At some point in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Lutheran pastor of Metirkviečiai (today a village in Lithuania, but then in Lithuania Minor on the Prussian side of the border) witnessed a sacrifice to the thunder god Perkūnas. Led by a vaidilutis (priest), the people of the parish went in procession to a large oak tree where there was a stone and a long pole from which the skin of a he-goat, flowers, and spikes of grain were hanging. A vessel containing some kind of drink stood on the stone. A woman in ceremonial dress suddenly appeared and poured a libation from the vessel onto the stone, before the vaidilutis drank from it and thanked the god for food and shelter. At this point the young people of the parish began to dance around the pole, but they stopped abruptly when the vaidilutis began another prayer. He drank from the vessel again, touched the pole, and removed the goatskin from it. Putting on the goatskin, he distributed grain to all the worshippers, before they all sat down around him as he spoke about the Baltic religion and mentioned Žemyna (the goddess of the earth) and Perkūnas.Footnote ¹

We do not know how much effort the pastor of Metirkviečiai put into stopping these proceedings – it was his job, after all, to ensure his parishioners worshipped only the Christian God. But he found them sufficiently interesting to report them to his friend Matthäus Prätorius, who recorded the eyewitness testimony in his book Deliciae Prussicae (‘Prussian Delights’). Prätorius belonged to a new breed of scholar who was largely a product of the seventeenth century: the antiquary, interested in the past for its own sake, with an indiscriminate (at times) hunger for relics of the past. Building on the curiosity of the ethnographers who came before them, the antiquarians went beyond mere speculation about the origins of peoples and sought to engage more fully with the present-day realities of life at the edge of Christendom and with the material culture of the last unchristianised peoples. This is good news for the historian, since although Prätorius himself was a Baltic German and did not share the culture of the Prussians and Lithuanians, he was fascinated by the apparent antiquity of their customs and eager to record them.

But the development of antiquarianism was just one aspect of the changes that convulsed northern and eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. The ‘Grand Siècle’ was an era of burgeoning absolutism and the beginnings of the nation state. In both Catholic and Protestant nations, church and state worked together to bring into line peoples who deviated from accepted standards of religious belief and practice, or who spoke languages different from those of the ruling elite. At one extreme of this process of state centralisation and normalisation lay colonisation, ethnic cleansing, witch-hunting, and even genocide. At the other extreme lay antiquarianism, the benign (but nevertheless patronising) face of an unprecedented expansion of the state into people’s everyday lives.

The seventeenth century saw the near collapse of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the aggressive expansion of Sweden, while Russia too began to flex its imperial muscles. Millions died from war and its consequences in Poland–Lithuania, while Europe’s remaining unchristianised peoples (especially under Scandinavian rule in Sápmi and Livonia) found themselves under intense scrutiny of two kinds. As interest in detecting and extirpating witchcraft grew and spread to Europe’s margins, traces of pre-Christian religion aroused the interest and suspicion of magistrates and witch-hunters, and the contested question of whether attachment to pre-Christian religious practices could define a person as a witch determined the fate of many. But while some in seventeenth-century Europe were determined to cast the remaining unchristianised peoples as witches worthy only of extirpation, the emphasis of both missionaries and antiquarians on ‘stupidity’ and ‘errors’ in their accounts of deviant religious practices in Sápmi and the Baltic could also make space for a more sympathetic (if condescending) hermeneutic in their approach to unchristianised peoples. The idea that remote rural people could not be blamed for their ignorance of the Christian faith – and indeed that any blame attached to the church itself – is a recurring one in early modern literature. This chapter examines the two dominant themes in Christian engagement with unchristianised peoples in seventeenth-century Europe – the fear of witchcraft and the curiosity of antiquaries – before examining how these themes were manifested in the three regions where unchristianised peoples were still be found in this period: Sápmi, the eastern Baltic, and European Russia.

Gods of the Witches?

In the seventeenth century, trends of demonisation of pre-Christian religion that had begun in the previous century came to a head, in an intensification of persecution of unchristianised peoples in regions that were coming under ever tighter central control. While the medieval church had routinely condemned ‘superstition’ and brought people to trial in ecclesiastical courts, these had been for misdemeanours for which the church usually had no authority to impose lethal penalties. But the Reformation brought many of the former judicial functions of the church within the purview of the emerging early modern state and made lethal persecution much easier than in previous centuries. At the same time, anxiety about diabolism intensified in this period, putting at risk those who engaged in popular religious practices or practised syncretic or creolised faiths. It was not difficult to interpret ‘paganism’ as diabolism – and, indeed, for most Christian theologians, pagan worship was axiomatically the worship of demons. However, whether manifestations of pre-Christian religion were treated as witchcraft varied greatly according to region in this period. For example, while witchcraft and paganism were rarely associated in Lithuania – and the persecution of pagans as witches formed no part of central or regional government policy – the mere existence of Sámi shamanism was routinely interpreted as witchcraft, diffusing a widespread cultural stereotype of ‘Lapland’ as the home of witchcraft (Plate 11).

Plate 11 The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches by Henry Fuseli (oil on canvas, 1796), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The reasons for the surge in witch trials in seventeenth-century Europe are extensively debated by historians, and they lie beyond the scope of this study. What concerns us here is the extent to which witchcraft became a hermeneutical paradigm for pre-Christian religion at Europe’s unchristianised margins in the seventeenth century. Antiquarian interest in pre-Christian religion, missionary activity, and persecuting unchristianised peoples were by no means mutually exclusive interests. Petrus Bång (1633–1696), Lutheran bishop of Vyborg, combined all three; as the author of Priscorum Sveo-Gothorum ecclesia (‘The Church of the Ancient Sweo-Goths’, 1675) he was an avid collector of antiquities, but on a missionary journey to Savonia in eastern Finland he was horrified to find that the local people were still worshipping ‘their old god Kekri’ on All Souls’ Day. Rather than responding pastorally, he alerted the secular authorities so that they could suppress the custom by force.Footnote ²

Similarly, the Latvian Lutheran missionary Paul Einhorn combined antiquarian interest in Latvian religion with an eager desire to suppress it, and judging from their frequent use of Classical analogies in describing it, some Jesuit missionaries in Lithuania were also fascinated by the traces of paganism they encountered. Yet they still cut down sacred trees and removed sacred rocks whenever they had the opportunity. While it might seem paradoxical to us, and alien to a contemporary sensibility to eagerly destroy what one finds culturally interesting, this was not so in the seventeenth century. Christian antiquarians (especially antiquarians who were missionaries) genuinely wanted to understand as much as they could about pre-Christian cultures, so that they could better purge them of idolatry. The imperative of curiosity and the imperative of destruction, seemingly in tension, were in reality two sides of the same coin.

