Beaivi

← Encyclopedia

In the high north there is a season when the sun does not clear the horizon at all. For weeks at the dead of the year, in the country the Sami call Sapmi — the land that arcs across the top of Norway, Sweden, and Finland and on into the Russian Kola — there is only a low blue twilight at noon, and then the long dark again. The cold deepens, the lichen lies under the snow, the reindeer paw down to it; and the people who live by those herds watch the south. When at last the rim of the sun shows once more above the hills, the year has turned. The light is coming back. That returning light has a name, and the name is the ordinary northern Sami word for the sun: beaivi.

To say the name is already to say something about the religion. The Sami did not, on the whole, set their high powers behind veils of proper names; the sun-power is the sun, the moon-power is the moon, and the holiness is in the thing itself and in what it does. Beaivi is the sun the Sami greeted at the turning of the year, the giver of light and of warmth and of life to a land that lives or dies by the sun’s return. And Beaivi is, in the records that survive, most often a she — though not always, and the qualification matters, as will be seen.

Genealogy

The Sami are a living people, one of the indigenous peoples of Europe, reindeer-herders and fishers and hunters across the Arctic and sub-Arctic of Fennoscandia, with their own languages of the Uralic family and their own old religion. That religion has no native scripture and left no temple. Its written record begins, as the written record of so many northern faiths begins, in the hands of outsiders who came to end it.

The earliest sustained account in print is Lapponia, a Latin work of 1673 by Johannes Schefferus, a Strasbourg-born scholar at the university of Uppsala. It was commissioned by the Swedish crown for a curious reason: rumors had spread on the continent, during the Thirty Years’ War, that Sweden’s armies owed their victories to Sami sorcery, and the chancellor wanted a sober book to lay the slander to rest. Schefferus never went north himself. He compiled his account from the reports of Swedish clergy posted among the Sami — Samuel Rheen, Olaus Graan, Johannes Tornaeus, and others — and from the words of a Sami student at Uppsala. The book described the drum, the offering-sites, the cosmos of the Sami sky, and it was read across Europe, translated into English the very next year as The History of Lapland, then into German, French, and Dutch. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries other missionaries added their own records, men who wrote down the old religion in detail precisely in order to uproot it. The sun is named in this literature among the powers the Sami honored, and it is from this hostile, secondhand, but genuinely observant body of writing — read against its own purpose — that the documentary outline of Beaivi has to be drawn.

The other witness is not written but painted. At the heart of the old Sami religion stood the noaidi, the one who could send the spirit out of the body and travel between the worlds on behalf of the community, and the noaidi’s chief instrument was a drum — an oval or bowl of wood or a stretched reindeer hide, its membrane covered in figures painted in red alder-bark dye. The drum was a map of the Sami cosmos and an instrument of divination at once. On the northern drums the membrane is ruled into three or five horizontal levels — the worlds of the sky, of the living, and of the dead — with the powers of each set in their places. On the southern drums the order is radial rather than layered, and at the very center sits the sun: a rhombus, or a ring, from whose corners or rim four lines run out toward the cardinal directions, and along those lines the other figures are arranged. The sun at the middle of the world, with the powers radiating from it — that is Beaivi’s place in the painted cosmos, and it is the single most eloquent thing the old religion left of how it ranked the sun.

The drum was not, in the Sami frame, a picture of the world only. It was the means of moving through it. The noaidi beat it to fall into the trance in which the spirit went out and traveled — over lake and mire and snow, down to saivo, the world of the dead and of the helping spirits, or up among the powers of the sky — to bring back what the community needed: the cause of a sickness, the whereabouts of a lost herd, the word of the dead. A small pointer or a set of rings was laid on the membrane and the drum struck, and where the pointer came to rest among the painted figures was read as the answer. To set the sun at the center of such an instrument was to make Beaivi the fixed point from which the whole journey was reckoned, the still ring at the heart of the moving cosmos. The figures around her were the country the spirit crossed; she was the light by which it was crossed.

Around the sun stand the rest of the Sami powers, and they should be named in plain prose, for they are Beaivi’s company. There is the high creator, Radien or Veralden-radien, the world-ruler from whom souls come. There is the thunder, Horagalles, the grandfather of the storm, whose by-name has long been read as something like “Thor-man,” a trace of old contact with the Norse. There is the moon, Mano. And there are the great mother-goddesses, the Akka: Maderakka, the earth-mother of childbirth, and her three daughters — Sarakka, Juksakka, and Uksakka — who between them carry a child from the soul’s coming to its safe arrival in the world. Beaivi belongs among these, a sky-power and, in much of the record, herself a mother — called in places the mother of human beings, the source from whom warmth and life descend on the land below.

A genuine difficulty has to be marked here, and not smoothed over. Almost everything just set down is a reconstruction, built from sources that are late, partial, scattered across a wide territory and many Sami languages, and written by men who despised what they recorded. The Sami religion was never a single system with a fixed catechism; it varied from region to region and from family to family, and the tidy pantheon that runs through the handbooks is in part an artifact of the outsiders who needed it to be tidy. Beaivi is no invention, and the sun-cult is well attested and documented; but the fuller portrait of the deity — her family, her dwelling, the exact shape of her worship — comes down through a screen, and the screen distorts.

The sun’s return, the green, and the herds

What the sun does, in this world, is bring everything else to life. Beaivi is the giver of light and warmth, and from the warmth comes the spring: the snow goes, the lichen and the grass green, and on that green the reindeer feed and bear their young. The chain is short and absolute. No sun, no growth; no growth, no herds; no herds, no people. In a country where the difference between a year of plenty and a year of dying could be a few weeks of warmth at the right moment, the sun was not a benign abstraction but the most exacting of powers, to be thanked and petitioned in earnest. So the sun in the Sami frame is not an abstraction of light but the practical author of survival, the power on whose returning the fertility of the reindeer and the very continuance of the community depend. Beaivi made the plants grow so that the reindeer might flourish and increase, and in their increase was the people’s wealth.

