Fire and Water: Sauna Purification

"Saunassa ollaan kuin kirkossa."

-Finnish saying: You should be in the sauna as in a church.

For the northern European peoples, a hot room full of steam was the best way to get clean. When half your year is bitterly cold, enough that it would be impractical to be wet and naked for very long, being in a tub of water in your drafty longhouse isn't a good idea. Unless you live next to hot springs - which were sacred places and much revered - your best choice is to build a separate small building (or a small space within a large one) where you can heat things up and encourage your body to sweat out impurities. If you lay a supply of rocks into it, heat them, and throw water on them, you get the cleansing steam that the Finns refer to as löyly.

While the sauna is mostly associated with the Finnish people these days, we know from archaeological digs that ancient cultures all over the arctic and subarctic regions of Eurasia used them to one extent or another. In northern Europe, the oldest ones were small domed stone buildings with a hole in the top, rather like a permanent stone version of the Native American sweat lodge. Somewhat later ones were round or squarish stone buildings; occasionally a Norse longhouse would have a separate small room that seems to have been a bathhouse. In the Eyrbyggja Saga, a Norse bathhouse is described that is a room dug into the ground, or perhaps the side of a hill. A window over a stone oven, just at ground level, provided both ventilation and a place to pour water over the stones.

The word sauna is Saami, the language of the original inhabitants of Finland. We don't necessarily know what the various Scandinavian and Slavic cultures called a bathhouse, because the modern words are more recent in their etymology, such as the German Aufguss and the Russian banya (which was originally derived from an Italian word for bath). However, some linguists have pointed out that the Old Germanic word stofa, which is where we get our modern word "stove", originally meant a heated bathhouse and may have been the equivalent word for the Finnish sauna. It later evolved into the German Stube, which became Badstube or bathhouse.

During the Middle Ages, public bathhouses went from being family and tribal retreats to being busy centers of commerce and prostitution. The Catholic Church finally cracked down and banned them, and so the sauna and its various forms were lost to most places west of Finland for a long time, until those countries rediscovered the health benefits of the sauna in later centuries. This interruption via first civilization and second Christianity means that we have very little in the way of remaining lore about the religious rituals of the stofa. We can conjecture from the scraps left behind, especially those remaining in Finnish and Russian culture, or we can ask the wights and work them out ourselves, which is what some of us have done.

As far as we can tell, one of the primary religious functions of the sauna in Finland - and likely in the rest of northern Europe as well - was as a holy place of transition. Women were brought into the sauna to give birth, and the dying often lived out their last days there. Once dead, their bodies were washed and wrapped in the sauna before removing them to a grave. It was also used for secluding one's self for such things as casting charms and spells, and healing rituals of all sorts were performed there on various sufferers. Indeed, the ill were often brought into the sauna for the duration of their illness. Aleksa, a Russian-descended spirit-worker, points out that: "They are generally kept on the outer edges of a homestead or village - a further symbol of their position as being in-between the ordinary world and the non-ordinary one. In Russian folklore, sorcerers both good and bad were said to practice there, doing things unacceptable to normal society in that in-between space. Similarly, stillborn children were buried under the threshold to protect them and guard their spirits - like baptizing them without a baptism."

Ancestor worship was also a function of the sauna; it was thought that the Dead would return to places that they had enjoyed, including the bathhouse, and that the löyly, or sacred steam, held their souls. It is the Breath of the Ancestors, a word which originally meant "spirit" or "life". (One cognate is the Ostyak word lil, which means "soul".) The sauna is, in many ways, an ancestor altar that is also useful. Its usefulness stretched to the mundane as well; it was sometimes used for such practical purposes as curing meat or drying out malt, hemp and flax. It was a doorway between worlds; the fact that fire and water held an equal balance in sauna sanctity drives home the image of liminal space.

The sauna is where all the transitions happen. People who are sick go there, people who are about to die go there, women who are about to give birth go there, the midwives go there to pray before they bring out the pregnant woman. Those critical times are celebrated in the House of the Ancestors. And there isn't any lore on it, but I suspect very strongly that there is an order to who sits where, who sits closer or further away. The senior person sits closest to the fire, because they are deemed to be the one who can manage the heat best, and the coming of the löyly. There's also the agricultural aspect to this: when you have to do hard, hard work in the cold and dark winter in order to eat and heat yourself, a communal warmth, beyond just physical heat, is very important. In the more moderate climes, hospitality is a completely different thing. In the more northern climes, you could demand hospitality, at least three days of it, before they could kick you out. It's the idea of having ancestors, and warmth, and social cohesion, and rites of passage all in the same place.

