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Paganism in Early Modern Lithuania and Prussia

Posted on September 6, 2020October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“My aim is to move beyond the perception that Lithuanian paganism is a matter of interest only to Lithuanians, and to show that this extraordinary pagan faith matters to the religious history of Europe as a whole.”

– Dr Francis Young

Every age has had its relic-hunters, those who, propelled forward into untracked territory by “dreams, aerial voices, and ancient lays”, reached back across the shifting sands of time and raised up from their sunless resting places the storied wonders and wisdom of the past. It’s an Atlantis impulse to which many have happily succumbed, but in the nineteenth century it was the American journalist and litterateur Charles Godfrey Leland who attempted to find a real, living pagan tradition in the Italian countryside.

Retiring with his wife to a small apartment in Florence, Leland immersed himself in what he termed an “atmosphere of witchcraft”. Befriending a number of local folk magic practitioners, and aided by several colleagues and assistants, he assembled as much evidence as he could find on the lasting pagan practices of the ancient Etruscans. In his Etruscan Roman Remains in the Popular Tradition (1892), Leland wrote that in going to live “among the shadows”, he penetrated into “an obscure and strange forest” inhabited by witches, goblins, and faded gods. From his researches and inventive pen emerged the seminal witchcraft text, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899).

Excerpt from Etruscan Roman Remains

Roughly twenty years later, the erudite historian and archaeologist Margaret Murray proposed her own hypothesis, which went much further than Leland’s. In her groundbreaking book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe Witch Cult (1921), she argued for the existence of a “Dianic cult”, a unitary religion of Western Europe that could be traced back to pre-Christian times. Murray was confident that the continuity of the cult was proved by “references to it in the classical authors, the ecclesiastical laws, and other legal and historical records”. Nevertheless, her thesis, while attractive and immensely influential, was immediately contested and later discredited by her scholarly peers.

Today Dr Francis Young has, in a way, taken up Murray’s mantle and resumed the search for the secrets of Europe’s last remaining pagans. Young is an early modern historian and the author of fourteen books on a variety of topics ranging from local folklore to political magic. Set to be released in 2022, his latest book, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-century Ethnographic Accounts of Baltic Paganism, is a deep dive, not into black-letter expositions and fabulations of Christian magicians, but into the less studied traditions of pagans in Lithuania and Prussia. “I’m interested in the history of paganism in post-Classical Europe,” said Young in a Twitter post, “so Lithuania is a natural place to end up.” 

Paganism in Lithuania was curiously–and perhaps preternaturally– resilient. Notably, it persisted in the wilder regions of the Baltic state until the eighteenth century. For this reason, as Young has pointed out, descriptive texts by contemporary observers of its key rites and mores might be the “closest we can ever get to encountering an ancestral European paganism as an unbroken tradition”.

The Thinker’s Garden caught up with Young to learn more.

 A pagan priest with his caprine offering. Image from Libellus de sacrificiis et idolatria veterum Borussorum (1551) by Jan Malecki

The Custodian: Why and when did you first begin to take an interest in Lithuanian paganism?

Francis Young: I first encountered Lithuanian culture as a teenager and have been fascinated by it ever since. I was interested in languages, so the Lithuanian language first caught my interest as a survival of a very primitive stratum of Indo-European. I then became aware of Lithuanian paganism through Lithuanian folklore, which is extraordinarily rich and full of pagan elements. More recently, I turned in earnest to the study of Baltic paganism because I was becoming increasingly interested in the debate about pagan survivals in medieval Europe, but found few English-speaking scholars who were actively researching paganism in those countries we know to have preserved their ancestral faith into modern times – namely the Baltic states.

Since I already had a knowledge of Lithuania (and some familiarity with the Lithuanian language), advancing the study of Baltic paganism in English-speaking literature seemed the next logical step. My aim is to move beyond the perception that Lithuanian paganism is a matter of interest only to Lithuanians, and to show that this extraordinary pagan faith matters to the religious history of Europe as a whole.

King Minduagas, Lithuania’s first king

C: You’ve said before that in the thirteenth century Lithuanian paganism actually started to “imitate” Christianity. Could you elaborate more on what you meant?

FY: When King Mindaugas, Lithuania’s first king and its first ruler to convert to Christianity, was overthrown and assassinated in 1263 the attempt to introduce Christianity to Lithuania died with him. However, his successors retained many of the trappings of Mindaugas’s regime. The elaborate court ceremonial of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania imitated Constantinople – with the difference that it was pagan – while Grand Duke Gediminas converted the cathedral built by Mindaugas in Vilnius into a temple with a perpetual fire (it became a cathedral again in 1386, and is there to this day). Mindaugas’s successors rejected his Christianity, but they saw an advantage in a state religion, which seems to have honoured the thunder god Perkunas. Gediminas seems to have seen himself as a successor of ancient Rome, and the ‘iron wolf’ that became a symbol of Vilnius may be linked to Rome’s Capitoline wolf.

C: Were there any Christians at the time who converted to paganism in order to gain political power and influence?

FY: We don’t really know for certain whether this happened or not, but some of the surnames of the families recorded as pagan by the Polish writer Jan Lasicki in 1582 are Christian Ruthenian (i.e. Belarusian) names (such as Mikhailovich), suggesting some Ruthenians may have converted to paganism in order to assimilate within the Lithuanian elite. However, Lithuanian princes also routinely converted to Orthodoxy in order to gain the confidence of the Orthodox principalities they acquired, so it was a two-way street. The medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a religiously fluid place where pagans, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews and Tatar Muslims co-existed in relative harmony.

C: You’ve described the Liber Viginti Artium as “Poland-Lithuania’s most dangerous book”. Did this work incorporate any rituals or elements from Lithuanian or Baltic pagan practices?

FY: Not really; the rituals of Baltic paganism were not written down by their practitioners as Baltic pagan cultures were not literate, and there was no crossover (as far as I’ve been able to determine) between popular paganism and learned magical traditions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When rituals were described or written down, it was either by hostile Christian missionaries or by curious humanist writers who wanted to understand Baltic culture.

C: What’s the most interesting or bizzare ritual you’ve come across so far in your Lithuanian studies?

FY: One particularly bizarre ritual involves mixing excrement with milk which is then given to the barstukai (gnome-like household spirits) in order to drive them away. The ritual is particularly odd because its purpose is to stop the barstukai enriching the family by producing miraculous gold. Like many cultures, the Lithuanians feared the social imbalance and instability created by sudden wealth, and so took extreme measures to drive away gold-bringing gnomes.

Want more stories? Check out our spin-off project, Godfrey’s Almanack.

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