Yambe-akka
Yambe-akka EuropeLiterally, ‘old woman of the dead’. In Lapp mythology she had charge of the underworld, which appears to have been imagined as a similar place to the world, except that the departed spirits walked on air. Prior to the advent of Christianity, death does not seem to have severed the bond of union between spirit and body, and Siryan tradition relates how, while a person slept, the spirit could emerge in the form of a mouse. So the souls of the departed sometimes assumed other animals, birds, or insects. A frequent choice was the butterfly, flitting through the sunlit clearings of the northern forests during the short months of summer.
Lapps buried their dead attired for a long journey. Birch-bark shoes were the traditional footwear, and in the grave of an old man they would put a staff for him to lean on. Clothes and ornaments were always heaped on the coffin of a maiden in the belief that men who had died unmarried were likely to...
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