Reverent revelry — Enchantment and fellowship  through the ages

Over four years, the international and multidisciplinary Heinävesi Ancient Week festival has vitalized my capacity for magical experience, awakened deep joy, and renewed my trust in community and communion. The Echoes of the Ancient project has highlighted my belief in the power of art, voice, improvisation, and fun to venerate nature, spirit, and human freedom.

Kasper Salonen

Introductions

When we peer deep into the past, a gaze responds. When I speak and sing to the forest, a voice is reflected back as an echo that reaches all the way to the heart of my being, through time immemorial, present within me — in reverence and revelry, in playful ritual, between and among worlds.

How could the average urban citizen in the apocalyptic 2020s discover and harness powerful and age-old experiences of connection, as part of their daily lives and personal spiritual landscapes? What practical benefits can be gleaned from ancient Finno-Ugric spellcraft, musical trance states, as well as universal and intercultural, ecological, animistic, indigenous principles? How can we access and cherish such connections, and vivify ourselves and our voices in the embrace of nature and history and language and culture, developing into more caring, curious, and capable human beings together? How to have fun all the while?

So many wonderful answers to these questions have arisen throughout the diverse program of the Heinävesi Ancient Week festival (2023—2026); and through the wisdom, play, and friendship of all the amazing people and artists who have gathered yearly in the environs of Kermajärvi lake to share their skills and energy. My entire life has been transformed by the fellowships and bonds I have had the luck to encounter and nourish in the countryside, in creative cooperation and intuitive partnership, with some of the warmest and wisest people I have ever met.

I will provide a window into some of my experiences here, describing some key moments, drawing from memory as well as my extensive and jumbled journal entries and poetic notes.

Dialogue with language, music, prehistory, and nature itself, in all their dimensions and portals and sanctuaries, is a methodology of sanctification — and of embodying open-hearted enchantment; haltioituminen, Finnish for “becoming like the spirits” or “joining the elves”. When someone acts against (their) Nature (Fin. luonto), or harms that which is sacred, they are said to be haltiaton, “without the spirits, bereft”. But the word haltija also refers to (safe)keeping; holding and cherishing, guarding and treasuring[1] that which is most precious, and tremendously powerful.

With this in mind, below I’ll try to outline what these spheres of knowing and feeling mean to me. First some background, and my first steps toward the ancient lands.

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Arrivals

The area of Heinävesi in Eastern Finland, in the region of Savo and Karelia, is a place where nature’s magic seems to reside and resonate wherever you turn. The earth itself, and the trees and rocks and waters, all seem to radiate a pure presence, and the hum of deep time.

Heinävesi was unknown to me until the summer of 2023. Many Finns know it for its proximity to the Orthodox monastery of Valamo and nunnery of Lintula (unique in the Nordics). Vast stretches of wild forest and preserved national landscapes around Heinävesi are protected under the Natura2000 environmental treaty. The city itself is small, cozy, and clean. The whole region is known for having been a hotspot for the gathering and documenting of ancient spell-poetry (Fin. loitsurunot) starting in the 18^th century; the Kalevala epic is a collage or retelling of these partly-preserved traditions of spell-singing and verbal magic, which persisted through untold generations — and are still accessible, written and performed and heard by increasingly many people, re-entering Finnish culture.

Geography, heritage, and regional ties come up a lot as part of the mingling that occurs at the beautifully diverse Ancient Week festival. I have roots on my mother’s side around Simpele, Karelia; but as a suburban person raised in Finland’s capital region (Rekola, Vantaa), with an early childhood upbringing in the UK (Wimbledon, London) and my adult life spent in Southern Finland (Kallio, Helsinki and now Lippajärvi, Espoo), I hadn’t had many chances to visit these eastern rural towns and wildernesses, where my ancestors lived and roamed. But the call of the ancients beckoned, and through sheer coincidence I found myself drawn toward these new places that would soon enchant me through and through.

