Good morning, Finland! Today I am going somewhere and seeing something but I can’t spell where it is phonetically so we’ll all find out when I get there. I believe there is a tower!
We have reached a display about the geology of the region. “I once wrote erotica about a volcano in Finland 350 million years ago,” my guide says, as solemnly as if discussing eating a badger.
He told me about a belief that if you arrive at the church too early, you will interrupt the Mass of the dead. The pews will be full of corpses and the priest’s face will be moldy. Then you must run away, but they will chase you and tear you to pieces. “You must drop your scarf behind you,” he says.
“Then they will tear the scarf to pieces instead.”
“Errr…how early do you have to arrive for this?” I asked.
He considered this. “Before everyone else.”
Finland is hardcore.
A proper Weirdness Magnet takes a while to develop. There's a certain amount of little bookshops and coffee places involved, invocations to small bored little gods, and a surprising number of sandwiches.
Hmm. Im in New Zealand. Plenty of coffee places, far too few little bookshops. Or large bookshops. Or medium bookshops.
Possibly a lot of bored gods though, due to the lack of bookshops.
There are stories of priests getting upfor an early morning service and realising that he's preaching to a congregation of dead people. At that point, he just has to power through and hope no one notices he's alive.
Presumably the dead won't attack a priest, but I'm picturing him sweating bullets.
Interesting! There's a very similar belief to this in some Swiss mountain folklore. (And also about churches that have been swallowed by glaciers, but that's another story...)
It's interesting stuff. Every now and then, some village or another in the Alps would be threatened by a glacier, and in some cases, swallowed up. (Needless to say, people left first. Thank god glaciers move a lot more slowly than avalanches.) As a result there are a lot of legends... (1/?)
...about explorers or lost travelers who stumbled into churches full of dead people. (There are also stories of how, if you're a mountain person, when you die, you die "into the glacier". An interesting way to explain the weird noises glaciers make at night.) (2/?)
...Anyway: sometimes the inhabitants of a threatened village would get the local priest to request that an archbishop 9r whatever would come out and attempt to exorcize the glacier. Mostly this seems to have happened in the mid-1700s...(3/?)
We have that one in Sweden too! Though here I've always heard it specifically for julottan (the church service helt at matins on Christmas day). The night between December 24th and 25th is the night of the dead, so if you arrive at julottan too early, you might crash the dead's church service.
The night of the dead is also why you leave some of your Christmas dinner out on the table overnight between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so you can share it with your dead relatives when they visit during the night.
Holy chocolate truffle! We have a pretty much identical legend over here in the Eastern Italian Alps! Although being Good Catholics the Mass of the Dead you *shan't* go to is the one between midnight and morning.
