A History of the Finnish Boogeyman

#NerdAlert

As part of a large project I’m working on, I’ve recently had reason to be researching pre-Christian Finnish culture. Long story for another time. This post, though, is about one of the small things that has turned up and refused to leave me alone. Today, the Finnish word “hiisi” (pronounced hEE-see as far as I can tell) is mostly used to mean “a monster” much like that way in American English we use “the boogeyman” and don't have a specific shared meaning of what that creature looks like or is. Functionally, hiisi is a broad stand-in for any evil supernatural being. However, that has not always been the case and the history of the term is a winding mix of colonization and resistance that I find deeply compelling. I encourage you to read it even if you usually like the more literary things I do. This is also that, but its historical as well.

Our story starts way back before Finland was Finland. In the centuries before 1000 CE, the territory that will later become Finland was a landmass approximately the size of Minnesota and Wisconsin shoved together. It was populated by an assortment of Baltic-Finnic tribes including the Ålanders, Savonians, and Karelians, rather than a unified Finnish people. These tribes spoke their own regional dialects and languages within the broader Finnic language family. A few localized barter towns existed in limited urban centers, trading with Baltic and Swedish partners, but tribal identity prevailed in the countryside. A coherent singular Finnish national identity had yet to emerge from this decentralized array of pagan Finnic tribes. It is in this mix our story begins, specifically in the language scholars now refer to as “Old Finnish,” the collective related language root shared by all these folks. We’ll zoom ourselves way back and then walk through history with an eye to the changes that happen to hiisi.

Pre-1100s

Historically, the hiidet (that’s the plural of hiisi) were an intimate part of pre-Christian religion in the area. A hiisi was a sacred place in nature where the ancestors and spiritual guardians could be reached more easily. These were something like the Celtic idea of a “thin place” where the space between our world and another is the smallest. Estimates on the number of pre-Christian hiidet range from 118 up to about 1,000. The 118 figure is how many we know for sure existed based on archeological evidence, but it is almost certain that there were more than that. A conservative figure referenced a fair amount suggests between 300-500 sites seems likely.

Based on surviving histories, place names, and archaeological evidence, we know the hiidet could be found in different environments. Sometimes they were in groves of ancient or distinct-looking trees, other times just in glades or clearings within a forest. They were also in places that had proximity to water: there’s record of many near rivers, lakes, and swampy areas. Unusual rocky outcroppings, cliffs, and large boulders also seem to have been possible sites as well.

One of the common visible markers of a hiisi was a “cup-marked” stone. There are around 200 identified stones with depressions or cups pecked into them, presumably by a few hours spent banging away with a rock. There is significant evidence to suggest that these stones had ritual purposes. Historians believe that the hiisi sites represented areas for communing with ancestral and nature spirits.

In the pre-Christian worldview there, the first person to settle in an area and create the initial farmland and fields remained the owner of it even after death. As settlements grew, the deceased were believed to occupy their former farmlands as spirits that could safeguard future harvests. Their descendants were being allowed to use the land, but ownership of it remained with the ancestors. A hiisi was a space not only for people to appeal to protective gods and spirits, but also to make offerings honoring the dead’s ongoing influence, and consult spirits regarding affairs through a shaman (noita).

Interestingly, “hiisi” was also sometimes used as the proper name Hiisi to refer to a spirit one might find at or near a hiisi. This, in turn, led to later Finnish magical incantations used to access power by invoking Hiisi. Shamans (noidat) sang these special metered “loitsut” spell-songs to draw on the strength of spirits for healing, safeguarding, summoning game, controlling weather, and speaking with the deceased.

This all began to change when Christians arrived.

1100s-1300s

One of the interesting things about Finland is that indigenous “paganism” remained deeply entrenched in many regions for longer than other places in Europe, leading to military interventions by Christian forces. While “The Crusades” are often associated with battles in middle Eastern territory and conflict with Islamic forces, the period was a lot more complex than that and included, for example, the “Northern Crusades,” as well. These were started by Pope Celestine III starting around 1193, with the promise of spiritual and material benefits to crusaders. There were kingdom-level economic and territorial motives too. Main targets included “pagan peoples” in the Eastern Baltic region, including the Finns and Estonians. Armies of Catholic crusaders made bloody forays over several decades intending to claim lands and souls for Rome. The Swedes in particular focused efforts on Finland. In fact, though Finland is now largely Lutheran, Finnish Christianity is, historically speaking, almost entirely a function of Swedish Catholic military and evangelism. It is in this mix that “Saint Henry” emerges as an important character.