Life-changing adventures often happen via the broadening of friendships. It was my good friend, art curator Toni Ledentsa who invited me to visit the newly established Taideniitty residency and cultural center in Varkaus, not far from Heinävesi, in the summer of 2022. This oasis of art, music, peace, and kindness has also become a cherished environment for me. When I first met the family of Kati and Teemu Paananen, who run Taideniitty — and also build and illustrate incredible authentic drums and traditional instruments — we were astounded at how quickly we got along, and how much of the same living spark we saw in one another. This special process of immediate affection and bonding over shared values between strangers has persisted in my life, and the same has occurred time and again at the Ancient Week festival, too.

On this first-time visit to the old quarter of Varkaus I also met the maestro and primus motor of the Ancient Week, chair of the Heinävesi Ancient Association, filmmaker and educator Mikko Keinonen. His full-hearted vision and contagious eagerness, and his family’s beautiful hospitality, are at the root of all the amazement that has followed.

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Encounters

«Loven luona lohkareella,
alla mannun mahtavaisen,
kävin minä ryömimässä,
kiven alla laulamassa.»

«To the portal-rock I wandered,
under earth and heavy power;
there I came and crawled beneath it,
under stone my voice was singing.»
(orig. spell-poem, KS)

The homestead of the Keinonen family by the Kermaranta harbor has been the festival’s headquarters, a comfortable and picturesque base of operations as well as an open air stage and a peaceful lakeside sanctuary (complete with a wood-burning sauna, where true cleansing and restoration took place, and lots of jolly songs and spells!). Greatest thanks and heartfelt love to Mikko’s children and to his partner Myléne Mersault, a lovely friend and sensitive spiritual conduit.

The household processes at the residence each year have been communal, with more than a touch of anarchic chaos but always providing for every need, with more than ample nourishment and privacy, guaranteeing us visitors full bellies and sound sleep each day and night. (Nor should I forget to mention the famous and enormous Karelian pies and delicious local tomatoes that were nourishing staples of our outdoor adventures.)

The same improvisational and intuitive style of organization — not just laissez-faire but also trusting in the flow and synergy of unfolding events, styles of motivation and endurance, and adaptations to change and to needs — was also reflected in the development of each year’s festival contents and scheduling. While delays, extensions, confusion, and alterations to the program were not uncommon, still each event, journey, performance, seminar, recording session, and shared moment felt authentic, vouchsafed, and inherently happy, important, and free.

My own contributions and collaborations within the Heinävesi Ancient Week repertoire over four years have happily been numerous and diverse; true harmonies, word-worlds, playful games, ceremonies, soundscapes, rhythmic and melodic correlations. I developed two different sets of poetry workshops in tandem in 2022—2023, as I prepared content for writing and performance sessions for both the wonderful Kosmos Festival’s Oasis program (with a focus on psychedelia, integrative verbalization, and cosmic-mystical imagery) and for the Ancient Week. The workshop series I employed there for several consecutive years is called Sanan mahti / Words of Power — it included, in variations, dialogical sit-downs and writing practices surrounding spoken word poetry, freeverse haiku, glossolalia or nonsense, and crucially also “loitsu” spell-poems. All of these genres, forms, and literary principles were employed with free association, though with a guidance and natural tendency to appreciate and ponder on the personal experiences gleaned in the embrace of the ancient wilderness.

The festival’s locales are not all in the deep boreal forests; many of the most impressive and fruitful events over the years have been indoors, in the splendid accommodations of the Heinävesi public library’s halls and facilities.[2]

Still, above all it was the forests, glades, caves, coves, and islands of Heinävesi themselves — with their hallowed atmospheres, resonant energies, and intriguing acoustic traits — where our awareness and inspiration were perhaps most potently channelled. It’s also where hours upon hours of audiovisual content was recorded[3], amounting to a vast and glimmering catalogue of spontaneous performances, mashups, and jam sessions.

Some of these flourishing locations also played tricks on me. At the remote hollows and caves of Kerivuori I misplaced my small black notebook, full of irreplaceable poem fragments and notes. Many attempts to find this personal artifact were undertaken but to no avail, and I spent much of the festival week working through feelings of loss and shame over my carelessness, with the help of the empathy of all the people around me. Amazingly, a few months later local resident Ville Hakamäki — who is, fittingly enough, a regional archeologist — happened to find this little black square of mine! He called Mikko at once: “This seems like something one of your artist friends might have left behind.” The booklet had been drenched many times over, but miraculously the text inside was unharmed. Instead, all the writing I’d done in blue ink became doubled and mirrored on the opposite pages, evolving the notebook into an environmentally blessed totem, which I still have and intend to digitize soon. Deepest thanks to the elves for returning my words (and to the keen-eyed Ville!).

