On Sámi everyday spirituality, sacred landscapes, and a gradual return
It may begin with a stone.
Not merely a piece of geology, but a stone that stands out. Dark and smooth, with water seeping from a crack. A stone beside a steep rock face, in a place where the landscape seems to carry something older than human voices.
At Badjelánnda in Laponia, northern Sweden, such rock surfaces can be found. Boats, reindeer, and human-like figures have been carved into the rock. People came here to extract soapstone and asbestos, hunt, fish, and travel through the area. Yet archaeologists Inga-Maria Mulk and Tim Bayliss-Smith suggest that the site may have been more than a place of work. It may also have been a threshold between the visible world and another reality.
We do not know exactly what people thought or did here. But the site invites us to consider an important insight into older Sámi religion: the sacred was not reserved for the noaidi, the religious specialist who could divine, heal, and travel between worlds. The sacred was also woven into everyday life—in the hearth, in hunting and fishing, in birth and death, and in the relationship with the landscape.
The noaidi was important, but the noaidi did not own the sacred.
The world was larger than humanity
When we speak of pre-Christian Sámi religion, it is easy to begin with the drum and the noaidi. Historical sources describe the noaidi as a person with particular religious responsibilities and knowledge, including contact with spirits, the dead, and divine powers.
But if we focus only on the noaidi, we risk overlooking the people around them.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith point out that religious practices in Sámi communities before around 1600 did not take place only during major ceremonies. There were also small, repeated acts associated with food, work, hunting, family life, and particular places. Knowledge of the landscape and its religious significance was not necessarily restricted to a small elite.
This does not mean that everyone possessed the same knowledge or had the same responsibilities. Age, gender, kinship, and experience could all matter. But a relationship with the unseen world was not necessarily something only a religious specialist could have. It could be learned through everyday life.
Children could observe how adults handled food, approached particular places, or showed respect for animals and the landscape. Knowledge was passed on through actions, stories, and experience.
Nature was not a backdrop to human life. It was part of the living community.
The hearth as the centre of the world
Imagine a winter evening in a Sámi dwelling. Darkness surrounds the home, while the fire brings the family together. Some prepare food, others repair tools, and children listen to the adults talking.
The fire provides warmth and light, but it could also hold religious significance.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith describe small, daily offerings associated with Sáráhkká at the hearth. Sáráhkká was connected to Máttaráhkká, a central female divine figure in Sámi cosmology. In the researchers’ reconstruction, Máttaráhkká was associated with the earth, life, birth, and motherhood.
The sacred was therefore not found only at remote offering sites or during special ceremonies. It could be present in the everyday activities of the home.
The spaces and boundaries within a dwelling could also carry religious significance. Certain activities and objects belonged in particular places, while relationships between people, food, and the body could be governed by customs and beliefs.
To us, the distinction between home and religion may seem obvious. But in a religious worldview rooted in the landscape, the home itself could be a small cosmos—a place where people maintained the connection between the visible and invisible worlds.
To receive is also to be indebted
A reindeer is not merely meat. A fish is not merely food. A stone is not merely raw material.
People in older Sámi communities depended on hunting, fishing, animals, and the landscape. But depending on nature is not the same as treating it as a warehouse of resources.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith use reciprocity as a central concept for understanding the relationship between humans and divine powers. An offering could express gratitude and acknowledge that people had already received something: food, life, or access to an area.
They also refer to the Sámi word vaerro, which can mean an offering or gift to the gods, but also a tax. The word illustrates how gifts and obligations can be closely connected.
The idea is simple but significant: receiving something also brings responsibility.
If you take something, remember where it came from. If you live from the land, you must also live in relationship with the land.
This could be expressed through larger offerings and communal rituals, but also through small acts that left almost no trace. A piece of food, a splash of drink, or a gesture could mark a connection between a person and the surrounding world.
The sacred did not always require a large gathering. Sometimes it was enough for someone to remember.
Hunting, community, and responsibility
Hunting was not merely a way to obtain food. It was also a social activity that required cooperation and mutual obligations.
In Sámi society, the siida was an important community associated with people, territories, resources, and rights. Hunting and other forms of resource use could involve several families and groups. The work included finding animals, driving them, slaughtering them, processing the carcasses, and distributing what had been obtained.
In the researchers’ model, religious practices took place at several levels: among individuals, within families, among hunters and fishers, and within larger communities. Rituals were not necessarily something that happened after the work. They could be an integral part of it.
This makes it difficult to draw a sharp line between economic and religious places. A hunting ground could also be a place of spiritual significance. A mountain could provide raw materials and be sacred. A river could provide fish and feature in beliefs about connections between worlds.
The sacred was not a break from life. It was a way of living.
Where the world opened
Some places stand out from their surroundings. They may be a mountain rising abruptly from the landscape, a dark spring, a cave, a waterfall, or a rock face with unusual shapes.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith use the concepts of anomaly and liminality to understand such places. An anomaly is something that differs from the ordinary. Liminality concerns thresholds and transitions—between states, territories, or worlds.
Applied to the landscape, a mountainside, riverbank, or opening in the rock could be understood as a threshold. Such places did not have to be dangerous or evil. They could be significant because they disrupted the ordinary and made the boundaries of the world visible.
This may help explain why springs, waterfalls, caves, rocks, and mountains have held special places in many religious traditions.
They are not merely natural features. They can also be places where something begins, ends, or passes through.
