Description
Saami Duck Pendant: The Duck is a bird, but it is a water bird, it lives and moves in two worlds, very different one from the other: it flies in the sky, it swims in the water. Sky and water are not the uniques wordls to which the duck belongs and between it can freely come and go, the duck can also move between the earthly world and the unearthly world, the reign of Säiva people, according to Sami legends. For this, the duck was invoked by shamans to help them, to put them in contact with Säiva people, ancestral spiritual beings that could help humans in haunting and fishing, hard and heavy activities essentials to survive in the cold and unhospital north. The Duck is the connection between our world and the other one.
According to the finnish poem Kalevala, before everything was created Luonnotar (the "daughter of nature") swam in the primordial waters for centuries, without finding anything. Tired and frustrated, she finally saw a duck in flight: the duck also was exhausted, and desperately was looking for a stable place in the ocean to lay its own eggs. Luonnotar stood up her knee, allowing the duck to lay three eggs from which came out the earth, the sky, the stars, the world as we know it, allowing life.
Saami shamanism (or Sami): The Saami (also knows as Laps) live in the most extreme lands of Scandinavian peninsula, occupying the northern part of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Because of their geographic isolation, they kept their ancient magical and shamanic traditions intact, traditions that are deeply connected to a naturalistic and animistic conception of religion. They believed that gods lived in nature, specially in its great and particular forms, and into the nature they established their sacred places. The Shaman, Noaide The Saami (also knows as Laps) live in the most extreme lands of Scandinavian peninsula, occupying the northern part of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Because of their geographic isolation, they kept their ancient magical and shamanic traditions intact, traditions that are deeply connected to a naturalistic and animistic conception of religion. They believed that gods lived in nature, specially in its great and particular forms, and into the nature they established their sacred places. The Shaman, Noaide (Noai'de) crucial figure, feared and respected, as well as being a healer had the task to contact and to put humans in contact with the divine, natural, magical entities. Through the noitarumpu (O Goavddis in Sami language), his drum, ritual instrument par excellence of all antiquity, and its loud, repeated and obsessive sounds, the shaman reached a state of trance in which the soul could leave the body, in which it could then return always continuing to follow the guidance of his drum sounds.
The protector animal spirits, even painted on the shaman's drum skin, were invoked by the shaman to assist him in his spiritual functions, in his travels among the unearthly worlds and in its role as a healer.
