The traditional religious specialist of pre-Christian Sami society across Fennoscandia, historically documented as entering trance states, often with the aid of a drum painted with cosmological symbols, to mediate with the spirit world on the community's behalf for healing, divination and guidance. Scandinavian Christianization campaigns, especially through the seventeenth century, treated the role as sorcery: missionary and court records describe the systematic confiscation and burning of noaidi drums and, in a number of documented cases, the trial and execution of noaidi. This entry describes that historical record. Sami religion carries a live restricted-tradition designation in this atlas, and no present-day ceremonial practice is described or instructed here.
Facts
Attestation
HistoricityDocumented through Lutheran missionary and court records from the seventeenth century onward, and through confiscated drums now held in Nordic museum collections, several bearing painted cosmological diagrams that modern scholarship has worked to reinterpret. 1 Significance
Sacred RoleTrance mediator between the community and the spirit world, consulted for healing, divination, and guidance in hunting and reindeer herding. 1 Status
Status TodayHistorical; not practised continuously 1 Attributions
Associated Religion Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source Shamanism and Culture (Pentikainen)Juha Pentikainen
Sources
1. Shamanism and Culture (Pentikainen)
Juha Pentikainen, Etnika, Helsinki, 1998Pentikainen's career scholarship on the historically documented noaidi role and drum confiscations
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