An ecomyth: Rewriting and living the Kaleva’s Nine diseases and sampo

Eco + Mythology
Eco from oikos: home, household.
Myth from mythos: story, narrative.
Logy from logos: knowledge, deep inquiry.

Eco+Mythology is the art and practice of creating new stories, ceremonies, and rituals calibrated to the needs, challenges, and resources of our time. We live in an era marked by accelerating climate change and overlapping social and health crises, like loneliness, addiction, burnout, violence, erasure of biocultural heritage, intergenerational trauma.

These may well be the “Nine Diseases” of the 21st century. These observations led to some questions:

• What kinds of stories can hold us now?
• What rituals might help us metabolize grief, shame, and ecological loss?
• What ceremonies could restore belonging … in our bodies, our neighborhoods, our watersheds?

Calibrating the Old Stories to new needs

Some months ago, as part of a Finnish funding application, some of us (Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri, Katriina Kilpi, Anika Spindelmann, Sage Borgmästars, Liene Jurgelane and I) reimagined a perhaps outdated story of the Kalevala, the Finnish epic.

In the Kalevala, compiled in the 19th century from oral poetry, Louhi is depicted as the Mistress of the North, powerful, cunning, and often cast as an antagonist. Yet by re-reading and reimagining through an ecofeminist lens, Louhi is a witch, shapeshifter, and sovereign of nature’s chaos, whose demonization reflects a broader pattern in which powerful women, associated with ecological traditional knowledge and non-linear cosmologies, were reframed as threats during the rise of patriarchal and industrial modernity that promotes monocultural knowledge and fights diversity.

The same can be done for Loviatar, the mother of the Nine Diseases, whose dark femininity might also provide recipes and practices for coping with destructive stories surrounding us. In this funding proposal,  we saw Louhi and Loviatar, as both mythic companions and conceptual figures through whom to explore inherited wounds and emerging afflictions of our time, the so-called Nine Diseases. In the Kalevala, the Ninth Disease is an Unnamed Son, and we played with this further in our funding proposal writing, to keep a space open for the unnamed, the unknown yet in this journey.

Where to root our project?  Pohjola, as a liminal space rather than a fixed end-stage This ecomythological framework would let us travel to Pohjola, a land mentioned in the Kalevala. Rudolf Steiner viewed the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, as a source of ancient spiritual knowledge, asserting that it reflected a clairvoyant memory of humanity’s descent into the physical body and a time of a more “soul-like” consciousness (Rudolf Steiner Archive, 2025).

• Is Pohjola Hyperborea, a mythical, utopian land located in the far north of the known world in ancient Greek legend, where there is eternal youth and everyone is healthy (whatever health means)?
• Is Pohjola a land with healthy (or healing) forests and humans?

Finns still refer to themselves as living in Pohjola, the place in the north (pohjoinen = north as a direction).  While spinning this project, we playfully probed questions of Finnishness, heritage, and home, drawn to the ephemeral Pohjola of the Kalevala.

What and where is Pohjola, especially for those called “Finnish” who do not live within today’s Finland?

We did not win the funding call, but that does not stop us to work out more prototypes for ecomythologies and find other ways to fund it.

A new sampo

The Sampo is a mysterious artefact, forged by the blacksmith Ilmarinen for Louhi, the Queen of the North. We also worked out what could be the sampo or the medicine. We saw it as a cauldron, a vessel, as spaces, sanctuaries, and moments of encounter to co-create and test this sampo with others, human and forest alike. Referring to Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory, the cauldron is a tool for gathering what already exists among us.

From stone soup to soil soup

In our first Eco+Mythology online symposium, already a month ago, we retold the Stone Soup story. But we replaced the stone. Instead of a male traveler, we imagined a feminine medicine woman. Instead of a stone, she brought a cauldron and sampled soil. The sampo.

In our gatherings, online and physical, we bring the cauldron, you bring the ingredients.

The cauldron may be:

• a well-designed Miro board
• an ethical framework
• a science-informed practice
• a shared budget with transparency
• an meeting invitation with a clear agenda and objectives

It is a structure. Not a rigid structure, but it is a structure. Structure does not suffocate creativity. Structure creates safety… and structure allows people who need safety to also participate in co-creation.

wounded Village feelings in the 21st century

As an answer to the observation of the Nine Diseases, we want to rebuild “village feelings”, in cities as much as in forests. We want to move from catch-up friends to hang-out friends to do-it-with-others friends (DIWO instead of hyper-individual DIY culture).

We are exploring how to create both online and local village, spaces where ritual can be prototyped, tested, repeated, adapted. Not grand spectacles, but small recurring acts, like:

• monthly picnics
• seasonal potlucks
• shared walks
• story circles
• micro-ceremonies

Repetition builds trust and trust builds belonging. Of course, we need to be not too naive, and of course, also design care-fully the care structures and rituals. Villages are messy. Conflicts and miscommunications happen. And that is ok, but you need care (infra)structures for mediation, negotiation and conflict solving. We are also finetuning our workflows for building and maintaining structures (of the sampo or cauldron).

From Online Symposium to Ritual Prototyping

In winter 2026, under the umbrella of Nordic Summer University, we organized our first online Eco+Mythology symposium, gathering voices from around the Baltic Sea, especially Poland and Latvia.

The response was clear: We need more of this.

And we also need to go deeper. Our own critical reflection? Root more strongly in place. Partner with local NGOs and projects. Do land-based work.
Support pioneers who can host small, recurring rituals with courage and patience.

So we are developing a dyad model:

1. An online symposium, which is open and accessible, for both listeners and co-creators from the whole world, who want to learn more about the place and/or the ecomythology methodology.
2. A physical ritual prototyping event 

Or in other words: the cauldron during the online event, the soil under our feet during the offline ritual prototyping.

We just started to brainstorm, but it seems that we will be able to test out this prototype in Dublin and with people interested in co-creating Irish ecomythologies, in spring-summer 2026.

If this resonates with you, as storyteller, as an investor who want to explore the prototypes with us, a scholar, ritualist, designer, caregiver, or curious participant, we would love to hear from you.

The cauldron is warming. What ingredients will you bring?

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