Risala: Ibn Fadlan's Account of the Rus. Finnish paganism. The elk is a common image in many Finnish petroglyphs Finnish paganism shows many similarities with the religious practices of neighbouring cultures, such as Germanic, Norse and Baltic paganism.
However, it has some distinct differences due to the Uralic and Finnic culture of the region. Finnish paganism provided the inspiration for a contemporary pagan movement Suomenusko (Finnish: Finnish faith), which is an attempt to reconstruct the old religion of the Finns. Deities[edit] The Finnish pagans were polytheistic, believing in a number of different deities.
Proto-Indo-European religion. Proto-Indo-European religion is the hypothesized religion of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) peoples based on the existence of similarities among the deities, religious practices and mythologies of the Indo-European peoples.
Reconstruction of the hypotheses below is based on linguistic evidence using the comparative method. Archaeological evidence is difficult to match to any specific culture in the period of early Indo-European culture in the Chalcolithic.[1] Other approaches to Indo-European mythology are possible, most notably the trifunctional hypothesis of Georges Dumézil.[2] Pantheon[edit] Linguists are able to reconstruct the names of some deities in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) from many types of sources. Some of the proposed deity names are more readily accepted among scholars than others.[3]