The Antiquarians

Angus Vine has described early modern antiquarianism as ‘a dynamic, recuperative, resurrective response to the past’ that was grounded in the power of the imagination. But while antiquaries in the Mediterranean, France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles pondered the legacy of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians, the antiquaries of Europe’s northern and eastern margins rapidly came up against the challenge of understanding the legacies of pre-literate, pre-Christian cultures whose living representatives, in some cases, still lingered at the fringes of the realm. The antiquarian project thus merged with the ethnographic one, rendering the study of antiquities simultaneously the study of cultural ‘living fossils’ like the Sámi and the unchristianised Lithuanians. The antiquarian’s indiscriminate appetite for relics of the past came into its own at Europe’s unchristianised edge, regions with little or no history in the conventional sense, where Rome’s reach had never extended. This absence of written history only intensified the antiquarians’ eagerness to recover a lost past, and to draw on material culture, ethnographic study, and oral testimony in order to do so. If the antiquarian ‘is so familiar with past customs and traditions that he sees the past as if it were the present’,Footnote ³ then the opposite was also true; antiquarians discerned the distant past in present-day popular and creolised religion among the imperfectly Christianised peoples of Europe’s north and east.

Unlike the mythographers of the Italian Renaissance, whose exhaustive studies of the genealogies of obsolete Graeco-Roman pagan deities could be dismissed as ‘nothing but a form of idle play’ in comparison with serious arts and sciences,Footnote ⁴ the ethnographer-antiquarians of regions where paganism was still a living reality could justifiably claim the study of pre-Christian religion was important for advancing mission. The strength of the antiquarians was their eclectic range of methodologies, which included the gathering of ‘popular antiquities’ from oral testimony,Footnote ⁵ something the classicising ethnographers of the Renaissance would hardly have attempted. Martin Mulsow has argued that seventeenth-century antiquarians increasingly treated the history of religions as a kind of natural history, building a proto-anthropology that was distant from the condemnatory anti-pagan rhetoric of earlier authors.Footnote ⁶ Antiquarians such as Vincenzo Cartari (c. 1531–1590) began to move away from the view of the Church Fathers that idolatry arose from the deceptions of demons and towards the idea that certain habits of worship – such as the adoration of celestial bodies – were indeed natural to human beings.Footnote ⁷

The early modern antiquarian was a stridently modern figure who was willing to augment the authority of the ancients by direct experience of antiquities. Brian Copenhaver has argued that a key factor in the transition from the early modern to the contemporary world was the breakdown of the ‘reflexive deference to antiquity’ that had hitherto ensured that scholarship remained essentially a philological activity.Footnote ⁸ Before the ‘empirical turn’ of the late seventeenth century, scholarship resembled a closed loop of textual reception where new information was added primarily from other textual sources in an atmosphere of deference to ancient works as well as more recent learned authors as ‘authorities’. But some early modern scholars began to introduce genuinely new information from fieldwork and empirical experimentation, disrupting the deferential, authority-centred hermeneutics of the Renaissance by including first-hand testimony and fieldwork alongside received wisdom. Thus Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia (1673) could be said to differ qualitatively from Olaus Magnus’s History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Neither author actually visited Sápmi. But whereas Olaus Magnus relied mainly on pre-existing textual authorities and represented a synthesis of everything hitherto written about the Sámi, Schefferus’s groundbreaking innovation was to systematically cultivate informants in and from Sápmi in order to produce the most complete ethnographic work possible.Footnote ⁹ Crucially, he did not privilege the wisdom of the ancients over the reports of contemporaneous missionaries.

Sápmi: The End of Drum-Time

As we have seen, the centrality of shamanism to Sámi religious practice – and, in particular, the shamanic trance of the noaidi – led external observers to view Sámi religion as a kind of witchcraft or sorcery, rather than as mere idolatry. This was a hermeneutical choice with potentially lethal consequences, as persecution of people accused of witchcraft intensified in the seventeenth century. The Sámi were, to some, an entire nation of witches. In 1609 a royal proclamation imposed capital punishment for sorcery throughout Denmark–Norway, with a particular focus on the Sámi noaidi, although the actual number of noaididi put to death for witchcraft was low. Instead, the authorities often targeted Norwegian women who were said to have learnt sorcery from the Sámi. Between 1593 and 1695 twenty-seven Sámi were accused of sorcery in Finnmark; however, not everyone accused was convicted, and not everyone convicted was executed. One person put to death who was certainly a noaidi was Guivi Baardsen from near Alta, who was accused of magically raising a storm to sink a fishing boat and burnt at the stake in 1627.Footnote ¹⁰

The fact that the Norwegian authorities were focussed on the idea that witches were usually women, yet only a man could be a noaidi among the Sámi, may have contributed to a fairly low level of executions – although the difficulties of magistrates reaching Sápmi was also undoubtedly a factor. However, because drums played a crucial role in Sámi shamanic practices, the suppression of Sámi ‘witchcraft’ could be accomplished by the confiscation of drums – an activity that blurred the lines between religious persecution and antiquarianism, since such drums were sought after by collectors of curiosities. Seventy-one of these drums are still known to be in existence.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, the best known of the witchcraft trials in Sápmi was focussed on a drum. This was the trial of Anders Povelsen at Vadsø in February 1692; he was accused of being in possession of and using a ritual drum (Plate 12). Povelsen had been born in Torne lappmark in Sweden, but moved to Nordlandene and Finnmark in Norway, before eventually ending up in Varanger. The accusations against Povelsen came from the Sámi themselves – perhaps because his practices differed from accepted ritual practices within their community, and perhaps even because Povelsen risked exposing Sámi ways.Footnote ¹²

Plate 12 Replica of Anders Povelsen’s rune drum in the Sámi Museum at Karasjok, Norway.

© Alamy.

