Luleå River Sámi Biei've Niila bull-roarer cave narrative

Source term: bull-roarer

At the cave the Sámi called Basseuk'sa, "Holy Doorway," and Ganiiuk'sa, "Spirit Doorway" — a 25-metre-wide opening on the Tarrekaise mountain above the Small Lule River, one of the most renowned sacred places of the Sámi — a man remembered as Biei've ("Sun") Niila would go to the left side of the entrance and whirl a bull-roarer around his head. The sound, Lars Pirak told the ethnographer Bo Sommarström in 1986, was "similar to bird wings," and it came back as an echo "after two hours" from the unknown depths of the interior; a relative of Pirak's had inherited the instrument. The cave's principal deity was described in the seventeenth century as a stone in the shape of a "large bird," and other sieidi stones here were offered fat, bones, and reindeer antlers. It may have been the gadnihah, "the small people below," who answered the questions Niila put into the dark.

rites de passage at a hole for shamanic journeys in the Middle Worlds where spirits appear close to the surface

Sommarström 1987:214 (caption to Fig. 2)

Particulars

Function

Sacred-site bull-roarer narrative connected with a bird-shaped sieidi stone, cave, echo, and the mythic saivo world.