-Lydia Helasdottir

The banya seems to have endured in Russia as well, although it is not as famous in the West as the Finnish sauna. Herodotus wrote about the people of the Black Sea region making a felt-covered hut and throwing water onto red-hot stones inside, creating a vapor hotter than any Hellenic bath. (He also relates that hempseed was thrown onto the stones for purposes of visions and prophecy.) According to his accounts, this Slavic sweat lodge was used for ritual cleansing before marriage and after burying the dead. 2^nd-century excavations of Slavic settlements in Poland show earth-sheltered houses with fireplaces in the middle, but no separate bathhouses. The concept of building an actual permanent structure seems to have been unknown in the southern Slavic areas until the people of Novgorod moved south, as mentioned in the Lay of Igor's Campaign. Novgorod, a northern Slavic city, had been heavily settled by the Rus tribes, and was the mercantile capital of trade between them and the Norse. (There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the Rus people, or at least their leaders/upper classes, were Varangian/Norse-descended. There is also some evidence to support opposing conclusions; the debate still rages. However, regardless of how Norse-descended they were, they were certainly Norse-influenced.) With archaeological evidence showing that the early Russian banya was basically identical to the Finnish sauna and the Norse equivalent, it is likely that it is an ancient import from the Rus settlers.

As the Catholic Church never held much sway in Russia (and the Orthodox Church never fixed on sweat-bathing as a moral problem), the tradition of the banya continued unabated, complete with its folk beliefs. The Russian Primary Chronicle describes, in 1113, the monk Andreas' observations of the banya practice in Novgorod wherein he described the pagans "drenching themselves":

Wondrous to relate, I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bath-houses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day and actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.

As today, this does show the sauna as an ordeal of heat. In many ways, sauna-work is poised on the edge between the Ascetic's Path and the Ordeal Path, depending on how hot it is, and for what purpose it is used - purification, community bonding, creation of sacred space, or strength ordeal? When performed as a group rite, it partakes of the Path of Ritual as well. A multipurpose tool, the House of the Ancestors can be all of these. A community sweat is very different from using the sauna as a safe and sacred place to give birth, and even more different from using it as a solo purification and sacred-space creator for a spirit-worker.

If well tended and kept holy, it could also be a source of power to call upon. The Russian Primary Chronicle also tells of Princess Olga, the pagan widow of Prince Igor of Kiev, who punished the Derevlians for the murder of her husband in 945 A.D. Their leader had designs on her, considering her to be booty earned by the murder, and sent messengers to discuss their future marriage. Olga invited the Derevlian messengers to use her banya, and while they were inside, her men barred the doors and burned the banya to the ground with the Derevlians in it. Aleksa stresses that:

From my own UPG, this historical tale relates to the use of the banya as the guardian spirit of Russia to defend her and her people from the enemy, as the tradition of no enemy ever surviving an attempt to invade or conquer Russian lands is well documented. (The only ones to do so are the Mongols, and the degree of success in this regard us subject to debate, as they left Russians in charge and didn't stay there themselves). The use of the banya calls forth three things: Mokosh the sacred Earth in the wood and stones, the leshii (forest spirits) in the birch trees, and the rusalki and voidianki (water spirits) in the water. While sometimes referred to as masculine, Mother Russia is Mokosh; steam and rain are said to be Mokosh's milk. It's the Rodina (Mother Russia) that is always honored, regardless of the use of "fatherland". The taiga forest defends the eastern borders, and in the early years the western forests were what prevented the Germanic tribes from penetrating too deeply into Slavic lands. The forests on the borderlands between Poland and Transylvania and Belarus are very dense, and the rivers are the key transit mechanisms of the period. The sacred rivers relevant to the banya tradition are the Volga, the Don and the Dneipr in the west.