While I cannot here list every one of the incredible and unforgettable events, performances, jams, and ceremonies that I’ve experienced at the Ancient Week over the years, there are a few highlights I’d like to proffer.

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The “foot-stone” (Fin. jalkakivi) or glacial erratic (what a word!) at Pilpansalo is an awe-inspiring and energetic place, among dozens of such flabbergasting sacred ancient sites in Heinävesi. This 60-odd-tonne rock, resting upon several smaller stones with quartz inclusions, has sat upon its forest throne for literal ages of the world — thousands of years, hundreds of generations worth of unknowable, inscrutable, yet timelessly intuitive ritual and ceremony. And there we, contemporary sapiens, still frolic.

For the fourth consecutive year, as usual wearing my keffiyeh and driven by some recurrent shamanic magnetism, I dove into the shallow dark of the rock-upon-rock — betwixt-and-between, sandwiched amid the Upper (Ylinen) and the Lower (Alinen), in the Middle World (Keskinen), with the weightless massive weight of fate above me.

This year, I prepared for my transubstantiative immersion with the eons-old mineral deposit by first chant-singing a protective spell — called Varoitessa, “bewaring” — from my trusty, never dusty tome Suomen Kansan Muinaisia Loitsurunoja (SKS 1880; Salakirjat 2014). Then I got down and slithered headfirst into the gap before me, where I sang words of elemental cleansing that came to me intuitively. I beseeched the wind to blow away what no longer serves me, the fire to burn away what hinders me, and the roots of the earth to grow trees atop the soil of my soul.

Simultaneously several wonderful accompanied my personal ceremony: tietäjä comrade extraordinaire Eero Peltonen was beating a shaman drum as he sang the “Birth of the Bear”; my new acquaintance, diverse performer and bowed lyre (Fin. jouhikko) musician Eeva Meret also drummed above me upon the adjacent “stomping stone” (Fin. kalkatuskivi) with her feet; and my dear friend, virtuoso saxophonist and spiritually attuned singer Veera Neva filmed my miniature vision quest with my cellphone. All of these amazing people are unique and astounding artists in their own right, and I was rocked (!) to my core every time they performed during the festival.

I was reminded, on my last journey to this unique and resonant rock in 2026, of my first visit to the site four years earlier — when we travelers were treated to an astonishing display of vocal and musical sorcery by Aleksey Chichakov, a gently powerful soul and shaman who visited us from his native mountains of the Altai Republic in distant Siberia. His throat-singing and his mastery of the shoor flute, topshuur string instrument, and jaw harp lit a spark within me there in the summertime forests whose memory still seems to sparkle in me with timeless depth. His version of the Medicine Buddha chant, a mantra that is dear to me and part of my own diverse array of mental and spiritual practices, caused me on one occasion to tremble and weep with thunderous ad realigning energy.

At least two other rock formations deserve a special mention here, among all the others scattered across the Heinävesi region, for the powerful effect they have had on me. One is the tafone (i.e. a weathered cavity in granular rock) at Kytöjoki, where local legend says that a tietäjä or healer used it to cure people of illnesses as late as the 1800s, with one patient apocryphally ‘eaten’ by the rock itself; this little crevice is one of my favorite places to sing, chant, or drone due to the unnervingly beautiful echo it produces. Another is the Jumppanen cave system in Humalniemi, which extends about five meters underground right next to a shoulder of lake Kermajärvi; this rocky complex is imagined to have been home to an eccentric shaman in the late 19^th century, and the name may be a dialectal version of Joukahainen, the name of one of the folk heroes mentioned in the Kalevala epic. The main underground chamber features window-like openings in the cliff face, one of which shines directly onto a thick band on quartz running right down a rock surface like a glowing white snake.

