Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Every great mythology hides one object it refuses to explain. The Greeks had their Golden Fleece, the Celts their cauldron of rebirth, the Grail romances their vessel of inexhaustible grace. The Finns—that reticent people of lake, birch, and long darkness—possess the most enigmatic treasure of them all: the Sampo , forged in a single night of smithcraft, fought over across the whole arc of the Kalevala , and shattered at sea before anyone, in the poem or out of it, managed to say plainly what it was. The Sampo grinds. That much the runes agree upon. From one side it grinds grain, from another salt, from the third money—one binful to eat, one to sell, one to store at home. It is abundance itself given a body of metal, and its lid is a lid of many colors, kirjokansi , a word the singers also used for the star-strewn vault of heaven. Hold that detail; it is the key to the whole mystery. The Forging in the Night of Pohjola The tale begins, as Finnish tales so often do, with a man in tro...