Another way in which the Russian banya was a peripheral space was the tradition that sorcerers had to be brought there to die. (Keep in mind that many of the medieval descriptions of a "sorcerer" sound more like a shaman - they had spirit allies, they had to complete their sorcerous transition or die, and so forth.) It was said that a wizard's spirit would be unquiet if they could not pass on their knowledge, so the banya offered a protected space for them to teach their heirs without the "magic" leaking and accidentally conveying their gifts to the unsuspecting, and also a place where their spirit would be sent firmly on its way by the power of the banya in case there were no heirs. This association with wizards (and with pagan beliefs; the banya is said to be the vtoroi mat, or second mother, referring to its symbolism as a small temple to Mokosh the Earth Mother) caused later Russian Christians to say that the bathhouse was full of devils and unquiet ghosts. In general, Russian sorcerers (referred to as koldun) were said to go off to the banya when all the good Christians were going off to church. Besides the idea of the bathhouse being a private place to work magic, this comment reinforces the idea of the banya as a holdover from the pagan temple. Because of this, anyone who snuck off to the banya alone at odd times might be accused of sorcery, especially if they visited after midnight, which was when the spirits (evil or otherwise) took over the building.

The banya was also a place for prophecy and divination, as well as healing and rites of passage. According to folk belief, babies were born there because birthing women and newborns were terribly vulnerable to evil forces, and the guardian spirit of the banya was so strong that it kept all other spirits at bay. Bringing a child into the bathhouse would, for some reason, earn the favor of the domovoi and domikha, the male and female spirits of the house itself. One custom supposedly had the midwife stripping naked and carrying the newborn child around the banya, chanting an invocation to the Morning Star to keep the child from crying. As a house of both the living and the Dead, this was the place for seeing the Dead off on their way. Forty days after a funeral - during which time water, vodka and towels were left in the banya for the dead soul - the fire was lit and a feast prepared for them. Afterwards, the family walked out of the bathhouse and crossed the road, ceremonially sending the dead soul away.

Specific ritual dates associated with the banya were Mokosh's holiday - said to be in the late fall after the harvest when winter was beginning; one could possibly assume around the western-European festival of Samhain - and Yule, when pre-marriage prophecies were sought and made. (At any time of the year, brides were sent to the bathhouse to have a pre-wedding purification steam bath the night before the nuptials, and at least one source suggests that the village sorcerer or shaman was in charge of such ceremonies.) From all its associations, it is clear that the bathhouse in these cultures took the place of the sacred temple or grove once Christianity took over. Having a small building on one's property that could also be used for quite practical tasks provided the average peasant with a place to store all the reverence, memories, and suspiciously magical practices left over from a pagan past.

Building The House Of The Ancestors

It is the opinion of those of us who consider the sauna to be a spiritual tool of the Northern Tradition that if you are going to do it at all, you should do it right. Some modern "saunas" have electric heat, or infrared heat, or no steam at all, or not enough ventilation. Except for that last item, which can make people ill from oxygen deprivation, the rest aren't exactly a crime. If you want to use such a "sauna", fine. Go ahead. You can even use it as a purification ordeal, which is part of what the sauna is ... but don't think that you'll get deep religious ritual out of it. Tapping into the original spirit of the sauna/stofa ritual is honoring the powers of fire and water and stone, and the steam that is the Breath of the Ancestors. Without those, the wights will not come.

A proper sauna/stofa ritual should have the following in attendance:

1) A source of wood heat, with real flame. Usually this is a woodstove, although a stone hearth or oven will do just as well.

2) Ventilation. Many modern airtight saunas make people sick because the oxygen level falls too low. Even an open window to the cold is better than nothing - just crank the fire up. The ideal is an adjustable vent near the floor, to vent the cooling, sinking air, and another higher up to vent the excess heat later on.

2) Stones to throw water on. They can be collected ceremonially and charged with intent, if you like. Do not use river stones, which have a tendency to blow apart during temperature changes.

3) Water to throw on the stones, preferably rainwater.

4) A birch whisk. To make this, collect birch "twigs" - meaning branches less than two feet long - and tie them together. It is best made and used fresh, but of course you may not be able to get fresh leafy birch twigs for a good portion of the year. Think ahead and make a bunch of them, and let them dry. They should be spring or summer branches; fall branches tend to defoliate easier. Hang them to dry and then store them flat in paper bags. You will use each one up every time you do a sauna ritual, so be prepared. (If you have a chest freezer, you can freeze them flat in bags and then thaw them later.)

To use a fresh whisk, simply rinse it off before going into the sauna. During the second round - the Community round - dip it in warm water and turn it gently over the steam. For a dry whisk, rinse off the dry branches and then put them into a basin of warm - not hot - water. This is usually done on top of the sauna stove. As soon as it is rehydrated, it is ready for use. The birch whisks bring a beautiful scent to the hot air. It has a long history as well; among the ancient Slavic people, a certain number of birch whisks were actually paid as tributes by weaker, conquered tribes.