The Povelsen case is particularly revealing for the study of Sámi religion because the shaman was interrogated in detail about his drum and the meaning of the figures drawn on it – many of which had Christian significance. By the seventeenth century most Sámi under Danish and Swedish jurisdiction seem to have been content with a ‘Christianesque’ creole religion which accommodated Christian practices and symbols while perpetuating traditional Sámi ways. The Sámi supposedly identified or replaced the goddess Sáráhkká with the Virgin Mary,Footnote ¹³ and baptism seems to have become integrated into a creolised Sámi belief system, with the Sámi reportedly baptising their children with the name of an ancestor. However, if the wrong name was chosen, the ancestor would torment the child until the correct name was given, so Sámi children would sometimes be baptised several times – a practice forbidden, of course, from the point of view of Christian theology.Footnote ¹⁴ People seeking health or a cure for themselves or others, and good luck in hunting, began to sacrifice at churches rather than at pre-Christian sacred sites in this period.Footnote ¹⁵

Povelsen reported that his drum featured Sámi deities such as the hammer-wielding thunder god Dierpmis, the goddesses Maddarakka and Sáráhkká, and animals such as wild reindeer. Much of the imagery, however, was related in some way to Christianity (or a Sámi understanding of Christianity), including ‘God’s son’ (Raedienbaernie) and ‘God the Father’ (Radien-attje), a church, St Anne (misidentified as Mary’s sister rather than her mother), the Virgin Mary, the ‘Christmas men’ (the Sámi conceived of the twelve days of Christmas as supernatural beings), and a cathedral.Footnote ¹⁶ Povelsen’s drum was a visual testament to a creole Sámi religion that was neither straightforwardly pre-Christian Sámi religion nor orthodox Christianity; nor was it an artefact of mere syncretism, where Christian religious figures cloaked or replaced Sámi ones in a process of one-to-one equivalence, since the Sámi’s own idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity introduced wholly new figures such as the Christmas people. As it turned out, Anders Povelsen was murdered by an axe-wielding killer before he could be sentenced to death and executed, but the following year, in 1693, another noaidi, Anders Nilsson, was burnt at the stake at Arjeplog in Sweden. Nilsson had been found sacrificing to Sámi gods and attacked the Lutheran pastor who tried to deprive him of his drum.Footnote ¹⁷

In the end, the Lutheran kingdoms of Scandinavia chose not to grapple with Sámi religion through mass executions for witchcraft, but via the mass confiscation of ritual drums – ‘the end of drum-time’, as the Swedish historian Håkon Rydving called it.Footnote ¹⁸ As we have seen, this was as much an ethnographic as a judicial project, and it fuelled scholarly interest in the Sámi. By the late seventeenth century, the Sámi were the objects of intense ethnographic and antiquarian interest owing to the efforts of the German-Swedish scholar Johann Scheffer (1621–1679), who is generally known by his Latinised name Johannes Schefferus. Schefferus was a German who was born in Strasbourg but became a professor at Uppsala University in 1648, remaining in Sweden until his death. It is possible that Schefferus’s non-Scandinavian origins meant that he had not imbibed deep-seated prejudices against the Sámi from his earliest years, allowing him to approach this northernmost region with an attitude of wonder rather than horror. Schefferus’s Latin book on Sápmi and the Sámi, Lapponia (1673), was comprehensive enough to maintain its authoritative status throughout the eighteenth century and was quickly translated into multiple European languages.Footnote ¹⁹

However, Schefferus did not write Lapponia on his own initiative but at the behest of the Swedish government, rendering the book a political act. On 6 February 1671, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (1622–1686), Lord High Chancellor of Sweden (Plate 13), wrote to the Antikvitetskollegium (College of Antiquaries) in Stockholm suggesting that one of the antiquaries turn his attention to a history of Sápmi and the Sámi:

Plate 13 Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (1622–1686) by Hendrik Munnichhoven after David Beck (oil on canvas), National Portrait Gallery of Sweden.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

De la Gardie’s three points of curiosity about Sápmi each had political significance. Situating Sápmi within the context of the knowledge of the ancients lent prestige to Sweden as a realm with an ancient pedigree, while the possibility that Sápmi was a place where cosmic phenomena could be studied at high northern latitudes intersected with the Swedish elite’s desire to be at the forefront of natural philosophy. Furthermore, a thorough and accurate description of the life and customs of the Sámi would vindicate Swedish efforts to convert and ‘civilise’ these people. However, it was De la Gardie’s fourth reason for wanting an account of Sápmi that was the most politically sensitive of all, as it related to the rumour (which spread during the Thirty Years’ War) that the Swedish army’s astonishing success in conquering large parts of northern Europe was down to the employment of Sámi ‘witches’ and ‘sorcerers’ in the army.Footnote ²¹ This was a rumour that even had an impact on the English Civil War, since Parliamentarian pamphleteers alleged that the Royalist leader Prince Rupert owed his victories to the assistance of his dog, Boy, who was really a witch from Lapland in canine form.Footnote ²²

Clearly, allegations of this kind were an embarrassment to a Lutheran kingdom seeking to present itself as a godly bulwark of Protestant Christendom and it was up to whoever took up De la Gardie’s challenge to set the record straight. What this meant, however, was delving deeply into Sámi religion and setting aside the accumulated rumour and hearsay of previous centuries. Accordingly, Schefferus dedicated around a quarter of Lapponia to the subject of Sámi religion and belief (93 of 378 pages), across five chapters. Chapter VII dealt with ‘the first religion of the Lapps’ – that is, their pre-Christian beliefs,Footnote ²³ while chapter VIII examined the ‘second religion’ of the Sámi, Christianity.Footnote ²⁴ The subject of chapter IX was ‘the many relics of paganism among the Lapps at this time’,Footnote ²⁵ while chapter X dealt with ‘the pagan gods of the Lapps, and their cult today’.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, chapter XI examined ‘the magical rites and magic of the Lapps’.Footnote ²⁷

Schefferus was careful to make a distinction between the pre-Christian religion of the Sámi ‘as it now is’ and ‘how it was before [Sápmi] began to hear the Christian faith’,Footnote ²⁸ thereby acknowledging (at least implicitly) that seventeenth-century Sámi religion was partly a creation of contact with Christianity. Indeed, Schefferus believed certain elements of Sámi religion, such as the offering of sacrifices to Juhlii in boats around Christmas time, derived from a debased understanding of Christianity – since the boats were a memory of missionaries who brought Christianity, and knowledge of Christ’s birth, to Sápmi from the sea.Footnote ²⁹

Schefferus believed that, in all probability, the Sámi religion derived from a religion once common to all the Finnic peoples, but since nothing remained of pre-Christian Finnish religion this was difficult to prove.Footnote ³⁰ He also noted that all the textual sources for Sámi religion post-dated the Christian era: ‘Nothing is read, except what pertains to the time of the Christian religion, and the superstition which even now endures among them.’Footnote ³¹ For Schefferus the religion of the Sámi encountered in his own time was not, therefore, really a religion at all, but mere ‘superstition’. Schefferus played up the impact of Christianity on the Sámi, while acknowledging that relics of paganism survived.Footnote ³² It served the purpose of Lapponia (as a book refuting the myth that Sweden exploited Sámi magic in warfare) to emphasise the extensive efforts to convert the Sámi; but Schefferus also had to explain how and why many of the Sámi remained unchristianised. Schefferus portrayed the Sámi not as totally unchristianised heathens, but rather as a people poorly instructed in the faith who sometimes simulated Christianity because they had failed to internalise it:

Schefferus’s historiography of the Christianisation of Sápmi was grounded in a Scandinavian Lutheran understanding of ecclesiastical authority where the king was the centre of the kingdom’s Christian life and the clergy merely servants (and sometimes bad servants) doing his will. Sápmi was imperfectly Christianised because it was so far from royal authority and it was difficult for the king to make his will felt there. While the kings were to be praised for their efforts at conversion, the corrupt clergy were to blame for the incompleteness of conversion, and Schefferus was not unsympathetic to the Sámi themselves. Indeed, by the standards of his time Schefferus had a sophisticated understanding of the problems of converting an Indigenous people, declaring that ‘The reasons why superstitions and impiety are taken away with such difficulty are truly multiple and varied.’Footnote ³⁴ Those reasons included the vast size of Sápmi, the rudimentary nature of ecclesiastical organisation, and the poor example of the clergy, with their financial exactions on a people already extremely poor.