There is a second domain, less expected and very telling. Beaivi was prayed to for the healing of the mind. The long polar night, with its weeks of darkness, was understood to press on the spirit — to bring on the madness and the heaviness that the modern north still knows under other names — and the sun’s return was the cure. At the season when Beaivi came back, prayers were made for those who had grown ill in the dark, whose minds had been lost to the winter. The giver of light to the land is also the restorer of light to the spirit; the same power that greens the lichen mends the soul that the dark has injured. A scholarly study of the sun-symbol in contemporary Sami practice traces exactly this thread — the sun as a source of healing and of restored well-being — forward into the living tradition of today, where the old solar imagery is taken up again in healing and in the rebuilding of identity.

To the sun belonged a rite at the turning of the year, at midwinter, and the missionary accounts preserve its shape. The offering was an animal — usually a reindeer, and a white female — given in thanks and in petition that the sun should come back over the horizon and break the winter. The meat was prepared in a way that carried its own meaning: it was threaded onto sticks, and the sticks were bent into rings or hoops and tied with bright ribbon. The ring is the sun’s own figure. The same circle that the noaidi painted at the center of the drum was made, in the offering, out of the meat of the sacrifice — a hoop of thanks shaped like the thing it thanked. There is a further gesture recorded in some accounts: butter, the food that melts in warmth, smeared on the doorposts as the sun strengthened, so that the returning goddess might gather strength and climb higher each day into the sky. The reader should take all of this at the distance the sources keep it. These are descriptions, gathered at second or third hand by hostile observers and reconstructed by later scholars, of what the Sami did and what they understood themselves to be doing; they are not, and must not be read as, a procedure to be followed.

A noaidi with his drum, engraved for Johannes Schefferus’s “Lapponia” (1673), the founding printed account of Sami religion — a book written, in part, to refute the charge that the Sami practiced sorcery. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

One last point of doctrine deserves care, because the handbooks habitually get it slightly wrong. Beaivi is usually feminine — the sun-goddess of the far north, a she greeted as a mother. But the gender is not fixed across the whole of Sapmi. In some regions the sun was reckoned male, and the sources are not unanimous. The honest formula is the one the better treatments use: the sun-deity, usually feminine, sometimes masculine. To flatten that into a simple “sun-goddess” is to impose on a varied and regional tradition a uniformity it never had — and the variation is itself a piece of evidence about how locally the Sami religion lived.

Reception and afterlife

The afterlife of Beaivi is inseparable from a history of violence, and that history has to be told plainly. From the seventeenth century onward the Sami religion was the object of a sustained campaign of forced conversion, carried out by the Lutheran churches and the crowns of Sweden-Norway and the Orthodox church to the east. The instrument at the center of the religion, the noaidi’s drum, became the chief target. Missionaries called the drum the Bible of the Sami, and they meant it as the indictment it was: to take the drum was to take the religion. The drums were seized and burned. The records of the confiscations survive — in one Swedish district more than thirty drums were taken in a single year in the 1720s — and the Norwegian missionary Thomas von Westen gathered something like a hundred, most of which were then destroyed when the collection burned in Copenhagen in 1728. The noaidi themselves were persecuted; the offering-sites — the holy islands and the seita-stones, among them the island of Ukonsaari and the seita of Taatsi — were defiled or abandoned; and the suppression of the religion ran on, with the long assimilation policies of the modern states, into living memory. None of this should be softened into the picture of a faith that simply faded. It was attacked, deliberately and for centuries, and what remains of it remains in spite of that attack.

What remains is, first, the drums that survived — between seventy and eighty of them, scattered through the museums of Scandinavia and beyond, a few in Britain, with the largest collection in Stockholm. On their membranes the sun still sits where the noaidi placed it, at the center, the ring or the rhombus with its lines running out to the powers of the world. They are the most direct testimony left of how the Sami saw the cosmos, and the sun’s place in them is not in doubt.

A reconstruction of the figures on a Sami drum membrane, from Jens Andreas Friis’s study of 1871; the original drum is now lost. The painted powers of the Sami cosmos are arranged across the field. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

It remains, second, in the scholarship. The critical study of Sami religion has had to learn to read its own foundational sources against the grain — to use the missionary accounts and Schefferus’s Lapponia for the facts they preserve while discounting the contempt that shaped them, and to weigh how much of the neat pantheon is genuine old Sami cosmology and how much is the ordering imposed by the men who wrote it down. This is the standing problem of the field, and it is not resolved; the more cautious modern work treats the reconstructed system as exactly that, a reconstruction, and marks the joins.

And it remains, third and most important, among the Sami themselves. The religion was attacked but not erased, and the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have seen a broad cultural and spiritual revival across Sapmi — the recovery of language, of the joik, the personal song, and of the old sacred world. The sun has a particular place in that recovery. The solar symbol from the heart of the drum has become an emblem of Sami identity; it stands at the center of the Sami flag, a circle of red and blue, the sun-ring of the noaidi carried into the open as a sign of a people. The scholarly study of the contemporary scene documents how the sun-image is taken up again — on new drums, in healing, in the work of rebuilding what the centuries of conversion tried to take away. Beaivi is not a relic of a dead paganism. She is the sun of a living people, still greeted, in a country where the sun’s return is still, every year, the difference between the dark and the light.

→ Related: The Sami · Taatsi · Ukonsaari · Ukko · Vainamoinen · Ilmarinen · Tapio · Astuvansalmi · Varikallio · The Karelians · The Mari · Pohjola