take three days.

Finnish church historians have been rather keen to argue that Christianity was still a relatively new ideology in Finland at the time of the Reformation – some even argue that the Christianization of these areas was incomplete. However, the first signs of Christianity reached Finland around the eleventh century. Apparently, the parochial system had developed by the thirteenth century, although new parishes were established and churches and chapels were built in new areas of settlement well into the eighteenth century. One of the theories most often ascribed to is that the recent Christianization of Finland meant that it did not have the time for spiritual or structural deterioration, which, in the rest of Europe, had led to the Reformation efforts from the thirteenth century onwards. Therefore, the argument goes, the Reformation in Finland was largely led from above and was less politicized than in Sweden. This, in turn, led to greater tolerance and a lack of religious violence and iconoclasm in the Finnish Long Reformation period. This theory does not quite match the evidence though, since both economic connections and communication between south-western areas of Finland and the German areas on the southern side of the Baltic Sea were frequent in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. New religious trends can be traced along these routes, such as new types of guild devotion, rosary practices, saints’ cults, and – later on – ideas about the Reformation, religious radicalism, and witches. In fact, south-west Finland was a wellestablished area of European Catholicism in the late medieval period.

The Religious Background in Early Modern Finland

Lutheran orthodoxy and confessionalism is taken for granted in the research of seventeenthcentury Swedish history. It has been treated as one of the most important tools for supporting the power of the sovereign and of enabling Sweden’s rise to a great power in Europe. Historians claim that Lutheran orthodox teaching cemented early modern authority, from the king to the father of the peasant household, and it justified warfare and tax collection. Catechism teaching unified the country’s culture and mentality. Religious argument formed the basis on which social order was justified, from estate privileges to the ‘reform of manners’ that suppressed extramarital sexuality and addressed blasphemy and witchcraft. There is hardly a single trait in seventeenth-century Sweden’s history that is not connected to Lutheran orthodox theology and folk teaching.⁴ Nevertheless, despite this emphasis, little historical research has been done on the subject. Lutheran orthodoxy has been referred to as explaining, causing, and being explained by other phenomena. However, ever since the studies conducted from the 1950s to the 1970s on modernity and premodernity in religion,⁵ the nature and prevalence of Lutheran orthodoxy has been taken for granted.

In recent decades, a number of scholars have published studies on Finnish and Scandinavian church and religious history.⁶ Those studies make it clear that whereas the importance of religious teaching and argument in seventeenthcentury society cannot be overemphasized, the meaning of what social historians interchangeably call ‘Lutheran orthodoxy’ and ‘confessionalism’ is in need of reinterpretation, especially in political and social history. Nordic historiography (with the exception of Garstein and Laasonen,⁷ both theological historians) has overemphasized the special character of Swedish Lutheranism as a religious form connected to power-states and the development of a patriarchal society. For social and political historians especially, the religious framework has been something of a given. My approach sees Lutheran orthodoxy as a process rather than as a finished body of dogmatic and social teaching. Lutheran theology was searching for its form and content somewhere between the Roman Catholic and the Calvinist denominations during the time of orthodoxy,⁸ and the trends that later took the shape of Pietism were already present from the Reformation. They can be followed in the individual deliberations on religious experience and religious thought that are presented in many cases of blasphemy and magic.

