For Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo, sauna is the medicine we need in these tormented times. “In the sauna you are brought into direct contact with the holy spirit. It's the alternative to the patriarchal church. It's the space of peace, of equality, of ritual and the sacredness that we have lost and are craving. It's a multidimensional healing space for the body, the spirit, and the mind.”
A researcher of women’s cultural studies and folklore, Northern women’s culture, goddess mythologies, Indigenous worldview and theory, modern matriarchal studies, the gift economy, and the bear religion, Kaarina has spent many years investigating the very old history of sauna and sweating cultures in Finland, in Old Europe and in Indigenous cultures in North America.
With her new book Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality, Kaarina explores the origins of pre-Christian, pre-patriarchal sauna as a sacred space for healing and rebirth, and how female symbols and the maternally perceived cosmos in past sweating cultures have been transformed.
In this episode we talk about the early religions that didn't require belief in an abstract god because they were based on mother earth and verifiable material reality. We talk about the patriarchal takeover of sacredness, the great cost of losing our embodiment and connection to the natural world, the power of feminist spirituality to reconnect our broken bonds, and how we embrace the darkness so we can be reborn in the spring.
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