Schefferus drew heavily on the writings of Samuel Rheen (c. 1615–1680), whose En kortt Relation om Lapparnes Lefwarne och Sedher (‘A Short Account of the Lappish Way of Life and Customs’, 1671) was based on his ministry at Jokkmokk and Råneå. However, Schefferus’s decision to write in Latin rather than Swedish ensured that Lapponia reached a large learned audience far beyond Rheen’s work. Schefferus distinguished Sámi customs that were merely ‘superstitious’ (superstitiosa) from those that were ‘impious and pagan’ (impia et paganica);Footnote ³⁵ thus, for example, the observance of days as lucky or unlucky was merely superstitious, whereas the offering of sacrifice to pagan deities was impious. So, for example, the Sámi abstained from all activity (including hunting) on St Catherine’s Day (25 November) and St Mark’s Day (25 April). Like other early modern writers, Schefferus struggled to make sense of Sámi animism, drawing on Roman mythology in an effort to explain it:

Here, however, the Latin language proved something of an obstacle, as Schefferus insisted on translating Rheen’s ‘trolls’ (intended to make sense of Sámi belief within the context of Swedish folklore) as daemonia, thus imposing a further layer of interpretation that obscured the true nature of Sámi belief. Schefferus admitted that it was natural enough for a people who spent around half the year in the polar darkness to worship the sun as a god,Footnote ³⁷ although he did not go as far as some Italian humanists in interpreting sun worship as a form of primitive monotheism.Footnote ³⁸ However, he mistakenly identified ‘Seita’ (sieidi) as a deity rather than a specific kind of sacred place or natural object.Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, Schefferus (or his correspondents) did understand the importance of sacred sites in the landscape of Sápmi and even provided a list of them.Footnote ⁴⁰ But just as he had struggled to understand animism, so Schefferus foundered somewhat when it came to describing Sámi shrines.Footnote ⁴¹ Pagans were supposed to worship anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic) idols, but the Sámi made little or no effort to make sieididi anthropomorphic because they are markers of the sacredness of a place in the landscape rather than ‘idols’ of the kind described in the Bible or Graeco-Roman literature.

When it came to Sámi rites of sacrifice, Schefferus relied on an ‘anonymous manuscript’ which not only described the rites but also gave the words sung by the people and officiants in the Sámi language:

This passage reveals two of the uses for drums in Sámi religion: as musical instruments and as a method of divination. As we have seen, the coding of Sámi religion as sorcery as far back as the twelfth century had a devastating impact on the way in which the Sámi were treated in Norway and the Swedish realm as well as on perceptions of them abroad. To a certain extent, Schefferus’s account of Sámi belief, more granular than anything that had come before, mitigated this perception. Schefferus offered a fairly nuanced account of the Sámi world of belief, highlighting not only the significance of Christianity but also the gradations of belief within Sámi popular religion, ranging from superstition and half-remembered Christianity to what Schefferus regarded as out-and-out idolatry. Furthermore, even this idolatry was distinct, in Schefferus’s mind, from Sámi magic – a separate practice that, while implicated in Sámi pre-Christian religion, was nevertheless not the same thing as that religion.

Schefferus’s new interpretative framework opened up the possibility that the Sámi might be guilty of idolatry or dissembling the Christian faith without, ipso facto, being witches – which was surely a positive development. It diminished the possibility that witch-hunting might take the place of missionary endeavours as the Swedish Crown’s response to the Sámi. On the other hand, however, Schefferus did nothing whatsoever to deny the reality of the Sámi practice of magic, not least because witchcraft was the only hermeneutic available to Schefferus to make sense of what we call shamanism: the trance state, spiritual sight, and spiritual journeying of the noaidi. Schefferus reported that women were excluded from Sámi sacred sites,Footnote ⁴³ and that no woman could touch a Sámi sacred drum.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is possible that the belief that women were excluded from Sámi religion may have contributed both to the persecution of Sámi men for witchcraft and, ironically, to the long-term survival of Sámi beliefs because they could be transmitted within the family with relative safety by women. While Schefferus repeated the usual authorities for the claim that the Sámi were great masters of the magical arts, he also relied on the recent (and then unpublished) writings of the Finnish clergyman Johannes Tornaeus (d. 1681) about the material culture of Sámi magic and divination – namely, Sámi drums.Footnote ⁴⁵

It was in its discussion of drums that Lapponia exceeded anything previously written about Sámi religion, because Schefferus actually collected material objects from Sápmi and therefore had Sámi drums in front of him as he wrote (which he had illustrated for Lapponia). For Schefferus’s project was not only textual but also museological: his private museum in Uppsala, the Museum Schefferianum, contained drums, sieididi, and other sacred items confiscated from the Sámi,Footnote ⁴⁶ and Schefferus began a Scandinavian mania for ‘collecting’ (or indeed stealing) Sámi sacred objects that lasted well into the twentieth century, making Sámi sacred objects a subject of active discussion and restitution in contemporary Scandinavian museology. But while Schefferus showed no compunction in condoning the confiscation of drums and did not attempt to interpret Sámi shamanism as anything other than witchcraft, he nevertheless treated the Sámi with some sympathy. He reminded his readers that the Sámi considered these practices absolutely necessary because they were constantly under threat from spiritual attack by others skilled in the same art, and that animal familiars were passed on in families (the belief that the Sámi had animal familiars may have been a confusion caused by the noaidi’s experience of inhabiting the bodies of different animals in trance).Footnote ⁴⁷ Abandoning shamanism was therefore, for the Sámi, rather like nuclear disarmament for modern nations: ostensibly unfeasible unless everyone agreed to do it at the same time, which was unlikely to happen. While this did not morally justify their practice of witchcraft, Schefferus believed that it should at least be put in context as something entrenched in Sámi culture which was hard to eradicate.

