Kaarina Kailo:
Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality. The Architectonics and Cosmology of Sacred Space
Kaarina Kailo @copyright, quilt art illustrations by Kaarina KAILO
This book addresses topics that have so far not been studied in detail or in a truly comparative spirit: notions, definitions, beliefs and practices related to the sacred and the spiritual in the context of sweat ceremonies and sauna rituals.
Through an investigation of several sauna and sweat lodge cultures and their remnants (Finnish, Ojibway, Micmac, Cree, Lenape, Irish, Iberian/Galician, Pueblo Indian and Temascali sweat rituals), one can trace the changes that have taken place in the spiritual imaginary and the experience of the sacred. Recognizing the great diversity and variety of these cultural practices and belief systems, the book focuses on their shared spiritual, cosmological, celestial, earthly and structural features. To focus on proxemics, the meanings ascribed to symbolic structures and ritual processes, reveals close affinities across cultures and historical eras.
The book speculates that the spiritual roots of the sauna may well be in the Paleolithic era’s bear religion and the woman-oriented first rituals of rebirth and regeneration from Native menstruation huts to sweat lodges and maybe even Old European ritual practices. A sign of high antiquity is also the presence of a Sheela-na-Gig or goddess/grandmother figures in the case of Irish sweat houses. In matrilineal or matristic civilizations, the Great Mother or Grandmother enjoyed a particularly high esteem as someone guaranteeing rebirth to the same clan. The book examines the complex ways in which the saunas echoing the Delaware Big House can be read semiotically as cultural texts and imaginaries that demarcate the social, religious and political lifeways of the particular culture. The Finnish sauna is the particular personal case study and serves to show what has happened to the sanctity and gendered spiritual dimensions of the sauna in the North.
This comparative study explores how feminine symbols, the maternally perceived cosmos or matriverse in past sweating cultures have been transformed. The book is of interest to Native, religious and gender studies, archeology, folklore, studies of the gift economy, mythology as well as sauna studies. It is timely to also study the ecological importance of sweat rituals for addressing today’s planetary threats, climate change, mental dysfunction, militarism and increasing multilevel violence. Since the book’s focus is on spirituality, comparing ecofeminist, matristic, Indigenous and patriarchal definitions of the divine and of the spiritual will also be explored as the context of sauna and sweat ceremonies and rituals.
