The Nine Diseases of Lowyatar

The Nine Diseases of Lowyatar is an episode of supernatural illness and healing: Lowyatar gives birth to nine disease-bearing children, sickness spreads through Wainola, and Wainamoinen counters it with balsams and enchantment. The episode traces affliction to a named supernatural source, then sets the old singer’s healing authority against the children’s power to sicken a whole community.

Birth and Origin of the Diseases

The episode identifies Lowyatar as the blind daughter of Tuoni and describes her as an old, wicked witch and one of the most fearsome women of the Death-land. Her blindness and parentage place the diseases at the threshold of the living and the dead: they are not presented as ordinary misfortune, but as offspring of a figure associated with Tuoni’s realm.

Lowyatar is delivered of her burden and lays her children in a cradle beneath golden covers. Their birth takes place on a summer evening, an exact seasonal and temporal detail that contrasts with the suffering they will bring. The verse likens her care for what she has made to an artist’s love for the work fashioned by skilled hands; the image makes the children at once her creations and the objects of her attention.

She names the offspring as diseases, including Colic, Pleurisy, Fever, Ulcer, Plague, and Consumption. The account names these six but does not identify the remaining three in the available passage. Their purpose is stated directly: they are to bewitch the lowland people and engender strife and envy. Illness therefore operates on two levels in the episode, harming bodies while also threatening the social order.

Dispersal and the Outbreak

Louhi, hostess of Pohyola, banishes the other children to a fog-point in the ocean. The account gives this act as part of the movement from Lowyatar’s birth scene toward the diseases’ impact on the human world, without elaborating on the children’s identities or on the reason for their banishment. The ocean’s fog-bound point marks a remote destination, set against the inhabited places the sickness will reach.

The outbreak is described as broad and indiscriminate. Maidens of Wainola fall sick, but so do the young and the old, men and heroes; the passage emphasizes that no age or social standing protects the people. Alongside the worst diseases are new and nameless afflictions, so the danger exceeds the handful of illnesses specified in Lowyatar’s naming. Wainola is described as sick and dying, turning a supernatural birth into a crisis for an entire community.

Wainamoinen’s Healing

Wainamoinen hastens to rescue his people. His response joins action to knowledge: he is presented as a wise and wonderful enchanter, and later as an eternal wisdom-singer. The episode thus makes healing part of the same mastery through which he acts as a singer and enchanter, rather than treating the illness as a danger that can be met by force alone.

At the close of his healing words, Wainamoinen rubs the sufferers with balsams. This concrete treatment follows the incantatory address, bringing spoken power and physical care together in a single intervention. The passage also gives his words a temporal reach: they are directed against the diseases’ return at evening and their appearance in the morning light. The cure is therefore not only the relief of present sufferers but an attempt to prevent sickness from rising again.

Expulsion and Significance

The ending confirms that Wainamoinen expels the nine diseases. His final formula sets a boundary around Kalevala, invoking the moonlit lakes of the land as the limit beyond which the illnesses must not return. The episode closes with removal rather than negotiation: the diseases that Lowyatar’s children brought into the human world are driven away by the enchanter’s command.

The structure turns on a sharp reversal. Lowyatar’s children are created and named with purpose, and their bewitching power spreads until Wainola is sick and dying; Wainamoinen then answers their threat with healing, balsams, and expulsion. By giving the outbreak a supernatural genealogy and the cure a singer’s verbal force, the episode presents illness as something that can be traced to an origin and confronted through knowledge expressed in song. Its close restores the community not by erasing the danger from the story, but by making the diseases’ departure the decisive act.