Book excerpt: The Finns are a wonderfully simple nation, living in perfect touch and harmony with Nature. The old Finns clothed their perceptions of the world in a garland of sublime poetry. The Kalevala is more than 3,000 years old: it dates from the time when the Finnish tribes lived far south of their present home, probably on the Black Sea or the Caspian. The Finns are related to the peoples now settled on the tablelands of Tibet and Central Asia and stand to the Slavonian nations in the same mystical relation as the magicians and sorcerers of Thessaly stood to the rest of the Hellenes. In Russian folklore, Finn is almost a synonym of magician. Their cosmogonic myths and allegories are faithful echoes of the Dhyani-Chohans of the Secret Doctrine, a sublime radiation of Celestial Beings and fountainhead of humanity — formless on the plane of pure subjectivity — and their less spiritual emanations as they descend in the darkness of objectivity. Their beautiful duck corresponds exactly to Kalahamsa, the Swan out of Time and Space, convertible into the Swan in Time and Space of the Secret Doctrine.