Sami Religious Roles

The religious specialist roles of the traditional Sami religion of pre-Christian Fennoscandia, practiced across what is now northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. The noaidi was the traditional religious specialist of Sami society, historically documented as entering trance states, often with the aid of a drum painted with cosmological symbols, to mediate between the human and spirit worlds on behalf of the community, a role that came under sustained missionary and colonial suppression from the seventeenth century onward.