Henry was an English nobleman, whose family name seems to have been lost to time. We do know, though, that he climbed the church’s social ranks and eventually caught the attention of Swedish royalty. King Eric IX of Sweden in particular noted his talents. In 1152, Henry was appointed as the first Bishop of Uppsala, Sweden. Three years later the newly empowered Bishop Henry turned his attention to nearby Finland and spearheaded the first real Catholic attempts at evangelization among “the heathens” there.

Notorious episodes targeting the Finns include the Second Swedish Crusade led by Birger Jarl in 1249, which aimed to forcibly convert inland Tavastian tribes. Equally intense was the Third Swedish Crusade, around 1295, which finally defeated eastern Karelians after scorched earth attacks on villages. Tactics were often brutal, including destruction of property, murder of pagans, and the taking of slaves. In spite of this, pockets of resistance remained, leading to intermittent military conflict. In the midst of all this, something monumental was happening with religion as well.

1300s-1500s

Catholic leaders in the area actively sought to disrupt the land-based beliefs and practices by destroying hiisi grounds and trees. In Varsinais-Suomi, for example, the Catholic church destroyed kinship and village burial grounds in a hiisi and built a church on those same grounds. In place of the graves of family ancestors, the church brought martyr’s shrines, holy baptismal springs, and other places for Christian worship that served to normalize a centralized organization. At the same time, the Church also insisted on new ways of treating the dead, who at first were buried under the floors of churches, and later by the church in the cemetery.

Two centuries of work in evangelism and re-writing the Finnish understanding of land itself was largely successful. From the 12th through the 14th century, hiisi was often "Hiisi” with a capital “H” and the proper name of one particular evil spirit. Who was this big bad Hiisi? Why Satan, of course. Any worship involving hiisi was worship of the Devil himself. With the spread of Christianity, the hiisi became viewed with intense suspicion and associated with darker supernatural forces. For example, a 1323 legal document from Sortavala refers to offerings wrongly made at hiidet as "sacrifices to demons."

This re-visioning of how land, death, and nature worked had at least two consequences I want to name. First, while the hiisi used to be a place for connection, petition, and fertility, Christian burial grounds became frightening places associated with a bad death and damnation. In centralized cemeteries, the deceased lost their personality and kinship. Rather than individual spirits and guardians, the dead became “grave folk,” collective symbols of fear. By changing the story of what happened after death, the Church also assumed political power during life. Second, Christian connotations of the dead with fear and evil also expanded stories about who you might find in a graveyard. Previously, a hiisi might be used by a noita who went there to help the crops grow and so that village births could be easy. Afterwards, cemeteries and churches were visited by witches at night, with corpse earth and bones of the dead being used as tools of black magic.

1500s-1800s

Unsurprisingly, folklore and language had not been entirely wiped clean of earlier views. As time went on and the Church’s control was more-or-less secured, the need to be as vigilant and aggressive about rooting out pre-Christian thought was not as pressing. For example, in 1551, Mikael Agricola, the Bishop of Turku, created a list of ancient Finnish gods. In it he noted that Hiisi had been the forest god who helped hunters get prey. Important to this claim is his assessment of this forest god as “ancient.” By that time, hiisi was often used as a broad term referring to a whole host of bad guys and haunts. Various specific folk stories describe adventures involving mischievous hiisi creatures and villains.

Oral folklore that wasn’t based on Hiisi-as-the-Devil mostly describes a hiisi as a creature that dwelt in a hiisi site, including descriptions that seem to be closest to goblins, trolls, and giants. Many of the stories describe how odd rock formations or other features of the landscape were created by the actions of these creatures. There are stories about how the peninsula of Hiidennokka ("Hiisi's Point") on the shore of lake Pyhäjärvi was created by giants throwing rocks. At least one of these tales takes on a Christian element, as the giants throw rocks into the sea to prevent people going to church by boat. Remember that excuse if you need it.

In rural areas, Christian and Pagan influences sometimes mixed, giving birth to a syncretic religion that was, at least in the remote parts of the area, still very much alive as late as the end of the 1800s. For example, in some villages it was customary to honor the bear killed during the bear feast — a tradition that perhaps dates back to the Stone Age — by playing the church bells. Another example of this — that I have to imagine was discouraged by church officials — was the participation of village priests at their local feasts in honor of the Finnish thunder god, Ukko. Similarly, an ancient tradition of making communal sacrifices at a hiisi seems to have transformed into the custom of giving particular donations to church officials. The gifts of items such as elk antlers and bear hides were used in church decorations in a similar manner as they were probably used at hiidet sites during pre-Christian times. Old practices persisted within new ones, often regardless of formal theological teaching to the contrary.

