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Goddess Alive!
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Shamanism & the
Nordic Goddess
by Monica Sjöö
The arctic peoples believe that everything has a Mother and that all of Nature is ensouled. The most important Mothers are Mother Earth, Sun and Moon. The Sun was always female in the north - the Sun’s lifegiving power after the long dark winter is experienced as the life-giving warmth of the Mother’s womb. Both are the source of life and the Ahkkas are Her daughters. They are the protectors of women and of animals, and especially of mothers about to give birth. The Celto-Germanic Triple Mothers, the Matronae or Deae Matris, were also called Mother Earth, Sun and Moon Woman. They were the ancient creator Goddesses of the past, of Old Europe, who had survived. The Romans called them “Sorceresses of the early days”.
They were the same Triple Goddess as the Norns of Scandinavia, and they belonged to the Vanir people, a people of Old Europe who entered Scandinavia ca. 4000 BCE, bringing with them the Disir, their great female ancestral deities. These were the ancient collective mothers of the tribe who had taught the people time-reckoning, lunar wisdom, agriculture, prophesy and magical oracular powers at the beginning of time. Clearly there is a relationship between them and the Ahkkas of the Saami people, and perhaps their common ancestry dates back to the Paleolithic caves of the Ice Age in Europe.
In Scandinavia during the time of the matriarchal Vanirs, Shamanism was always a women’s tradition and belonged to Freya, the great VanaDis or queen of the Vanirs, and her sejdwomen or Valas. This tradition survived all through the Bronze Age, which was still a time of the Goddess, through the more patriarchal Iron Age with its Indo-Germanic male deities and priests to the beginning of the Christian era.
I grew up as a child in Åmgermanland which is south of the North, though still a magical land with great rivers, lakes and mountains. Some Saami people still live as far down as this. There is an alternative community called Skogsnäs where I’ve spent time in recent years. It is situated inland from Härnösand, a small city on the Baltic where I was born, and it is surrounded by large pine forests where even brown bear live wild and where are plenty of elks, huge majestic animals.
Not far from Skogsnäs there is a great river called Nämforsen, where several thousand petroglyphs are all carved on the cliffs, rocks and islands in and by the river. Here again was a major summer-gathering site, with remains and reconstructions of dwellings covered in skin. The petroglyphs date from ca. 4000-3500 BCE, and had already been studied in detail in the 1940s by the archaeologist Gustav Hallström. Petroglyphs continued to be carved here over 1500 years, obviously as part of rituals. This is a very important site and I felt lucky to be able to spend time there, drawing the images and experiencing the great power of the place. This was, like Vuollerim further north, a major ritual centre. There is an indwelling power in the rocks themselves and in the mighty river, which is presumably why the ancient peoples chose this particular spot to set up camp and carve images.
A great number of the images are of female elks. There are also images of what I interpret as Shamanwomen standing on Spirit-boats that bring the souls of the dead to the magical Otherworld of the Goddess. There was no fear of the dead and they were buried close to the living. On these boats there are elk-cows heads carved on the prows and sterns, where the Vikings later carved Dragons heads. There are figures holding elk-staffs and figures with raised arms, the universal posture of priestesses of the Goddess drawing down the lunar and solar energies, acting as antennae to the Universe. Here is the Great Mother of the animals (also the Great River and Water Mother) as She was before in the darkness of the Paleolithic caves, where pregnant animals were painted again and again, and the Goddess would swell, give birth, die and be reborn as the Moon in Her changes. Shaman women dedicated to Freya still carried the magical staff.
Nordic Mother of the AnimalsBut of course the Swedish male archaeologists see nothing of all this and speak of powerful and commanding shaman-men, great violent warriors struggling in combat with Nature, and the one solitary image of an elk with an arrow lodged in it is the one that is always reproduced and dragged out as evidence. Never mind that the Saami, like all indigenous peoples who have a sacred relationship to Mother Earth and all her creatures, never wantonly kill. Nämforsen was however a major hunting ground and traps were set in the rivers to catch elk. Hunting sites dating to 4000 BCE have been found. [Above - Nordic Mother of the Animals]
To the Norse people the Pole star was a place of secrets and mysterious powers. Many arctic peoples believed that the Great female Bear constellation Ursa Major, that circles the pole star, was the point of entry to the Upper world. Some believed that Ursa Major is the Cosmic Elk cow with Ursa Minor as her calf, and that the Elk ran out of the Heavenly Taiga and carried off the Sun on one of her antlers. These beliefs are rooted in hunting societies of great age in Siberia and elsewhere. The Elk cow and the Bear Mother are embodiments of the great Arctic Mother of the animals who was also an amazon and a great hunter. In later times she was called Artemis/Diana. Remember the woman who was buried in 4000 BCE with her hunting gear and who also was a mother of many children! Every bone of the Bear was preserved and put in the proper place on the skin and then buried. It was believed that thus the spirit of the Bear would be reborn. The Old Woman and Old Man Bear are intelligent and strong. The Mother Bear is particularly fierce and dangerous when protecting her cubs.
Amongst the Shamanic Altaic Mongol peoples of Siberia there were/are memories of the first shaman woman’s clan and of the magic powers of the first woman Shaman, or Ancestress of the clan, who came from an animal that they called the Mother Animal. The Altaic peoples experienced Earth as a conscious, animated enspirited Great Being and took pains not to offend Her. To dig or wound the Earth with sharp instruments was a great sin and had to be atoned for. It was felt that one must not anger the animated waters, stones or trees, whose spirits had names such as Water Mother, Forest Woman, Field Old Woman, Mother Wind and Her noisy children. There were also many male spirits of nature.
