Balts

Baltic religion is reconstructed from three uneven bodies of evidence: the reports of chroniclers and missionaries hostile to it, the records of church and court prosecutions, and an enormous corpus of folk song, the Latvian dainas among them, collected from the nineteenth century onward. Endre Bojtar's cultural history is careful about what that mixture can and cannot support, and the atlas follows him in treating the reconstruction as partial.

What is reasonably clear is a sky god, Dievas in Lithuanian and Dievs in Latvian, whose name is the direct inheritance of the Indo-European word for god and who appears in the songs as a farmer walking his fields. Beside him stands a thunder god, Perkunas or Perkons, whose name is cognate with other Indo-European thunderers and who is associated with the oak, and a female earth power, Zemyna or Zemes mate, who receives the first and the last of anything taken from the ground. Laima, who allots fate at birth, and the sun, Saule, drive much of the song material.

Worship was conducted in groves and at particular oaks, springs and stones rather than in built temples, and the perpetual fire tended at Vilnius before the conversion is the detail the chroniclers return to most often. Because the sanctuary was a place rather than a building, its suppression required the felling of trees, which is what those accounts describe.

Lithuania was the last state in Europe to accept Christianity, formally in 1387 for the Lithuanian core and in the following generation for Samogitia, and it did so under a specific pressure. The Teutonic Order held a papal licence to make war on pagans, so remaining pagan meant permanent crusade. Grand Duke Jogaila's baptism came as part of the dynastic union with Poland.

Further north the sequence was earlier and harsher. The Livonian crusade of the thirteenth century subdued the Latvian and Estonian territories by conquest, and the Old Prussians were conquered by the Teutonic Order across the same period and eventually ceased to exist as a distinct people, their language dying out by the early eighteenth century with only catechisms and a few word lists surviving. Marija Gimbutas's survey of the archaeology traces the material culture behind those names.

Late conversion left an unusually rich folk inheritance, and the nineteenth century national movements built on it. In the twentieth century that inheritance was organised into modern religions, Dievturiba in Latvia from the 1920s and Romuva in Lithuania, both suppressed under Soviet rule and both active again today. Romuva's application for state recognition became the subject of a European Court of Human Rights judgment in 2021. These are contemporary movements working from the collected songs rather than unbroken transmissions, and they describe themselves in those terms.