Suomenusko: The Contemporary Revival

Finnish Paganism as an organised present-day religion, often called Suomenusko, "Finnish faith," or Suomenusko/Karhun kansa, is a modern reconstructionist movement, and its dates belong to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not to antiquity. Practitioners draw on the Kalevala, on the Kanteletar and the collected folk poetry, and on scholarship about pre-Christian Finnic belief to reconstruct a nature-centred practice honouring Ukko, the forest and water spirits and the ancestors.

In Finland the group Karhun kansa ("the People of the Bear") was officially registered as a religious community in 2013, a concrete marker of the revival's modern, legally recognised form. As with the Baltic case, the honest description is of a living reconstruction founded on genuine tradition rather than of an unbroken pagan lineage, and the movement's adherents generally present it in exactly those terms.