Each time I leave the altar-like and , I feel as though I am stepping back out of a dimensional rift of some kind — leaving behind woes and baggage to be digested by the timeless forces of rock and root, and taking with me the blessings of cool wind and stone, bright echoes, and the seedlings of shuddering, soothing vigor.

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In stellar contrast to such intimate experiences of devotion and rambling hikes, numerous dynamic public musical concerts, both indoors and in specially constructed venues, have always also been a key element of the Heinävesi Ancient Festival. These diverse clubs blend ancient performance traditions with experimental modern modes of orchestral rock’n’roll, folk, hip hop, classical music, and spoken word poetry. Whatever the genre or style, an element of unexpectedness and improvisation were always in play (literally).

The Arkipyhä (Fin. “everyday-sacred”) concert in 2023 gathered local residents and audiences from across Finland to witness our live artistic concoctions. The concert was organized by constructing a full bespoke outdoor stage complex, cobbled together with great skill from scratch in the yard of the Kermacotta lakeside restaurant by jack-of-all-trades Harri Loiva and others (I shared much with Harri, a masterful electric guitarist and improviser who also accompanied my spoken word poems many times and was an important collaborator in the festival). That stage held up beautifully — until it collapsed, with some elegance, under the strain of the next night’s torrential rains.

Similarly, the various incarnations of the Tulevaisuuskonsertti (Fin. “future concert”) series of multidisciplinary clubs combined styles of performance, music, song, and dance in ways I had never imagined before. The intertwining sounds we wove and fused year to year created a distinct feeling of being flung through all levels of history at once, in the buzz of technology and the embrace of timeless, rediscovered forms of play.

Amazing fusions of multilingual and polycultural energy have nourished and delighted me through the years. These fantastic events brought together extremely eclectic creative experts from around Finland and the world.

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Lenses

«Luontoani nostattelen,
Haastattelen haltiata;
Nouse, luontoni, lovesta,
Haon alta, haltiani,
Kiven alta, auttajani,
Sammalista saattajani …»

«Here I come to raise my nature,
speaking with the ancient spirits;
rise, my nature, from the portal,
rise, my keeper, from the driftwood,
out from under stone to help me,
from the moss to now escort me …»

Haltioihin-saattosanoja (SKMLR 12.a)
Elf-sending words (orig. Eng. translation, KS)

To me, everything I’ve described and experienced as part of the Ancient Week through the years is about the balance and immersion of seeming opposites. Our shared gatherings can be described as playful communion, fun solemnity, or reverent revelry.

These are backformations of a Finnish dual term I’ve been using, hilpeys ja hartaus, which can be translated and formulated in many ways. Hilpeä means “joyous, happy, excited, cheerful, playful”. Harras means “reverent, solemn, respectful, focused, awed”. I have long felt that it is the combination and equilibrium of these two spectra of engagement and attunement that can bring us to our Nature: through gleeful silliness and celebration as well as humbling awe and sorrow; through epiphanies and revelations, but also moments of belonging, calm, and happiness. This all occurs both in solitude and in companionship.

One striking realization that confronts me when visiting locations that have stood for millennia is the feeling of sonder — recognizing that human beings roaming these excact same geological formations some hundreds or thousands of years ago also led full lives, wondered about their existence, cared for their loved ones, and dealt with pressures and uncertainties. Humans have been humans all along, diverse and adaptive souls.

Especially since we cannot know for sure exactly how or in what cultural frameworks our ancestors venerated these places, across many hundreds of generations, we each may also apply our own imagination when we visit and take part in something sacred. We may change the lenses through which we see. This is to say, our ideas of belief and even magic are inherently adjustable and non-dogmatic. The contemporary concept of religion, for instance, as an institution with its gatekeepers, hierarchies, and policing, would scarcely make sense to animistic, matriarchal communities of the distant past.

I am non-denominational (I was born secular Protestant but became agnostic as a teenager), and I adore respectful and artistic fusions of human spiritual ingenuity. I have a fascination and respect for all religious and metaphysical vantage points that preclude cruelty, supremacy, and violence. In my private life, I often repeat mantras and expressions in many languages and from many contexts. Among these, the Finno-Ugric traditions that my own blood relatives have more than likely engaged in throughout the ages have a special significance to me. This is partly because the spell-poems from bygone times (were passed down and expanded without writing) were practical and useful as well as forms of ‘original knowledge’ — and they are rhythmic and beautiful to hear and to express. Anthropologically, we can discern both widespread similarities as well as constant cultural fusion, improvisation, and adaptation.

