Peasants, Pilgrims, and Sacred Promises: Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk Religion by Laura Stark (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 103 very well documented, providing valuable guidance to further reading. Perhapsinevitablythere is a degree of overlap, especiallyin the reiterationof certain St Petersburgmyths,but overallthey make a very usefulcontribution. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies LINDSEY HUGHES U.niversity College London Stark,Laura. Peasants, Pilgrims, andSacred Promises. RitualandtheSupernatural in Orthodox Karelian FolkReligion.Studia Fennica: Folkloristika,II. Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki, 2002. 229 pp. Illustrations.Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography.Index. ?27.00 (paperback). LAURA STARK'S book is a welcome contribution to the study of folk religious beliefs and rituals within their social context, in this case among the rural Finnish population of Karelia from the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. Historicaland geographicalconsiderationshave made this ethnic group a fascinating object of study. Their cultural system reveals an eclectic intertwining of Finnish and Russian influences, while their religious worldview containsa fusionof elementsfromRussianOrthodoxy, as opposed to the Catholicism and, in the post-Reformation period, Lutheranism of Finland, with pre-Christianfolkbeliefs and practices. In her study, Starkhas utilized folk beliefs and legends, incantations and descriptions of ritual activities drawn from the folklore archives of the Finnish LiteratureSociety and the Karelian Lexical Archivesof the Research Instituteof the Languages of Finland. Stark identifies two separate, yet complementary, cycles of beliefs and associated rituals of crucial importance to the group studied. The first conicernsrelationshipsbetween humans and nature spirits,in particularthe supernatural denizens of the forest, the dead and saints, while the second relates to the objects of Christian pilgrimage, such as monasteries, and the relationship between humans and the sacred agents associated with such places. The two ritual complexes are linked, according to Stark, by certain sharedfactors.Both helped to define the divisionbetween 'pure'and 'impure' regionis.In the case of the former, ritual behaviour maintained the barriers between the 'pure' home community and the 'impure' forest or wilderness zone, while the lattercontrastedthe 'impurity'of the human community with the purityof the sacredcentre. Both complexes arose as a way of dealing with 'disorder'in dailylife (lossof cattle and humans in the forest,illnesscaused by caki, the dangerouspower surgesemanating from certainbeings and objects), and both were based upon an exchange of mutual benefits (e.g. ritual observance and giftsfrom humans versusreturnof good health by the sacred agent).This latter Starksees as the definingmoment for transactionsbetween humans and supernatural beings, being derived from the major principle underpinning, according to Stark, interpersonalrelationshipswithin society as a whole. It even extended to the personal relationship between the individual and God, the latter being viewed in Karelian folk religion as a being fromwhom concrete benefitswere also expected. I04 SEER, 82, I, 2004 Since it is Stark's contention that human approaches to sacred agents, whether saints or nature spirits, were most often made following some breakdown in normal, ordered life, whether personal (illness) or of the community (cattle attacked by forest predators), a significant part of her study deals with the restoration of order through negotiation with the sacred agent. Of particular interest are sections dealing with divination rituals and the use of healers, who employed their special knowledge and the insights received in dreams to control the disease-inducing vakiwho came, in response to some perceived insult or omission, from the wilderness and the spaces occupied by the dead in order to invade the 'open' and vulnerable body of individuals. Through their intervention, the patient's sense of wholeness was restored and the boundaries dividing the world of living humans from that of the Other reestablished . This book is full of interesting ideas and encourages further questioning and speculation. Some of its conclusions may seem a little exaggerated. By creating an artificial split between hunters and pastoralists, and by consciously eliminating rituals concerning the former from her study Stark has, in my opinion, created an imbalance. Her examination of the relationship between humans and sacred agents in the forest concentrates, almost exclusively, on ritual behaviour designed to reverse misfortune and restore order, equilibrium, or the 'limited good' (give me back what is mine) which supposedly regulated relations in the peasant community itself. The significance of ritual designed to enhance the material prosperity of individuals, hunters and others who entered the forest in order to exploit its riches (game, mushrooms, wood...