In typical humanist fashion, Schefferus was unwilling to abandon the testimonies of existing authors or to allow more recent and more reliable evidence to challenge them, preferring instead to build a more nuanced understanding of the Sámi on top of this existing base of authoritative knowledge. It would be an exaggeration to say that Schefferus discouraged witch-hunting against the Sámi – he was clear, after all, that the Sámi were indeed practising witchcraft – but he did a great deal to encourage curiosity, rather than mere hostility or hatred, as a response to Sámi culture and religion. He challenged the stereotype of the Sámi as witches in its crudest form, refuting the idea that all Sámi religion was mere witchcraft and that all the Sámi were idolatrous witches. Schefferus’s reputation was such that, as a Latin text accessible to scholars all over early modern Europe, Lapponia became the recognised authoritative text on Sápmi and its people throughout the eighteenth century. From being the objects of fear and loathing, the Sámi became exhibits in a metaphorical museum: curiosities of the far north who clung to long-obsolete superstitions and idolatries. Whether that was a better fate for the Sámi than being persecuted as witches is less clear.

Estonia: Impudent Blasphemy or Sub-Catholic Piety?

Between 1561 and 1721 northern Estonia was a duchy within the Swedish Empire, the Duchy of Estonia, while the southern part of Estonia remained part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until it, too, was conquered by Sweden in 1629 and became Swedish Livonia. The Estonian-speaking peasants of Estonia remained under the local rule of the Baltic German nobility, but Swedish officials sought to impose Swedish standards of government and Swedish Lutheranism. To the extent that Christianity was practised in Estonia at all, it took a highly individual and individualised form; in 1627 each peasant in the district of Tartu was said to have a chapel where he worshipped his own saint in his own way – apparently a Christianisation of the idea of the personal hiis or sacred grove.Footnote ⁴⁸

Arriving in Swedish Livonia in 1629, the regent Johan Skytte was alarmed by the prevalence of ‘repellent idolatry’, and it became a key aim of the Academia Gustaviana (University of Tartu), founded in 1632, to equip Lutheran pastors to convert the peasantry.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1637 the Livonian Consistory urged clergy to find out ‘whether the peasants still organized idol-worship … assembled on hillocks or in valleys, near chapels or chapel ruins to worship idols and sacrifice’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The mention of chapels is suggestive of an intent to extirpate the remains of popular Catholicism as well as paganism. The islanders of Saaremaa were particularly stubborn; a bishop conducting a visitation in 1647 found that ‘almost at every church some impudent elderly people knew nothing of Christianity and did not wish to learn it’, and refused to take communion.Footnote ⁵¹

It was not until 1667–8, however, that the Swedish Lutheran church carried out a complete visitation of Estonian parishes and found sacred groves and stones where people sacrificed in almost every locality. At the estate of Colonel Greifenspeer in the parish of Maarja-Magdaleena it was reported that local people performed sacrifices on Midsummer’s Eve for the benefit of the sick:

Those who had been healed were required to return in subsequent years with gifts of wax, either in the shape of a candle or a human figure, which was then burned on the stone. This Midsummer rite, interpreted by the Swedish authorities as pagan, is a good example of creolised religion, with elements from Christianity and (presumably) pre-Christian Estonian religion recombined in a harmonious whole. The rite took place on St John’s Eve (23 May), a Christian festival, and involved invocations of St John the Baptist, the sign of the cross, and votive practices (such as the offering of candles or wax images of an afflicted person) not dissimilar from anywhere else in the Catholic world. On the other hand, the rite was performed by women, was associated with a sacred stone, and involved the lighting of a sacred fire – the probable pre-Christian elements. Nevertheless, in contrast to the recidivists of Saaremaa there is no indication from the description of these rites that the people of Maarja-Magdaleena were actively hostile to Christianity. It would be more accurate to say that they had formulated their own version of Catholicism, perhaps in the absence of adequate catechetical instruction over centuries, which sufficiently resembled pre-Christian rites for the Lutheran clergy to be alarmed by it. But it is not obvious that the practices of these Estonian peasants were in any way consciously pagan; they were, rather, ‘sub-Catholic’ – popular Catholicism developing in isolation and therefore subject to deviance, distortion, and recombination with folk practices of pre-Christian origin.Footnote ⁵³

The ‘sub-Catholic’ theme recurs in the visitation of 1668. Peasants at Vastseliina ‘sacrificed’ on St Laurence’s Day; at Palamuse, it was on St Bartholomew’s Day. Elsewhere ‘sacrifices’ took place on the feast of the Assumption (15 August), while at Räpina it was Ascension Day. In northern Estonia peasants gathered at ruined chapels and hilltops on St Olaf’s Day, the Assumption, St Laurence’s Day, and St Anthony’s Day.Footnote ⁵⁴ At Kalkus, the visitors reported that an old peasant ‘offers bread and milk to the Sacrament, worships idols, keeps people away from church, and tells them to blame their calamities and illnesses on the church’Footnote ⁵⁵ – a strange combination of deviant devotion and hostility. But a more straightforward explanation for such paradoxical behaviour than outright rejection of Christianity is that the peasant was hostile to Lutheranism, hostile to the Swedes, and eager to maintain traditional sub-Catholic practices that he may have sincerely believed to be Christian. While Juhan Kahk has argued that some Estonian peasants in the seventeenth century still regarded Christianity as ‘an alien form of magic’, ridiculing the church and reviling anyone who took communion, it is not altogether clear that such reactions were very different from those of Catholics in early modern Lancashire who ‘blasphemed’ Protestant services of holy communion celebrated in their parish churches. Did seventeenth-century Estonians behave as they did because they were ‘pagans’, or because they preferred to consider themselves Catholics?

Juhan Kahk is surely right to reject the idea of a ‘revival of Catholicism’ among the peasantry in seventeenth-century Estonia, but it is not altogether satisfactory to explain away ‘sacrifices’ at ruined churches and chapels on the basis that these buildings had been erected at pre-Christian sacred sites.Footnote ⁵⁶ What the visitors of 1667–8 described as ‘sacrifices’ may have been the making of votive offerings to the Christian God and saints at holy places, while the Estonians’ attachment to ruined chapels was surely no different from popular devotion to ancient Christian holy places in post-Reformation Ireland. When visitors asked people why pre-Christian burial mounds were still in use in their parishes and why they did not bury the dead in consecrated ground in cemeteries, they received the response ‘Maria’s earth is everywhere.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Since we know that pre-Christian burial practices persisted throughout the medieval period in Estonia,Footnote ⁵⁸ it is hardly surprising that such traditions survived the Estonian reformation. But people clearly had their own, explicitly Christian, rationalisations for the perpetuation of pre-Christian burial practices – and, as David Petts has argued, burial practices are not a reliable guide to the Christianisation of a society.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even the visitors themselves implicitly avowed that what they had uncovered was more like Catholicism than paganism, since they were concerned that such superstitions inclined the people towards ‘the Papal faith’ and sympathy with Poland.Footnote ⁶⁰

