Raimmahallan

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Raimmahallan. Contact with death and the dead was an ambivalent experience in folk belief. On the one hand, it held a supernatural force associated with death which endowed the strong-blooded , i.e. those who were unafraid of it, with greater strength in their struggles with their opponents of the other world.; thus a seer might increase his healing abilities and other professional skills by actively seeking out contact with death and the dead. However, meeting a departed being was generally a distressing experience, although during the so-called soul time following a person s death it was more to be expected that feared. At other times this experience usually caused a state of debility, which in Saami is called raimmahallan. Particularly meeting a dead unbaptized illegitimate child ([[Tiedosto:I>|thumb|600px|{{{2}}}]]) was considered dangerous. The state of raimmahallan was characterized by restlessness, anxiety, nightmares and lassitude, and in the worst cases it could be lethal.

Theologically, the state of raimmahallan has been explained as a reflection of a shamanistic explanation of illness, a loss of one s soul; a person falls ills when the part of his soul that represents his individuality or his guardian spirit departs from him. Usually meeting a dead person is associated with a fright, but the force of the departed, manifested in any objected connected with him - for example his buried body - might cause this stateeven without the victim being conscious of it; the remains of departed persons as well as everything else associated with them was believed to hold something of their spiritual existence, which might be manifested in haunting, apparitions, etc. The fact that this scenario could also cause a state of raimmahallan can perhaps be explained by the fact that there generally appears to have prevailed some kind of cohesion between the souls of the living and those of the dead; the departed yearned for the living to join them. For example, the Inari Saami spoke with fear of a kivdji shadow that appeared when they were travelling in the country. This phenomenon can be classified as a kind of ghost ({{Kuvalinkki|P> <P align="justify"> The black magic</A> of the later tradition exploited people s propensity for falling into a state of raimmahallan in the practice of using human remains and burial soil in magic potions.