Kirkonväki

The dead as a material

Most traditions treat the dead as persons: the rusalka is a drowned girl, the tiyanak an unnamed infant, the upyr a corpse that will not rest. Each has a story and an identity.

Finnish belief has those too. But it also has something else, and it is the most distinctive idea in the whole tradition: väki.

Väki means both "folk" and something like a force or potency that belongs to a whole category of things. There is a väki of water, of fire, of iron, of the forest — and a väki of the dead. It is not a person. It is closer to a charge, carried by a class of things, which can be encountered, caught, carried and discharged.

Kirkonväki is that force as it belongs to the churchyard: the crowd of the dead, treated collectively, as a power.

No fixed shape

The records are unusually unhelpful about what the church folk look like, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the collecting. Kaarina Koski's study of the belief (Kuoleman voimat, Finnish Literature Society, 2011), built on thousands of belief accounts in the Finnish Literature Society's folklore archive, describes the concept itself as diffuse: the vocabulary varies, and so does what the word is taken to mean. In western Finland the church folk tend to be spoken of as a crowd — the dead of the churchyard as a congregation, sometimes heard rather than seen. In the east the same word leans on the other sense of väki and means a force, which has no appearance at all.

What the charm texts in SKVR describe is accordingly not a figure. They describe a place, a boundary, an hour, the materials taken away — earth, bone, water — and the symptoms left behind. Size, faces, clothing: the charms do not supply them, because nothing in the practice requires them.

Where descriptions do appear, they are usually local and small-scale: noise and movement inside a shut church, a crowd glimpsed at the wrong hour, misshapen little figures under the altar in some nineteenth-century retellings. Those pictures are the thinnest part of the material, not its core, and the altar-dwellers in particular belong to later popular retelling rather than to the charm tradition.

Fetching it

Here is what sets the Finnish material apart from other beliefs about the dead.

A tietäjä — the knower, the specialist of the charm tradition — could go to the churchyard deliberately and collect it. Earth from a grave. A bone splinter. Water in which something had lain. Words spoken at the right place at the right hour.

The force could then be carried, kept, and directed at somebody.

That is a practice, not a ghost story. It has procedures, materials and specialists, and the charm corpus preserves both halves of the operation: the texts for raising and sending the church folk, and the texts for curing the person they were sent against.

Where the sickness comes from

The afflictions attributed to it are the same family as the maahiset's maan viha: skin that will not heal, swellings, sores, sudden wasting.

Both beliefs share a structure that is worth naming. Certain ground is charged. Contact with it — through a cut, a bare foot, carelessness or someone else's intention — transfers the charge into a person. The cure is a charm that identifies which ground, recites its origin, and sends the force back where it came from.

A nineteenth-century Finnish healer treating an infected wound and a modern clinician treating the same wound are both, in their own vocabularies, tracing a contamination back to its source.

The wall

The churchyard wall is the physical expression of the belief. What the charms describe is not a figure but a place and the line drawn around it: there is no body to the church folk, only charged ground, a wall, a gate and a tower.

Inside the wall: consecrated ground, the dead, the charge. Outside: the ordinary world. The practices are all about deliberate crossing — going in at the wrong hour, taking something out, bringing something back, and the risk of carrying the charge home on your clothes.

In Russian belief the bathhouse is the one building left outside Christian protection. This is the mirror image: the one piece of Christian ground treated as a reservoir of pre-Christian power.

Christianity did not win this argument

It is tempting to read kirkonväki as a pagan survival that Christianity failed to stamp out. The sources suggest something more interesting.

The church is not an obstacle in this belief. It is the source. The ground is powerful because the dead are buried there, under the church's authority, in numbers, over centuries. Consecration did not neutralise the väki; it concentrated it.

A tradition that thinks in terms of forces belonging to categories will absorb a new institution by assigning it a force. That is what happened here, and it is why the charm corpus is full of Christian names, saints and crosses doing work in a structure that is not Christian at all.

Sources

SKVR (1908–1948) for the charms, which are the primary evidence and contain both the sending and the curing; Haavio (1967) for väki as the organising concept of Finnish folk belief. The tietäjä's practice is set out in the charm texts themselves.

• Finnish Literature Society, Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR) (1908). 33 volumes, 1908–1948The charm corpus, which contains both the charms for sending the church folk against a target and the charms for curing what they cause.
• Martti Haavio, Suomalainen mytologia (1967). WSOYThe standard synthesis, including the Finnish concept of väki — a force belonging to a category of things.