The Forest-Mistress and the Bear

In the hunting prayers Mielikki is often the more actively addressed of the forest pair, the emanta, the mistress of the household of the woods, who decides whether the game is given. If she is pleased she appears richly dressed in gold and silver and the hunt prospers; if slighted she shows herself ragged and the woods withhold their beasts. She is also a keeper of healing herbs and of the forest's wounded creatures, which ties her to the deep Finnic and wider Finno-Ugric reverence for the bear, the forest's king.

The bear-hunt was ringed with ceremony, the karhunpeijaiset, the great feast at which the killed bear was honoured, apologised to, and its bones and skull returned to the forest so that it might be reborn, precisely because to kill the forest's noblest animal was to touch the vaki Mielikki and Tapio guarded. Her domain is the whole moral economy of taking life from the wild and answering for it.