Peasants, Pilgrims, and Sacred Promises: Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk Religion

Lying on the border between eastern and western Christendom, Orthodox Karelia preserved its unique religious culture into the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was described and recorded by Finnish and Karelian folklore collectors. This colorful array of rituals and beliefs involving nature spirits, saints, the dead, and pilgrimage to monasteries represented a unique fusion of official Church ritual and doctrine and pre-Christian ethnic folk belief. The book explores topics such as beliefs in supernatural forces, folk models of illness, holy icons, the role of the ritual specialist and healer, the divine between nature and culture, the cult of the dead, and the popular image of monasteries and holy hermits.