Around 140 witchcraft trials took place in seventeenth-century Estonia, with men being accused of witchcraft almost twice as often as women. This seems to have been the pattern in Finnic cultures; in Finland and Sápmi, similarly, it was almost always men who were accused of witchcraft.Footnote ⁶¹ William Monter suggested this may have been caused by the linking of witchcraft with shamanism, which was a largely male activity.Footnote ⁶² Even under torture, Estonian suspects scarcely ever mentioned pacts with the devil or flights to the Sabbath, speaking instead of sorcerers, spirits, and werewolves.Footnote ⁶³ This was presumably because the demonology of mainstream European witch-hunting was entirely outside their conceptual world. While there were pagan elements in Estonian witch trials, however, it would be an exaggeration to say that Estonians were persecuted as witches because they were pagans. For instance, Aarne Ruben has argued that Pyrsa Martt, accused of witchcraft at Pärnu in 1641–2, may have sent devils to torment and kill Count Christian von Thurn because the latter strayed into a sacred forest or hiis.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, Ivar Paulson took the view that Haiki Jan, from Kanep parish, who was put on trial on 13 August 1632, may have made a sacrifice to thunder.Footnote ⁶⁵

A cult of thunder (or of a god of thunder, if such a distinction can be made) seems to have been a feature of pre-Christian Estonian religion. In 1644 Johann Gutslaff, pastor of Urvaste parish in Võrumaa, recorded a prayer to thunder, intended to avert storms that might destroy crops, that was recounted to him by the ‘thunder priest’ Vihtla Jürgen:

We should treat with some caution, however, Paulson’s suggestion that ritual sex was part of the placation of the thunder god Ukko in hilltop rituals recorded by seventeenth-century authors.Footnote ⁶⁷ Accusations of sexual immorality at unauthorised festive gatherings were a commonplace of pastoral writing and a means of further demonising pre-Christian practices.

By 1650 the Castellan’s Court of Tallinn was adopting a more nuanced approach than simply arresting idolaters for witchcraft, distinguishing five separate offences of varying severity within the crime of witchcraft. While those who made pacts with the devil were to be burnt to death, pre-Christian practices merited the least attention; those who engaged in ‘superstitions’ were to be imprisoned and admonished by a pastor.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, while the methods of bewitchment noted in trial records from Livonia belong to the world of popular magic and folklore, it is less clear that they have any special connection with pre-Christian religion. An exception is the importance of werewolves in Livonian witch trials. Several people confessed that they put on a wolfskin and transformed into a wolf, killing animals, and then hid their wolfskins under stones. In 1636 a woman from Kurna in Estonia confessed that an old woman had led her into the woods, fed her sweet roots, and turned her into a werewolf so they could hunt together.Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, Estonians also believed in the possibility of people transforming themselves into bears.Footnote ⁷⁰

Pre-Christian practices apparently remained strong at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1698, during the Great Northern War, peasants at Lääne-Nigula had to be threatened with dispersal by cavalry to stop them sacrificing at their traditional hill,Footnote ⁷¹ and the Lutheran pastor Christian Kelch recorded in the 1690s that the peasants continued to offer beer, milk, and food at a specific place in their houses and threw offerings into wells to bring rain.Footnote ⁷² In 1680 a figure of ‘Metsik’ was carried through the fields in Saaremaa in order to ensure fertility; this was about thirty inches long with a beard and hair made from flax, a wooden sword, and an oversized phallus. ‘Metsik’ (whose name meant ‘the wild one’ or ‘the one from the forest’) was then taken back to the forest and placed in a tree, perhaps signifying the priority of the forest and its deities as the source of fertility and sacred power.Footnote ⁷³

Prussia: Dying Embers

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Duchy of Prussia – the former Ordensstaat of the Teutonic Knights – was an autonomous Lutheran realm under Polish suzerainty, ruled by the Hohenzollern descendants of the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Duke Albert. In 1618, however, the Prussian Hohenzollerns died out in the male line, allowing their Hohenzollern cousins the Electors of Brandenburg to unite Brandenburg and Prussia in dynastic union – the beginnings of a new entity that would eventually become the kingdom of Prussia. In 1657 Prussia gained its independence from Polish suzerainty and Brandenburg–Prussia emerged as a major player in the geopolitics of east-central Europe. The University of Königsberg (the Albertina) was a major centre of learning in the region, and the key figures in the antiquarian investigation of Prussian religion in the seventeenth century were Christoph Hartknoch (1644–1687) and Matthäus Prätorius (c. 1635–c. 1704), both of whom were Lutherans (although Prätorius converted to Catholicism in 1701).

Prätorius’s German-language book Deliciae Prussicae (‘Delights of Prussia’) was not published in its entirety until the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁷⁴ and it was therefore Hartknoch’s Selectae dissertationes historicae de variis rebus Prussicis (‘Select Historical Treatises on Various Prussian Matters’, 1679), which Hartknoch also published in a German version, that came to influence learned understandings of Prussian religion the most. Hartknoch included chapters ‘On the Places Destined for Divine Worship among the Old Prussians’,Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘On the Three Greater Gods of the Old Prussians, Percunus, Picollo and Potrimpus’,Footnote ⁷⁶ ‘On Gods of the Second and Third Orders’,Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘On the Priests of the Old Prussians’,Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘On the Cult of the Gods among the Old Prussians’,Footnote ⁷⁹ and ‘On the Festival Days of the Old Prussians’,Footnote ⁸⁰ as well as chapters on Prussian marriage and funeral rites.Footnote ⁸¹ Hartknoch believed that ‘Sarmatian Europe’ (eastern Europe) had originally been evangelised by St Andrew the apostle, but later fell back into idolatry.Footnote ⁸² While Hartknoch treated the religion of the Old Prussians primarily as a thing of the past and drew heavily on earlier authors such as Peter of Duisburg, Simon Grunau, the Maleckis, and Erasmus Stella, he called particular attention to the fact that the Prussians still buried their dead with vessels of mead or beer.Footnote ⁸³

The work of Hartknoch and Prätorius reflected the mixed ethnic composition of Ducal Prussia; not only did the customs of the German-speaking elite and urban population of towns like Königsberg differ from those of the peasants, but the peasants themselves included Prussians, Sudovians, Nadruvians, and Lithuanians in the area of ‘Lithuania Minor’ (the easternmost part of Ducal Prussia, with a finger of land running up what is now the coast of Lithuania to the port of Klaipėda). Some of what Prätorius recorded therefore applies to Lithuanians rather than to Prussians, but he is usually considered a valuable source of information on pre-Christian Baltic religion in general. The German historian Michael Brauer has argued that the early modern Prussians were not pagans at all and that German-speaking commentators mistook Prussian festive culture for pre-Christian rites.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is certainly true that Prätorius sometimes invented non-existent pre-Christian Baltic cults by misinterpreting the evidence. For example, the cult of the owl deity Iwullis was in all likelihood little more than a series of superstitions connected with eagle-owls; Prätorius assumed, perhaps, that if superstitions existed there must have been a pagan cult behind themFootnote ⁸⁵ – a kind of seventeenth-century version of the twentieth-century ‘pagans under the bed’ mentality.

