Tietäjä

[1] The activities of a tietäjä were primarily healing and preventing illness, but also included helping with farming, fishing and hunting; dealing with witchcraft; supporting approved marriages and disrupting disapproved liaisons; identifying thieves; and bringing success to ventures such as journeys or building.

[2] Their incantations might call on helpers such as the dead, väki, Ukko, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, or animal spirits.

One of the key branches of the tietäjä's knowledge concerned aetiologies (synnyt, s. synty) of natural phenomena.

[5] Traditions of Kalevalaic poetry, and the associated institution of the tietäjä, were aggressively opposed in Lutheran early modern Sweden (which included modern Finland), but became integrated into Russian Orthodox culture in Karelia and Ingria, partly assimilating to and partly thriving alongside Christian culture.

The current scholarly consensus, based on comparative anthropological and linguistic evidence, is that Finnic-speaking cultures once shared in a wider central and northern Eurasian tradition of shamanism, most distinctively characterised by ritual specialists being believed to leave their bodies in spirit form.

However, while tietäjä traditions clearly have important characteristics in common with shamanism, tietäjät were not believed to leave their bodies; their supernatural power arose rather from their command of memorised incantations and rituals.