

For thousands of years, the only evidence we had of their religion was from the Torah and the Bible, where they are a constant enemy of the Israelites. In a weird twist for such a manly god, Ukko’s sacred animal was said to be the ladybug, and it was known as “Ukko’s cow.”Īlso unnamed, this was the religion of the Canaanites, natives of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. He shared a few common traits with the Norse god Thor, namely a magic hammer, and thunderstorms were said to be caused when Ukko slept with his wife Akka. The main god of the religion was Ukko, the sky and thunder god, and his feast day, held on April 4, was one of the most important dates in their calendar. Finnish pagans were intertwined with nature and they thought the world was created from the egg of a diving duck.

The Finns also put great stock in the power of words and thought that both animate and inanimate objects had souls. Evolving from shamanism, it shared a number of features, including ancestor veneration, with neighboring religions. 10Finnish PaganismĪ polytheistic religion without a name, Finnish paganism was the indigenous religion of Finland until it was Christianized. The religions on this list were all founded before most of the main religions of today (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam) and most of them have completely died out-although some are being revived by new practitioners. Most have faded away, their temples and statues vanished or half-sunk in the desert sand, their gods barely remembered. The ancient world was home to a huge variety of religions and belief systems.