Although his eagerness to make an exhaustive record of gods led Prätorius into reliance on unreliable sources such as Simon Grunau, he also admitted that Prussian religion was essentially animistic, and indeed totemistic, suggesting that there were almost as many religions as there were unchristianised Prussians:

Prätorius recorded the continuity of the cult of Curche, the earliest recorded of all Baltic deities who received a mention in a treaty concluded between the Prussians and the Teutonic Order on 7 February 1249. Here the Prussians undertook not to sacrifice to effigies of Curche they carved once a year. Curche was taken up by Simon Grunau in the 1520s, who reported that Curche was a god of food borrowed by the Prussians from the Masurians. Prätorius noted the continued significance of a god named Gurcho among the Samogitians:

Rimantas Balsys argued that Prätorius built on the work of Jan Łasicki by assigning functions to gods mentioned – but not described in any detail – by Łasicki; but Prätorius generally did this on the basis of speculation rather than further ethnographic research. Thus, for example, Prätorius hypothesised a god of birch trees, Biržulis, in spite of the fact that there is no evidence the Balts worshipped gods of specific trees.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, Prätorius also recorded evidence of creole religion in Prussia, such as the mingling of libations to God, the Virgin Mary, and the Baltic goddess Laimė after the birth of a child among the Nadruvians.Footnote ⁸⁹

Prätorius offered a glimpse of the remnants of pre-Christian Prussian religion in the last phase of its existence; for instance, on one occasion he encountered an old man who informed him that many people in Nadruvia worshipped sacred trees containing a sacred fire. Prätorius asked him if these trees sheltered Perkūnas, and the man eventually replied that ‘Perkunus and Pykullis rule over them, and one should greatly fear all gods and not take away what belongs to them.’ When Prätorius asked if Pykullis was a god, the man seemed not to know, only shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘He does what he wants.’ Prätorius wondered if Pykullis was one and the same as Velnias, the devil: ‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘it is he, because he is free to do what he wants.’Footnote ⁹⁰ This exchange suggests that, by the late seventeenth century, practitioners of pre-Christian cults were often uncertain of the identity of the gods they worshipped and what sustained cults was the fear of not worshipping the god – a kind of residual ritual taboo.

Prätorius even witnessed some rites at first hand, recording that he saw wejones (sorcerers claiming to control the wind) at Nybudžiai in October 1648: ‘During wildfire it is possible to watch with astonishment, how easily the direction of the wind can be changed.’ He reported that some wejones could also enchant fire, invoking ‘the fire-angel’ (perhaps aitvaras): ‘When they address by name the fire-angel, they can command him not to do damage.’Footnote ⁹¹ Prätorius displayed the antiquarian spirit in his enthusiasm for exhaustive catalogues – such as two chapters dedicated to different types of sorcery and sorcerers found among the Prussians and Lithuanians.Footnote ⁹² However, as with deities, so with types of magical practitioner this antiquarian ‘sorting-mania’ could lead ethnographers astray, since it inclined them to think of every magical practice as distinct and performed by a different category of specialists, which led to a fragmented portrayal of Prussian culture.

Unlike the other unchristianised peoples discussed in this book, the Prussians were entirely assimilated into the German-speaking population of Prussia by the end of the seventeenth century, to the point that the Prussian language became extinct. The last Prussian-speakers may have succumbed to plague and famine in the period 1709–11, although the Germanised descendants of native Prussians lived in east Prussia until 1945. At that point the entire German-speaking population (as well as the Lithuanian-speaking population of Lithuania Minor) was killed, expelled, or forced to flee by the invading Red Army and replaced by Russian-speakers. Kaliningrad Oblast, as it is now known, remains an exclave of the Russian Federation surrounded by the territories of Poland and Lithuania.Footnote ⁹³

Latvia: Werewolves and Witches, Jesuits and Lutherans

For most of the seventeenth century, the territory of what is today Latvia was divided into three main jurisdictions. The city of Riga and its hinterland was part of Swedish Livonia from 1621, while the western and central part of the country constituted the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia under the rule of the Kettler family, and ultimately subject to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Meanwhile the east of Latvia (Latgale) was jointly ruled from Daugavpils by Poland and Lithuania as the Inflanty Voivodeship. The religious makeup of Latvia was correspondingly complex; Riga was under Catholic rule between 1582 and 1621 but then became a Swedish Lutheran city, while the Duchy of Courland was Lutheran in spite of forming part of the Catholic Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Inflanty Voivodeship, meanwhile, was theoretically Catholic but many of its people remained unchristianised. Both Catholic and Lutheran missionaries left a record of Latvian pre-Christian religion, most notably the Jesuits of Riga’s short-lived Jesuit college, which was closed by the Swedes in 1621.

Many of these Jesuit journeys were made into the inaccessible territory of Latgale, which was marshy and heavily forested. Joannes Stribingius, visiting the area of Rēzekne and Ludza in 1606, reported that it was only ‘with labour and weariness’ that the community’s ninety-year-old popus (‘priest’) could be made to confess he had long led pagan rites, and when the Jesuits asked the people to reject idolatry they replied ‘that their ancestors had thus done, and thus taught them; it was fitting, therefore, that they should trust in them like the old man’.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, this turned out to be not so much a stubborn rejection of Christianity as a last resort of people without pastoral provision. As one of the old men who assisted the popus confessed,

This intriguing testimony, if it is reliable, suggests that the Latgalians underwent Christianisation but then reverted to or revived a half-understood pre-Christian religion because they had no priests and no churches, and because trees and groves were near at hand as potential sites of worship. The religion of the Latgalians was thus a kind of re-enactment of what they thought their ancestors might have done, motivated by pastoral crisis, rather than a continuous tradition from the pre-Christian era. Furthermore, the people retained elements of Christianity: the popus not only led rites of sacrifice to sacred trees but also baptised the children of the community.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1608, Jesuits from the Jesuit college in Riga encountered a similar situation where a seventy-year-old man was baptising children, but used the incorrect formula ‘Receive the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The rarity of contact with priests imbued any object a priest had blessed with magical significance, and in 1615 the Riga Jesuits reported that ‘as many of the Latvians as the Estonians put their faith in blessed created things, which they obtained from their ancestors at around the time of their conversion from their hereditary paganism’, giving the example of the blessed boats and blessed nets used by fishermen.Footnote ⁹⁸