5) Knowledge of the proper sauna etiquette. A sauna is not for partying, rowdiness, or fondling each other. It is a solemn occasion, and a quiet, meditative ambience should be promoted. Being naked is mandatory; one should go in as one came out of the womb. The sauna is a rebirth experience in its own way. In our modern society, some people may feel shy about being naked, but this is fairly critical. Anyone who would be so rude as to comment on someone's body, or give someone an unwanted touch, shouldn't be allowed to be present during such a ritual anyway.

Community saunas are traditionally mixed-gender and mixed-age, although there were occasional saunas specially for men or women (for example, part of a puberty rite might be held in the sauna). One saying held that of the three sauna rounds, one was for men, one for women, and one for the faeries. (One would assume that this refers to firing up the empty sauna for the Saunatonttu; see below.) However, the ancestors of men and women are the same, and we strongly encourage mixed-gender saunas, with everyone well versed in the proper behavior. If nothing else, it obviates the problem of where to put the people who are neither male nor female, some of whom may be the community shamans.

The first step is to build and consecrate your sauna. While the original ones were made of stone, by the 5^th century they were being built of timber. However you make yours, be sure that it has good ventilation. Situate the hearth carefully - remember that it is the altar of the room. You will likely be using some wood, if only for the benches. Traditionally, all lumber scraps were saved and burned in the ceremonial first firing. The door to a traditional sauna should be shorter than a "normal" door; one should have to stoop to get into it, which shows reverence for the ancestors. In Russia, it was traditional to leave the banya backwards, bowing to the spirits. Another of their traditions was burying a sacrificed black cock under the doorstep, a custom which the modern builder may use or not, as they prefer.

The first saunas were smoke saunas, referred to by the Finns as savusauna. The fire was lit under stones, and the smoke went out through a hole in the wall or ceiling. When the smoke had heated the entire room, the hole was shut and the window opened to let in fresh air. There are varying claims on the health risks of savusauna; some say that the smoke is bad for your lungs, others that the smoke creates a bacteria-free and oxygen-rich environment, assuming that you leave the place alone long enough for all the deadly carbon monoxide to leave it.

However you feel about it, the first ceremonial firing of your sauna should be as close to a traditional savusauna as possible. Afterwards, you can do it the "normal" way. To do this, remove the stovepipe from your stove (or stop up your chimney, if there's no pipe). Place containers of water out for heating. (It's also good to have it around in case of fire.) Start your fire using an older method, the sort that is appropriate for sacred fires - flint and steel at the least, or a fire-bow or fire-drill if you have mastered that art. Add pieces of birch, then harder woods as the fire gets going. It is traditional at this point to burn the scrap lumber from the building project.

Make sure that you have your vents open. It will take three to six hours to properly smoke up the sauna, so start it early in the day. Appropriate activities during this time might be to sit outside and drum and sing. What you're trying to do is to call a guardian spirit into the sauna. For some folk, the guardian spirit was an ancestor - in which case they didn't call one in when building the sauna, but merely waited until a family member died in there. Since we are unlikely to want to wait that long, start calling for a guardian spirit during the smoke-out.

Another sort of guardian spirit, popular in Finland, is the Saunatonttu, a little gnome or wizened faery. It was customary to warm up the sauna just for the gnome every now and then, or to leave some food outside for him. It is said that he warned the people if a fire was threatening the sauna, or punished people who behaved improperly while inside it. The Saunatonttu doesn't seem to be an Alfar-type so much as one of the "little people", the earthly nature sprites who live astrally in this world. If you work with them, calling a Saunatonttu might be a good idea. If not, try calling an ancestor to watch over the place, or just ask the land-wight to send the right spirit over. The song that you sing doesn't have to be brilliant, just sincere.