The Reformation in Finland was a slow and uncertain process – as big changes often are – groping to find its direction in the midst of political and economic turmoil. Although the process culminated in certain events and decisions, these took a long time to make an impact. Lutheranism, the ‘the pure Christian religion’, was pronounced to be the religion of the country in the Diet of Västerås in 1527. This made the king the head of the church, abandoning papal authority. What the ‘pure Christian religion’ meant theologically was left open at the Diet. This was a princely Reformation, imposed from above, without any great popular demand or violence of the kind that was present in the German cities. Nor did it raise much resistance, especially on the Finnish side of the Gulf of Bothnia. Certainly, there were clergymen in Sweden and Finland who were not only familiar with but genuinely convinced by the new Protestant ideas. Olaus Petri and Laurentius Andreae were such men in the immediate service of the king. Mikael Agricola in Finland had studied in Wittenberg at a crucial time. Gustav I took advantage of the spread of these ideas and the way in which they struck a chord with the emerging Swedish ‘national’ pride. The urban areas in Sweden found the Reformation appealing for much the same reasons as the German cities – a cultural climate perhaps, formed by religious fervour and anxiety, political and proto-nationalist ideas and social change. In the rural areas of Sweden proper, however, violent disturbances occurred. On the Finnish side of the Gulf of Bothnia, no systematic violence was recorded, although isolated instances were reported. This has been attributed to the less political nature of the religion and to the even slower development of the Reformation in Finland than in Sweden proper. It took time to create Protestant liturgical and religious texts and formulas in Finnish. Mikael Agricola published the first catechisms, the ‘ABCkiria’ (1543) and ‘Rucouskirja’ (1544), and a translation of the New Testament, ‘Se Wsi Testamentti’ (1548). In addition he also published Finnish liturgies (1549), as did the bishop of Vyborg, Paulus Juusteen (1575). When these texts did appear, they were slow to spread – they were too expensive for even the clergy to purchase – and their nature was conservative; the changes to the old formulas were few.

The Counter-Reformation had exerted some influence in Sweden and Finland, too. John III is widely known to have been interested in Catholicism, and during his reign of 1562–92, the religious policies of the realm took a Catholic turn. A new liturgical handbook with strong Catholic tendencies was introduced, named the Red Liturgy after the colour of its binding. On the other hand, rumours about a Jesuit conspiracy in the royal court provoked a wider anti-Catholic allegiance at the end of John III’s reign. The decision on Lutheranism was cemented in the Council of Uppsala in 1593. It is rather ironic that it was not until the ascension of Charles IX that Lutheranism was established as the state religion. Charles’s own religious ideas were definitively closer to Calvinism than Lutheranism. In Finland, this seems to have caused some tension, but, unlike Sweden proper, the bishops here were not forced to resign from office – possibly because Charles had already beheaded a huge number of his political opponents in Finland at the end of the Club War. He had angered and at least temporarily defeated the nobility, and he was not in the position to take risks with the clergy.

It took well into the seventeenth century for the Lutheran Reformation to establish its influence on the level of lay piety. This was a period during which the church and the state united into a confessionalist policy of state religion and theocracy. Religious and denominational uniformity was an explicit aim of the realm in Sweden, as in many other areas. In Finland, the Russian Orthodox population of the Kexholm area – which had been annexed to the country in the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617 – formed a notable minority. It is usually considered that only the rise of Pietist movements in the eighteenth century questioned the denominational unity of Finland and Sweden. Lutheranism was, therefore, more secure in the Nordic area than it was in the more contested central Europe. Nevertheless, the complex development trod a path among Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Reformed Protestantism. Moreover, the slowness of the changes suggests that the Reformation was not a single process; rather, we could talk about Reformations in the plural, meaning not only the different temporal phases but also the approaches and experiences of the different actors on the scene. The theological, the political, and the lay religious – and the different types of Protestantism and Catholicism – were all present in the early modern Finnish scene in one way or another. The period during which these processes took place can thus justly be termed the Long Reformation.

The final period of the Long Reformation in Finland and Sweden is also considered a period of confessionalization and of religious orthodoxy. The crown and the church together strived for discipline and control. The populace was taught the Christian religion through sermons and catechism teachings, and this was supervised by the parish clergy. Church attendance was, at least theoretically, made compulsory by the 1680s, although the authorities well understood that cattle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Magic in a Religious Borderland
• 2 Lived Lutheranism and the Development of Superstition
• 3 Catholic Influence and Magic in Finland
• 4 Eastern Orthodox Influence and Its Demonization in Finland
• 5 Conclusion: The Continuum of Magic and Religion
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography and Sources
• Index