IN 1589, the German traveller Johann David Wunderer visited Samogitia, in the west of modern-day Lithuania. What he found there disturbed him greatly: the local people, he claimed, “live like wild animals, without faith or religion, and they not only worship animals and monstrous snakes, but by diabolical arts they change themselves and take the appearance of wolves and bears”.
Such shocking behaviour was not, this devout Calvinist felt, appropriate for a Christian country — which Lithuania had officially been since 1387, when Grand Duke Jogaila ordered the destruction of Vilnius’s temple to the thunder god Perkunas, and organised group baptisms. This mass-conversion event marked, at least in theory, the completion of the Christianisation of Europe. And yet, as Wunderer discovered, pre-Christian beliefs and practices persisted in Europe’s peripheral regions for many centuries after they had supposedly been eradicated.
In Silence of the Gods, the historian and folklorist Francis Young painstakingly pieces together the fragmentary evidence for such beliefs to build a wide-ranging (if somewhat formulaic and inevitably incomplete) picture of religion in North-Eastern Europe between the Middle Ages and the 19th century. Most of the inhabitants of these remote regions were not, he suggests, truly pagan; instead, they practised creolised religions that combined Christian elements with traditional rituals. Many had been baptised, and some attended church. But the depth of their faith was (often justifiably) doubted by outsiders, whose views were heavily influenced by lurid tales of human sacrifice, sexual deviance, and snake worship.
Consequently, although Europe’s unchristianised people were few in number, geographically scattered, and mostly powerless, their existence was deeply troubling to the Christian majority. Many were converted (or at least introduced to Christianity) by missionaries, although the long-term impact of such efforts was undermined by a lack of resources and personnel. In 17th-century Latvia, one elderly man claimed that his people had reverted to the tree worship of their ancestors because they were “wretched and destitute of all the Word of God and of priests” and needed some form of protection.
Inevitably, Europe’s pre-Christians were also subject to violence and persecution. Medieval popes endorsed crusades in Prussia and the Baltic States, and early-modern witch-hunters targeted Sámi shamans such as Guivi Baardsen, who was burnt at the stake in 1627 for raising a storm to sink a fishing boat. In the 18th century, forced conversion was a favoured weapon of the expansionist Russian state, which gave conquered populations the choice of baptism or death.
Thanks in part to such hostile environments, most of these religious minorities died out by the early 19th century, vanishing even as interest in pre-Christian religion flourished. Unfortunately, Young argues, this neo-paganism owed more to contemporary imaginings than to ancient traditions, and created the inaccurate, though hugely influential, myth of a united pagan religion driven underground by Christianity. The reality — a world in which belief was diverse, changeable, and often neither straightforwardly Christian or Pagan — is far more intriguing, and raises big questions about faith, religious identity, and the challenges of religious coexistence, which remain relevant in today’s complex world.
Dr Katherine Harvey is Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Silence of the Gods: The untold history of Europe’s last pagan peoples
Francis Young
CUP £25
(978-1-009-58657-3)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
