In Finnish mythology, the underworld is known by many names including Tuonela, Tuoni, Manala, Vainajala, and Mana, but Tuonela is the most commonly used, and is also sometimes used to refer to graveyards. The realm is ruled over by the god of death Tuoni and his wife Tuonetar. They also have several daughters who are the goddesses of death and disease, the most important of which is Loviatar.
Life After Death
The Finns believed that there was no heaven or hell. All of the dead become shadowy ghosts that occupy Tuonela. It is described as existing in a place in the northernmost part of the world and separated from the rest of the world by a great divide, through which flows a wild river. The dead must cross the river either by swimming, a bridge, or a boat, and the river is guarded by a black swan that sings death spells.
There was a time in the mythological past when the living visited Tuonela in order to learn secrets and spells. This was a perilous journey through thick mountains and required facing the flesh-tearing monster, Surma. Once they arrived, Tuonetar would offer the living drinks of forgetting to try and get them to stay. But the most experienced shamans know to consume nothing in the realm of the dead.
The most famous living visitor to Tuonela was Vainamoinen in the Kalevala, the 19th-century folklore poem. A powerful shaman, he is taken across the river by a ferry woman and knows to refuse the drinks offered to him. Nevertheless, he did not get the knowledge he wanted, and he had to turn himself into a snake to escape.
Little else is known about Tuoni and Tuonetar except that together they have several daughters: Kiputytto, Kivutar, Vammatar, Kalma, and Loviatar.
Kiputytto
Kiputytto can literally be translated as “pain girl,” and she appears to be the goddess of pain as she is often called on in spells to ease pain. She is said to spend her time on a kill called Kipumaki, where three rivers meet. There she uses pain stones, which seem to be stones with holes in them, to increase or reduce pain.
In the Kalevala it says: Kiputytto of Tuoni, sitting on the mount of anguish at the junction of three rivers, turning rocks of pain and torture. Turn away these fell diseases through the virtues of the blue stone. Lead them to the water-channels, sink them in the deeps of ocean, where the winds can never find them, where the sunlight never enters.
According to a folk poem from Savonia, a region in Finland close to the Russian frontier, Kiputytto was born at the same time as the three maidens who created the origin of iron. It all started with a strong wind that lasted for six years and seven summers that caused an old tree trunk to be pulled up from the ground and cast into the sea. The four maidens were then born from that tree trunk. Three of them were involved in the creation of iron and the fourth became the maiden of pain.
Kivutar
Kivutar is also a goddess of pain, and it is not always clear whether she and Kiputytto are the same. But while Kiputytto uses pain stones, Kivutar is described as boiling people’s pain in a big black pot, but on the same mountain as her sisters.
Kalma
Kalma is specifically associated with death and decay and she lives in graveyards, attracted by the scent of corpses. She moves like a puff of smoke and maybe a kind of angel of death. She is accompanied by a beastly dog called Surma, who guards the gates of Tuonela. This suggests that Kalma may be the woman who ferries the dead, and the occasional shamanic visitor, across the river.
Vammatar
Vammatar is described as a goddess of pain, disease, and suffering, and sometimes of evil and misfortune.
In some cases, there are just three sisters described as ruling the underworld. These are the youngest sister Kivutar, goddess of pain, the middle sister Loviatar, who rules physical pains and disease, and the oldest Vammatar, who rules psychic pain and mental illness.
Loviatar
The most famous of the daughters is Loviatar, who is described as the most evil and black-hearted of the daughters of Tuonela. She is described as blind, which may allude to the indiscriminate and “blind” way that death and disease attack mankind.
She becomes pregnant by the east winds and gives birth to nine sons and one daughter. The sons are all diseases: Pistos (consumption), Anky (colic), Luuvalo (gout), Riisi (rickets), Paise (ulcer), Rupi (scab), Syoja (cancer), Rutto (plague). Her ninth son is too dreadful to be named, but was sometimes called “enchanter,” which may imply a link with supernatural illness. She is said to have sent him off to become the scourge of mankind.
Despite being described as a blind, ugly, old, virgin (different from virginal goddesses in other traditions) who has evil intentions for mankind, Loviatar is invoked in spells to banish illness. Rather than suggesting a softer side, the implication is that the spell gives the shaman power over the goddess.
In one story of her pregnancy, Loviatar is described as traveling blind and in great pain while heavily with child. She travels by the mountain-springs and fountains, by the crystal waters flowing, by the sacred stream and whirlpool, by the cataract and fire-stream to the north. There she is instructed by the god Ukko, and is helped by a witch called Louhi, who acts as her midwife.
Loviatar the Mistress of Pohjola
Loviatar may be the same as Louhi, another fearsome woman who appears in Finnish myth. Louhi is also described as the mother of nine diseases, and on separate occasions, both are described as the Mistress of Pohjola.
Pohjola means “bas or bottom,” which among the Finns meant north, which suggests that Pohjola was located in the same region of the world as Tuonela. It is also specifically described as a dark and terrible place.
In the Kalevala, the shaman Lemminkainen goes to Pohjola to woo the daughter of the mistress of the land, who could be Loviata, Louhi, or both as an amalgam. The mistress gives him three tasks that he must complete to win the hand of her daughter. His third task is to kill the swan of Tuonela, which be fails to do. Instead, he is cut into pieces by a water snake and thrown into a whirlpool in the river that separates the worlds of the living and the dead. But his mother finds the pieces of his body and restores him to life, not dissimilar from the story of the Egyptian god Osiris.
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