Badjelánnda: the stone, the boat, and the threshold
Badjelánnda lies in the mountain region that is now part of the Laponia World Heritage Site. Its rock surfaces bear carvings of boats, reindeer, and human figures. The area has also been used for the extraction of soapstone and asbestos.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith argue that the site may have been understood as a threshold to the Underworld. They also stress that direct evidence for this interpretation is limited. It is an archaeological and religious-historical reconstruction, not something that can be established with certainty.
Nevertheless, the connections are intriguing. The site has unusual rock formations, water that can seep from cracks, traces of human activity, and images that can be considered within a Sámi religious context.
In the researchers’ interpretation, the boats may have been more than depictions of actual vessels. They may also have symbolised journeys between worlds and the soul’s passage to or from the Underworld. The reindeer may have been associated with hunting and offerings, while the human figures might possibly be connected with divine beings.
Such interpretations must be approached carefully. We cannot know for certain what each figure meant, or whether all the images served the same purpose.
The boats may have depicted real boats while also carrying religious meaning. In older Sámi beliefs, a journey across water could also be understood as a passage between worlds.
A boat carved into the rock could therefore hold several meanings: a journey, a transition, or a connection between the living and the dead.
The images may not have belonged to the noaidi alone
It is tempting to assume that rock carvings and religious symbols must have belonged to a religious elite. But Mulk and Bayliss-Smith suggest that the images at Badjelánnda do not necessarily express the noaidi’s secret knowledge. They may also have been created by people who shared a religious worldview without being noaidis themselves.
Perhaps hunters carved images after a successful hunt. Perhaps people extracting stone marked their visit. Perhaps the site was connected with stories about ancestors and the dead.
We do not know. But the images may have helped preserve shared stories and memories through repeated visits and actions.
A reindeer could be associated with hunting, gratitude, and obligation. A boat could open the way to stories about the dead. A human figure could be linked to life, birth, or divine presence.
The images may not have been the whole story, but rather an opening into it.
When ancient places were silenced
It is difficult to understand older Sámi religion without considering the history of Christianisation.
For centuries, missionaries and authorities attempted to replace older Sámi religious practices with Christianity. Drums were confiscated, offering sites were destroyed or neglected, and religious practices could become dangerous to perform openly.
As Christianity became established in the north and Lutheran missions expanded from the sixteenth century onwards, the pressure intensified. The noaidi’s former religious role gradually weakened, and much knowledge and practice were lost.
The older religion did not survive unchanged. Traditions were disrupted, transformed, and combined with new religious expressions. Yet suppressing a practice is not the same as erasing every relationship on which it was built.
Places remained. Place names, stories, and certain practices could survive even when the old religious vocabulary disappeared.
The past could endure in fragments: in a story, a family tradition, or a particular respect for a place that others saw simply as nature.
A gradual return
Today, many people are working to rediscover and continue Sámi culture, language, knowledge, and spirituality. This development is often described as Sámi cultural and spiritual resurgence.
It is not a single movement with one doctrine or one correct way of practising. Some seek to reconnect with pre-Christian religious expressions, rituals, and drum traditions. Others find a connection through joik, language, family history, reindeer herding, fishing, art, or the protection of sacred sites.
Some people are both Christian and Sámi. Others wish to explore pre-Christian traditions outside the framework of Christianity. Sámi spirituality encompasses different experiences and approaches.
For many, this rediscovery is not simply about reconstructing an ancient religion. It is also about restoring a relationship—with the land, ancestors, language, and places that carry memories.
How can we live well in a place? What do we owe the landscape? How can older knowledge matter in the modern world?
There is not necessarily one answer to these questions. But they show why older Sámi religious thought can still be relevant.
Not a tourist version of the sacred
As Sámi spirituality becomes more visible, the risk of oversimplification also increases. The drum can become a decoration, the noaidi a tourist character, and sacred places a backdrop for the experience industry. The term “shamanism” can be used so broadly that its connection to Sámi history, language, and local traditions becomes unclear.
This does not mean that traditions cannot develop. Living traditions must be able to find new forms of expression. But the sacred should not be reduced to entertainment, an identity marker, or a commodity.
A drum is not automatically a bridge to the past. A ritual does not automatically become Sámi simply because it takes place outdoors.
The depth of a tradition does not depend only on how old it appears. It lies in its connection to history, community, responsibility, and particular places.
Older Sámi ways of understanding the world were not only about contact with unseen powers. They were also about living in ways that maintained the relationships on which life depended.
The sacred is still present in the way we walk
When Mulk and Bayliss-Smith investigate Badjelánnda, the rock carvings, and ideas of sacred geography, they are exploring more than a mountain region in Sweden. They are examining humanity’s place in the world.
The noaidi may have possessed special abilities and responsibilities. But the entire community lived in a world where places, animals, and natural phenomena could have religious significance.
The sacred could be found in the way people treated an animal, shared food, related to the dead, or moved through a particular landscape. It could be expressed through major ceremonies, but also through small actions that were never written down.
This is not merely a story about the past. At a time when nature is often treated as raw material, land area, and resource, this understanding reminds us of another possibility: the land is not merely something we use. It is something with which we are in relationship.
We cannot recreate the past exactly, and we should not pretend to know all the answers. But we can examine the traces left by those who came before us and take their questions seriously.
How do we receive without forgetting to give? How do we listen to a landscape that has long been treated as silent?
At Badjelánnda, the boats, reindeer, and human figures remain carved into the rock. They do not tell us everything, but they remind us that people before us could experience the world as filled with meaning.
A stone could be a threshold.
A spring could be a beginning.
A boat could carry a soul.
And the sacred could be close at hand—not only for the noaidi, but for everyone who learned to live with respect for the living world.