In Russia, the guardian spirit of the banya was the Bannik, a spindly, hairy creature described here by Aleksa: "In ancient Russian culture, the (usually male) spirits of the banya provided safety in bad times or against evil spirits, so if you were being chased through a field or a forest by evil beings or bad men, you may take refuge in a bathhouse and pray to the banyanka or the Bannik to protect you. The Bannik controlled your experience of the banya - the heat and steam levels - and it was heated and cleaned once a week to placate him. In Christian times the offering became the sign of the cross (although, ironically, icons were not allowed to be hung in a banya due to their residual pagan associations), but vestiges remained of the pagan practice of feeding the Bannik in offerings of vodka. In order to see the bannik, you had to go alone at night, and you had to sit with part of yourself in the banya and part out - in other words, you had to be in-between. (This was why people didn't bathe alone at night, unless they wanted to meet the Bannik.) If the banya made a purring sound, the Bannik was at home." He was sometimes known to appear to late-night wanderers as a village elder or dead ancestor, and it was important to leave the fourth steam round for him, to propitiate him with food and vodka, and to refrain from bringing anything from the house into the banya and vice versa, as everything in the banya belonged to him (whereas the rest belonged to the domovoi). If properly treated, he would protect his guests; if maltreated he would become hostile and cause failures of fertility (crop, animal, and human), again showing the connections to the banya as a temple to Mokosh the Earth Mother.

But back to your ceremonial first smoke sauna. When the room is very hot and there is only a small blue flame left in the fire, shut the vents for a while - perhaps 20 minutes. Then open them all up and let the air in for at least an hour, to clear out all carbon monoxide. Pour water on your rocks, which will have been heating on the stove; it helps clear the air. When it's safe to be in there for more than a minute, go in with buckets of water and old rags and wipe everything down - the smoke will have blackened things. Sweep the floor, putting your intent into purifying the space. Then reconnect the stovepipe (or unstop the chimney), relight the fire, and have a regular sauna in the mellow heat from the savusauna. You have now honored the ancestors by doing your first firing in the way that they would have done.

A Northern-Tradition Sweat Ritual

To prepare for the sauna, first clean yourself. In the winter during older times this would have meant a scrub with snow; at least take a shower first. There will enough toxins coming out of your pores in short order. Clearing the skin is a good idea. It can also be used as ritual pre-cleansing in order to make yourself ready for the sacred space of the sauna.

A sauna is divided into rounds, each called a gang in Finnish. The ritual we create here is done in three rounds, as are many traditional versions. The first gang is the opening of the space, done to warm up and release the pressure of the everyday, a transition from daily concerns. It is the Ancestor round, in honor of those who came before us. The Ancestors are always honored first during a proper Northern-Tradition sweat ritual. Although this ritual is written as if for a group - since it may well be the job of the spirit-worker to lead it - it can also be adapted to a personal religious ritual by one individual.

The first round is the Perth round, going into the Mystery in silence. To begin, each person is recaned with mugwort and then sent inside the sauna. Everyone comes in naked, bowing before the low lintel, and seats themselves. The one who is in charge of the rite lets everyone get settled in silence. Keep the silence going for a few minutes in order to let everyone calm down and transition away from their daily movement. If there are those who are uncomfortable, the silent warmup may help them as well. Ideally, one ought to get to the point where there is no psychological discomfort with being naked in a roomful of other naked sweating people. Physical discomfort is to be expected, at least in small amounts - in fact, if someone needs to leave during the rite for physical reasons, let them do so, and don't give them trouble about it. Having someone keel over will disrupt everything. It should go without saying that everyone in the ritual space should have been briefed on what this is about and how to properly behave.

If possible, encourage people to start by breathing together, difficult as that is in the hot room. The ideal is to get folks into a headspace where they are the tribe, all together, quietly celebrating their group bond. Don't push it, though. Overenthusiasm will not work here. Let the löyly do its job. As Lydia Helasdottir puts it: "One of the things that is said about sauna by the Finnish is that the everyday isn't there. Marriages are brokered and enmities healed in the sauna. It doesn't matter who you are; when you're in the sauna you're just a sauna-mate. Doesn't matter if you're a Prime Minister or a peasant."

The officiant (which is how we will hereby refer to the person in charge of the rite) kneels before the fire as one would an altar, extends their hands towards the fire, and says:

All participants repeat back, "Out of the darkness, Fire."

On top of the stove, a number of stones have been arranged, ideally in a spiral pattern, or perhaps that of a rune or a pictograph. They have been heating up all this time. The officiant has held back and is carrying one stone, which they now carefully place with the others, completing the pattern. The officiant says:

The participants all repeat: "Out of the ice, stones."

Then the officiant wipes the sweat from their forehead with a bit of (natural fiber) cloth, and tosses it into the fire, saying:

The participants all repeat: "Out of the sweat of earth, life."

