A Shared Pre-Christian Past? - By Edward Dutton
Here is a paper that seeks to find commonalities in the pre-Christian religiosity of Finland and Greenland, by comparing baptism ceremonies between Finnish and Greenlandic Lutheranism. Both point to a pagan (and, in the case of Greenland, still persisting) belief in a “name spirit”. The article makes the point that those two religions, being Shamanistic (from a society that is more primitive hunter/gatherer and not highly socially stratified) share more in common with each other than Finnish paganism did with Norse paganism, at least that from the late pre-Christian era.
Rites of passage are an example of keeping the integrity of categories intact. So much of religion is about preserving atavistic views of things - about reconciling culture (a word that, as this paper points, isn’t present in Greenlandic, them seeing man and nature as not separate) and nature. Things really exist as in-between rather than categories, as our brains are wired to comprehend and this fact is only part of fancy religions like Hinduism and Spinoza’s pantheism. An intellectual understanding doesn’t change a social reality, though - Hinduism itself places great importance on rights of passage rituals and other such dogma nonetheless.
This paper also points to the possibility that pagan religiosity is best preserved in rights of passage ceremonies. It doesn’t make clear why a religion such as Lutheranism wouldn’t also place strong emphasis on removing taboo, but it does make references to a general tendency on the part of pagan religions to do so. Dutton does make the argument that the fact these rights of passage rituals survived so well over the years is evidence of their importance. It may be possible to use some of the methods used in this paper to do more reconstruction of ancient pagan beliefs (such as Korean “Shamanism”, which only survives in faith healers and such today), though I do feel some of Dutton’s arguments would be too weak if there weren’t at least some minimal historic accounts of Finland’s Pagan past (as well as the Saami people’s well-documented more recent Pagan past). The fact that their Christianity differs could be considered unique Church tradition in the vacuum of such evidence.
The paper talks about how it’s ultimately the priest’s discretion what to name the child, and the name by law must be from a long list of approved Finnish names, not be weird, not be a duplicate, etc.. and this might point to the persisting importance of “the name”. This is similar to the Japanese law about how names must be spelled with only a certain set of approved name kanji and can only use standard readings. By itself, this doesn’t point to parallels in religiosity by itself (though Japan does have a shamanistic past if you go back far enough - their pagan religion evolved to be more sophisticated, just like Norse paganism did prior to Christianization)