Category Archives: Estonia

SS. Raphael, Gabriel, and the Trumpet

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Statues of the four archangels at the Church of the Transfiguration (“Little Church Around the Corner”) in New York City: Uriel holds the book, Gabriel the lily, Michael the sword, and Raphael the fish. Read the history of the Little Church here.

The Archangel Raphael is said to be the angel always ready to blow the trumpet to announce the General Resurrection and the End of Time, according to Islam. Christians, on the other hand, expect the Archangel Gabriel to be the one who will blow the trumpet on the Last Day to announce the General Resurrection and Judgement.

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

(1 Thess. 4:16)

A statue of Gabriel, often depicted with the lily which is associated with the Mother of God (because he brought the Good News of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin), is frequently found atop the roof at the east end of churches already blowing the trumpet. It is always Gabriel’s job to announce; he is the “announcer” of God.

We are told in the Old Testament to blow a trumpet to celebrate the New Year (Leviticus 23:24) or to announce a fast (Joel 2:15). Trumpets announce the coming of God as king and call the people to get ready to greet him. In the New Testament, trumpets announce the arrival of God’s judgement and call the people to turn their lives around (“repent”) in order to face the coming judgement. That is why Gabriel blows the trumpet atop a church: to announce the End that comes during the celebration of the Eucharist on the altar below the statue’s feet.

The most famous trumpets in the Bible are the seven trumpets blown in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 8-11). Angels blow the first six trumpets to call sinners on Earth to repentance. Each trumpet blast brings a plague, each one more disastrous than the one before it. The trumpet is used to build anticipation and tells the reader that an alert, announcement, or warning is about to take place. The seventh trumpet does not bring a plague with it. Instead, an angel blows the seventh trumpet to announce the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom.

How did Raphael get associated with the trumpet in Islam? Islamic folklore says that Raphael was the first of the archangels to be created and that he visited Mohammed even before the archangel Gabriel came to reveal the Qur’an. The Islamic folktales also say that Raphael is a master of music, who sings praises to God in a thousand different languages. It is probably this association with music that results in Raphael being given the honor of blowing the trumpet.

We never read explicitly in the New Testament that Gabriel is the archangel that will blow the trumpet on Judgement Day. I think we have come to expect him to do this precisely because he is God’s “announcer,” who announced the meaning of Daniel’s visions to the prophet (Daniel 8-9) and the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zachary as well as the birth of Christ to the Mother of God. So we expect him to announce the End of Time and the General Resurrection as well.

But the association of Gabriel with the trumpet can only be dated with certainty to the 1300s: the earliest known identification of Gabriel as the trumpeter comes in John Wycliffe’s 1382 tract, De Ecclesiæ Dominio. In the year 1455, there is an illustration in an Armenian manuscript showing Gabriel sounding his trumpet as the dead climb out of their graves. Two centuries later, Gabriel is identified as the trumpeter, in John Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667).

New Review for STORM WOLF

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New review of STORM WOLF:

“This is both a historical novel and a werewolf novel, and the combination is intriguingly like the experience of reading Dracula. The connection to Eastern Europe myths and legends gives this additional interest, and the portrayal of the setting, the prominence of the forest and field and superstitions, was well-done.

“My grandmother was Lithuanian, so I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the townspeople’s rituals and traditions. The contrast between the different countries was interesting and described with vigor and color. The action scenes were also done well and vividly….

“The characterization was really intriguing. Alexei was a deep character, doomed by his fatal flaw of wanting more and more experience and power, and suffering for it for years to come. I found myself sympathizing with him as he really was exploited, even if he at some level brought it on himself.

“Good work! The use of the old legends and suspicions really energized and individualized the story.”
(comments by a Judge, 4th Annual Self-Published e-Book Awards)

Read more about STORM WOLF!

Why Estonia?

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The historic old town of Estonia's capital Tallinn is included in Unesco's World Heritage List. (Photo from the BBC.)

The historic old town of Estonia’s capital Tallinn is included in Unesco’s World Heritage List. (Photo from the BBC.)

Estonia? Where is it? Who has even heard of it?! Why set a story there, of all the places that you might possibly set a story?

It just so happens that Estonia, although little known to non-Estonians, has a fascinating although difficult-to-trace heritage of folklore and legends that set it apart from not only its Baltic neighbors (Latvia, Lithuania, Russia) but from almost everywhere else; traditional beliefs and practices survived in Estonia for much longer than in other regions of Europe. These traditional Estonian legends and folklore were primarily handed down via oral tradition until very recently; there were occasional references to Estonian beliefs and stories but no systematic attempt to write collect these and write them down until the 19th century. (The Brothers Grimm made their collection of stories, etc. almost 100 years before that.)

I picked up a book one day about folklore as I was researching another project and found a brief reference to the Estonian version of werewolf folklore: in Estonia, werewolves could fly and would drive away the storms that would otherwise devastate the farms and destroy the crops, resulting in starvation when winter came. They killed storm clouds and ate weather devils, not their neighbors. Because of this, werewolves were heroes, not monsters. I was shocked: Werewolves were the Good Guys?!

Because they were heroes, everyone in a village or district knew who the local werewolf was. It was an honored position. (The only other place that had an even slightly similar version of werewolf folklore is a small Italian region northeast of Venice where the werewolves are called “good walkers” and drive away witches that attempt to destroy the crops.) Estonian werewolves were so unlike their more commonly known cousins in other parts of Europe that it almost seems a shame to characterize them all with the same moniker as “werewolves.”

This distinctly Estonian version of flying heroic werewolf folklore set off fireworks in my imagination! Werewolves as heroes? In a traditional pre-modern, non-ironic culture?! This was too good an opportunity to pass by! I grabbed it and Alexei, my werewolf in 1880s Estonia, was born.

Read more about Alexei’s adventures as a werewolf in Estonia in Storm Wolf.