Baltic

The Baltic peoples were the last in Europe to be Christianised, and that late date is the reason there is any pantheon to describe. Lithuania converted formally at the end of the fourteenth century, which means the crusading chronicles were describing a functioning pagan religion rather than reconstructing a vanished one.

What they describe is thinly structured. Dievas is the sky god, and the name is itself the inherited Indo-European word for god, which argues for antiquity. Perkunas, the thunderer, dominates the later folk material by a wide margin, and which of the two headed the pre-Christian cult is genuinely disputed. Below them, a scatter of figures attached to the sun, the moon, the earth, fate, fire and the household, several of them known chiefly from lists compiled by churchmen.

The strongest impression the material gives is of a religion of place and household rather than of temple and priesthood. Sacred groves, particular trees, stones, springs and a fire kept burning recur constantly in the sources, and it is the destruction of these that the chronicles record.

The sanctuary called Romuva, named by Peter of Dusburg as the seat of a chief priest, has never been located and its existence as described is doubted.

The tradition did not simply stop. Folk practice persisted alongside Christianity for centuries, and Romuva today is a recognised religious community in Lithuania.

Three layers of evidence exist for Baltic religion and none of them is disinterested.

The first is the chronicles of the crusade, the Chronicon terrae Prussiae of Peter of Dusburg foremost among them. They were written by the Teutonic Order and its associates to justify a war of conquest fought as a mission, and a pagan religion with priests and sanctuaries is exactly what such a text needs to describe.

The second is the visitation and confession records of the Jesuit and Lutheran churches from the sixteenth century onward, produced as clergy investigated what their nominally Christian parishioners were still doing. These are unusually valuable, because they record specific practices at specific farms rather than a general account, and because they were compiled by people who wanted to know accurately what they were suppressing. They also list god names that appear nowhere else, some of which may be misunderstandings of local usage.

The third is folk song, above all the Latvian dainas, of which hundreds of thousands were collected in the nineteenth century. They are formulaic, deeply archaic in places, and full of the sun, the moon, the thunder and the god of the sky, and they were also collected during a national awakening that had reasons to find an ancient religion in them.

Archaeology and place names supply the check, and it is the layer most likely to yield something new.