The Cosmogony of the Kalevala

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, and *the only file in this section that takes a European folk poem as its subject. The frontispiece is Väinämöinen and Aino* of 1896 by Sigfrid August Keinänen.

The historical claim comes first: the Kalevala is put at more than three thousand years old, dating from a time when the Finnish tribes lived far south of their present home, probably by the Black Sea or the Caspian. The Finns are then related to the peoples settled on the tablelands of Tibet and Central Asia, and said to stand to the Slavonic nations in the same mystical relation as the magicians and sorcerers of Thessaly stood to the rest of the Hellenes — with the supporting observation that in Russian folklore Finn is almost a synonym for magician. They are described as a wonderfully simple nation living in perfect touch and harmony with nature, and it is that closeness which the file treats as the reason their poetry preserved what it did. The substantive argument is that the Finnish cosmogonic myths and allegories are faithful echoes of the Dhyani-Chohans of the Secret Doctrine — a sublime radiation of celestial beings and fountainhead of humanity, formless on the plane of pure subjectivity, together with their less spiritual emanations as they descend into the darkness of objectivity. The particular correspondence the file rests on is a pleasing one: the beautiful duck of the Finnish creation story is said to correspond exactly to Kalahamsa, the Swan out of Time and Space, convertible into the Swan in Time and Space. The Hierarchy of Compassion drawing is reproduced within the file, and a page of suggested reading closes it.

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