People simultaneously knew that Hiisi was the Devil and… they also knew that Hiisi and his pal Lempo sometimes worked together to lead people into trouble or shoot invisible poison arrows at humans and animals to cause them pain and illness. This parallel consciousness isn’t particular to the Finnish people, but I find it fascinating because what didn’t seem to survive as well is the fact that before Hiisi was a cow-shooting character in folktales, and before Hiisi was the Adversary of Christ himself, hiisi was a sacred place where weird trees grew. It was a place you could go to ask your grandfather to help make sure your barley crop was good.

Now-ish

Waves of national romanticism in Finland in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to increasing self-reflection about the loss of native culture. The term “Uskonusko” (Ukko’s Faith) emerged, drawing on the name of Ukko. This set the stage for later revivalist groups. One such organization is Taivaannaula. Founded in 2007, it is dedicated to preserving and fostering Finland's indigenous religion and spiritual traditions that have faded over centuries of cultural transformation. Taivaannaula and similar groups seek to resuscitate once suppressed elements like mythic poems, ritual practices, folk beliefs, and sites that resonated meaning to ancestors in the ancient past.

In 2013 , Taivaannaula declared March 28 as an annual “hiisi day.” On that date in 1748, a Bishop sent a letter to the governor of Liperi requesting support to destroy known sacrificial hiisi sites and trees growing around houses and fields. Taivaannaula intends the day to encourage people to search for information about natural holy places and get to know them, as well as to revive the traditions related to those places. This interest in pre-Christian Finnic religious thought doesn’t appear to be a large movement — in the equivalent of the 2020 Finnish census, there were only 80 self-identifying neopagans — but the fact it exists at all is interesting to me.

So What?

Before it was a boogeyman, a hiisi was the Devil. Before that, it was any of the spirits you could find near a special spot in the woods. Before that, it was what you called the spot itself. These were places where you could find answers. If you treated the spirits there well, the good ones would watch out for the people that lived near them. If not, they could be dangerous. But they weren't bad. They just weren't living humans and didn't have human concerns.

A hiisi came to mean a bad thing, a nasty creature because Christians thought that a hiisi was just the spirit of the hill. They didn't understand or care that the hiidet weren't really the spirit, but the place themselves. What was a word for a good sacred place became a word for a bad scary guy. When the Christians came they were afraid of those places and taught people to be afraid too. Or, perhaps more critically, the Christians knew that they would have to do something to break the worldview of the Finnish people so that a new one could grow in its place.

Lord knows I’m not a Finnish historian and I don’t even pretend to understand what the status of the conversation is on the ground in Finland regarding the realities of colonization. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it is probably hard to sort through there. This larger issue of the violence of colonization is of course not unique to Finland. I’m sure there are parallel wounds and histories that happened in the spot I’m sitting right now. And… something about hiisi caught me.

I think about those 80 or so people out there today, trying to preserve and experience a hiisi as sacred. I imagine that somewhere in them they have a feeling the word has been tainted. They are actively engaged in the practice of recuperation, but history can never be returned to as it was. Conversely, what if you’re a Catholic in Finland who feels fed by the Church and that it is right for you AND… you’re trying to sort through historical injustices and figure out some better way into the future? Whether we want to reject it or to repair it, the violence of empire can’t be dismissed. It has left too many marks on our lands, stories, and hopes to be pushed aside by will or intention alone. So much of what we have to do is over and against a memory of past pains.

Rubem Alves is good here:

When writing was done on leather, it was common to erase a text in order to write a new one. The words were scraped off and the rough surface was made smooth again... When the eyes were assured that nothing of the old text was left, new writing was done, but deep inside the leather the old text remained, invisible. These were the palimpsests: leather on which many texts were written. So too our bodies.

I’m a firm believer that the seeds of whatever comes next are already in the present. Competing visions of the future sometimes wage silent battles within words themselves, small arenas where we can wrestle with our longings for something new. Hiisi mirrors the layered history of the land and its stories — annexed, colonized, Christianized, and yet still remembering what came before. Still nurturing what might come next.