A universal and innate result of this kind of activity may be described as non-ordinary states of consciousness or trances[4]. It is important to me that we as people and societies come to find renewed awarenss of our mental capacities, to rediscover our voice, and indeed to de-colonize and vivify the language we use to access or describe this grand variety in the “felt presence of immediate experience” (a term from ethnobotanist and lecturer Terence McKenna).

That is to say, we can reconfigure our approaches toward the meaning and power of words as world-shaping magic.[5] I hold to the belief that we may access psychedelia (Greek for “mind-manifesting”) in this age of apocalypse (Gr. “revelation of secrets”) in order to aspire to eutopia (Gr. “good world”, as opposed to utopia, “non-world”).

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It continuously dawns on me that resonant spiritual experiences maintain their strength through the real-world reflections and practical, principled applications that follow. The attempt is the practice. Kukaan ei ole seppä syntyessään, Finns say; ‘no one is born a smith’. Shocks of many kinds seem to call us not only to evaluate our own life decisions, but to seek compassion and express staunch solidarity with all oppressed, silenced, and tortured living individuals and populations. This is an age of runaway consumerism, climate catastrophe, techno-oligarchy[6], colonialism, genocide, and overall alienation from life itself. I feel that we are being tangibly called upon to restore our connection to nature, consciousness, history, humanity, and mystery. We are each being called upon to save one another and to heed the unknowable — with neither naïvety nor suspicion, but as a personal evocation, and an important key to understanding the logical, ethical, and practical solutions we so desperately need.

A lot of what I’ve here described feels relevant to me when asking what viewpoints might help sustain us through the Anthropocene (along with all flora, fauna, fungi, and minerals on the planet from which we are inseperable) and ease our current apocalyptic predicaments. I feel there is a wealth of wisdom and intelligence to be gleaned from the attunement enabled by gatherings such as the Heinävesi Ancient Week.

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I once again thank everyone involved in the thrilling wonder of the Ancient Week; and everyone who treasures and sanctifies life, and fun, and liberation.

May the haltijat be with you!

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[1] Etymology can broaden and brighten our (self-)conceptions. In a rather pleasing and cosmic coincidence, my name Kasper carries the literal meaning of “treasurer” or “keeper, protector of treasure” (which corresponds obliquely to Fin. haltija). The name originates from the now extinct Old Median language, spoken in the Levant in antiquity; ganǰabarah became Classical Persian ganjūr, which begat Aramaic (and generally Semitic) gizbar, which went on to become the apocryphal name (Caspar, Kaspar) of one of the Magi who visited the newborn Christ after following a comet from afar. Magus is roughly equivalent to Finnish tietäjä. My surname Salonen means “(from) a wilderness” or “a woody island”; which makes me, by and large, a “guardian of the forest”.

[2] In 2026, as luck would have it, my family friend Pertti Koistinen’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures adorned the same space in which we held concerts and seminars. ‘Pera’ is a family friend, a soft-spoken professor and diverse artist, whose career and publications on politics and culture are deeply important works of social anthropology. His vocal support of Palestine is also something that inspires me and helps me also use my voice, as much as I’m able, to confront and counteract all supremacy inflicted on civilian populations. I thank Pertti very much indeed for also letting me crash at his home in Tampere, where I rebooted myself in his basement sauna directly before I travelled to Heinävesi that same year.

[3] With most excellent thanks to the lovely gents who so expertly and tirelessly hauled and utilized their equipment through all terrains; Carlos Norton, Vasco Ribeiro, Patrick McGinley, musician Salman Rafique, et al.

[4] Related phenomena are mesmerism, suggestion, and hypnotism.

[5] Among all the arts it is storytelling, song, and poetry in their myriad forms that allow for endless verbal morphing and emotive linguistic consciousness.

[6] I personally boycott all artificial intelligence, without exception, and none was used to write this text (despite all the em dashes and overly florid vocabulary!).