There should be a bowl of water placed on one of the benches; it can have some kind of herb or essential oil if you like. For appropriate scents, I prefer pine needles for the first round (symbolizing the evergreens which are the oldest trees), birch for the second (as this is the birching round, although if you're using birch whisks, there's no need for anything but clean water), and the third should be chosen on the basis of which Gods you are honoring. The officiant holds up the bowl of water and says:

The officiant pours water onto the hot stones, and as the steam rises the participants repeat: "From fire and water and stone, all creation."

The officiant then speaks of honoring the ancestors who came before us, and may speak of some deed done by an ancestor. Others then might speak forth with tales of their own ancestors. For those who do not know their own ancestors, or do not wish to honor them by name for whatever reason, speaking of a spiritual ancestor that inspired them will suffice. Not everyone needs to take part; if the round falls to silence, that's fine. Whatever people say, it should end with a time of meditative silence.

Meanwhile, the löyly is surrounding everyone slowly. As Lydia puts it, "...this presence fills the sauna area, and it's more than just the steam somehow, and it makes your skin tingle, and the hackles on your neck rise if it's really there properly. It overwhelms you; when löyly comes you are just quiet for that moment until it gets absorbed into the walls."

One Finnish farmer referred to there as being four kinds of löyly: Maiden löyly, Lady löyly, Mother löyly, and Grandmother löyly. The first time that the water is thrown on the rocks is Maiden löyly, which surrounds you like a fiery lover; you can hardly bear her touch, but it is exciting and ecstatic. The second is the Lady löyly, which caresses you like a loving wife. The third, Mother löyly, is so gentle that it is "like sitting in your mother's lap". The fourth, Grandmother löyly, is said to be the sweetest of all ... it happens when you go out to the bathhouse after the sauna and toss a little water onto the still-warm coals for the sake of the Saunatonttu and the Ancestors.

When the first round has gone on long enough - and "long enough" is something that needs to be carefully gauged by the person in charge; remember that you'll be doing two more of these - everyone takes a break. This is the time to wash in cool water, or take a cold shower, or roll in the snow, depending on how sturdy one is. If someone has high blood pressure or a heart condition, have them soak or sponge off with warm water - a sudden drastic temperature change could create problems. Then it's back in for the second gang.

The second gang is for weighty matters. It is the Mannaz round for the Community. While this is traditionally for bringing up important issues that are besetting the community, it is not for arguing or starting fights. Instead, people should frame their issues as hopes, stating what positive changes they would like to see happen in the future. "Community" could be anything as small as one's family to as large as the world. The round is formal, and people should not speak out of turn. If the group is intimate and trustworthy enough, negative matters between people can be brought up, but the officiant should keep things on track and not allow grudges to affect the energy of the rite.

This is the round where the birch whisks are brought out, steamed over the fire, and used to flagellate each other. It is done to loosen off the dead bits of skin that are peeling off of everyone's back, and also for spiritual purification. When done in community, it is important that people do it to each other as well as themselves, as an act of acknowledging the community bond. If no birch whisks are available, essence of birch can be put into the water. Birching is sometimes done in the sauna, and sometimes during the second break, depending on people's preferences. Birch is the tree of Frigga, the Queen of Asgard and the Lady of Frithkeeping. Part of Frigga's gift is to make sure that social interactions run properly, with as few people being insulted as possible. During this round, the officiant takes on Frigga's role, making sure that the atmosphere is maintained and that nothing degenerates into argument or, conversely, mere partying. An invocation to Frigga can be done, if the people involved wish to invoke her, to keep things peaceful. The UPG of one spirit-worker was that this round would be appropriate for divination done with symbols - runes or pictographs - drawn on birchbark or carved on birch twigs. After this round, the whisks are burned in the fire.

The third gang is done for the Gods, the Ansuz round, and it is mostly quiet. The Gods may be hailed in the beginning, by name as people choose or all together, and then silence falls again. The group meditates on how they are going to enact the vision that came during the löyly or the divination or the talking on the last two rounds. Then all leave in silence, shower off, and the sauna is left going for a while longer in order to propitiate the guardian spirit. Someone should be chosen to watch the fire - checking in on it periodically until it goes out - and if there is a feast afterwards, some of it should be brought out and set at the door of the sauna as an offering.

Raven Kaldera
cauldronfarm@hotmail.com

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