Of note, I think, is that small tomb, which looks so very Scandinavian (images of the Kalevala come to mind).
Lacking a premodern tradition, how are we as Americans to repristinate Orthodoxy the way the Finnish have? We need a new myth to integrate the heterogenous, heteronomous, fused but unalloyed elements in our own American "melting pot" (which frankly melts nothing, but seems to corrode quite a bit).
The English did this properly, I think. After the Norman invasion they needed a new myth, which came in the form of the Arthur cycle to fuse native Brythonic (Celtic), Anglo-Saxon and Norman influences and populations swirling about in the culture. What was needed was a new synthesis to be found before the occasions for alien elements to intrude. Once the new Arthurian synthesis was retrojected into the past, it became possible to domesticate the two intrusions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans into a stable trunk which was perceived to be there all along. The Arthurian synthesis needed to work with pre-existing material, though, and couldn't simply manufacture things ex-nihilo. People needed to recognize it as something ancient, something old, something that was their own. Indeed, all of the populations needed to recognize it as their own history.
Something like this was what happened with the two Creation stories in Genesis (1:1-2:3 and 2:4-3:24 or 4:26). There were "original man" stories, as we see in Ezekiel (the oldest one of its kind in the Hebrew bible), but they were different than the ones that developed in the Exile, and which come to us in the forms we have in the first four chapters of Genesis.
Our "democratic" secular modernity tries to integrate populations differently - not with a tradition, but with a context of privatization and commodification of elements incapable of easy social management by a centralized administration or the dynamics of a free market. The commodification of these elements is also a transformation of them, so that they lose their original context and content, and become something else. I suppose you could say that it is a tradition of amnesia.
Of course, there are two problems - one of a rupture with the past in terms of our own cultural memory, the other is that there is no public, no polis or community that does not define itself by the terms that the cultural dynamics give to it. Unless the Orthodox Catholic Church in America can recover herself as a polis, an ethnos (not a phyla, an ethnic enclave, but a people and a nation and a city unto herself), then she cannot repair any cultural memory, for traditions such as the Arthur cycle need a concrete, historical people in which to be embedded as the memory of the history and way of life of this people. Otherwise it is simply more grist for the postmodern free-interpretation-according-to-my-own-accidentally-arranged-subjectivity mill.