Nevertheless, some rites remained overtly pagan. Stribingius reported that people went into the forests to sacrifice ‘a black bull, a black hen, a black suckling pig to the god of fields and grain whom they call Dewing Cereklicing, together with several tuns of beer, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on how cheerful the god Cerekling makes them’. The sacrifices were followed by dancing around the trees.Footnote ⁹⁹ A few years later, in 1618, Jesuit missionaries made a similar report about a god they called Cerroklis: ‘Apart from other sacred things, they honour trees. They offer to them their gifts: men a black rooster under an oak tree, women a black hen under a linden tree. They also sacrifice the first bit of every meal and first draught of every drink to a god called Cerroklis’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Stribingius also reported that Latvians made offerings to a god of horses: ‘To the god of horses whom they call Deviņ ūšiņe every one of them individually sacrifices two shillings, two loaves of bread and a piece of fat by throwing them into the fire.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Tree worship sometimes involved climbing into natural holes inside or in the root systems of trees while praying for healthFootnote ¹⁰² – a practice not so very different from passing sick children through split ash trees in Britain, for example.

In contrast to Lithuania, where the Jesuits treated sorcery and witchcraft primarily as pastoral issues to be dealt with in the confessional, the Jesuits in Livonia found themselves involved in judicial proceedings against accused witches by hearing the confessions of people awaiting trial or execution. Elements of pre-Christian religion occasionally surface in witchcraft proceedings from Latvia; in 1699, for example, a woman was accused of witchcraft for making a goat meat broth and then pouring it out at a crossroads with the incantation, ‘Mother of Path should take the Mother of Lying [i.e. illness] far away to Russia’,Footnote ¹⁰³ which seems to be a fairly early reference to one of the many divine ‘mothers’ recorded in Latvian popular belief in the nineteenth century. However, the confessions received by the Riga Jesuits were not significantly different from the testimonies of women and men accused of witchcraft elsewhere in Europe, involving gatherings of witches for the Sabbath in order to worship the devil and receive instructions from him. According to one confession, witches gathered in Riga’s Lutheran cathedral on Christmas night in 1612, where the devil appeared dressed as a Lutheran clergyman but addressed the assembled witches in the Latvian language – a strange combination of the simultaneous demonisation of Lutheranism and the unchristianised Latvian peasantry.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In addition to witches, the Jesuits in Latvia also seem to have encountered people who confessed to being werewolves (or something similar). As the Riga Jesuits recorded in 1619, ‘There were found … not a few men who, fleeing in the manner of wild beasts into the woods, were carried with a wild force into the woods and groves, when any of them had given in to the strict bonds of liberty.’ The Jesuits prescribed blessed bread and holy water.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Paul Einhorn noted that there were two opinions on werewolves, with some holding that the person who became a werewolf projected their soul into the body of a wolf and others that people actually transformed themselves into wolves.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The most famous werewolf case from seventeenth-century Latvia, that of ‘Old Thiess’ of Kaltenbrun, which is the focus of a book by Carlo Ginsburg and Bruce Lincoln, hinged in part on the apparently pagan nature of one of the charms used by Thiess, who saw himself as ‘God’s werewolf’ and assumed his werewolf identity in his work as a local healer. Thiess’s invocation ‘Sun and moon go over the sea’ in several of his charms invoked celestial bodies like deities and not God, leading to Thiess’s sentence of flogging and banishment.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The Jesuits were by no means the only missionaries recording pre-Christian traditions in Latvia; the Lutheran missionary Paul Einhorn (d. 1655) made similarly valuable records, primarily from Courland. Einhorn published his Widerlegung der Abgötterei und Aberglaubens (‘Rebuttal of Idolatry and Superstition’) in 1627, followed by Reformatio gentis Letticae in Ducatu Curlandiae (‘The Reformation of the Latvian People in the Duchy of Courland’) in 1636. Einhorn was contemptuous of Latvian Christianity, such as it was, describing the Latvians as semi-Christiani and ethnico-Christiani – ‘ethnic Christians’ – for whom their inherited traditions mattered a great deal more than the faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Reformatio gentis Letticae, Einhorn set out his manifesto for the conversion of the Latvians from idolatry, blaming a famine in 1601 on God’s wrath against idolaters. Unlike the Jesuits, who concentrated on confession, exorcism, and giving people blessed objects like the Agnus Dei (a blessed wax image of the Lamb of God), Einhorn emphasised the need for preachers who would preach ‘most simply, from the word of God, for the captivation of their idiot hearers, that they should avoid idolatry and receive the Christian religion with their whole heart’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this way, Einhorn believed, ‘the relics of the vanities of the gentiles will be dissipated by the grace of God, and will be completely exterminated’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 1649, Einhorn’s masterpiece, Historia Lettica (‘History of Latvia’) provided the first history of the Latvian people, with several chapters devoted to the Latvians’ pre-Christian religion,Footnote ¹¹¹ and exemplified the early modern paradox of antiquarians dedicated to destroying the object of their study.

Lithuania and Samogitia: The Long Battle against Idolatry

The first half of the seventeenth century was a fairly stable period for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, united with Poland in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth under an elected grand duke. The Lithuanian nobility was by this time mostly polonised, although religious rifts between the Catholic and Calvinist nobility rumbled on. However, the Counter-Reformation was in full swing and was led by the Jesuits of Vilnius and other colleges, who travelled on mission into the remote countryside every summer in an effort to normalise the status of Lithuanian Catholicism. However, the size of the country and the absence of a functioning parish structure made the mission a rather thankless task, and by all accounts the Christianisation of the peasantry was as much of a challenge for the Lithuanian church at the end of the century as it had been at the start. However, one reason for this may have been the collapse of both ecclesiastical and civil authority in the middle years of the century as Lithuania suffered ‘The Deluge’ – a devastating invasion by Russian and Swedish troops. The second half of the seventeenth century was characterised by tentative recovery, but the ‘golden age’ of the Grand Duchy’s capacity to dominate east-central Europe had passed.

In 1600 the Jesuit college in Vilnius reported that forty-seven missions had been sent out into the countryside, lasting between a day and a week. These resulted in 1,700 confessions, the revival of abandoned fonts and the baptism of many infants, children, and adults, as well as the regularisation of marriages contracted without Christian rites. The Jesuits reported the sacrifice of a ram, suspiciously similar to the goat sacrifice described by Jan and Hieronim Malecki in their book about the Prussians and Sudovians, suggesting they may have lifted the details from the book rather than eyewitness testimony. They also reported women sacrificing chickens and the secret worship of stones called deyues in granaries, to which old women sacrificed a black sow. Old women also sacrificed chickens at riverbanks in order to ensure a safe crossing, while newborn children were dipped in rivers in thanks for the gods for their safe birth. According to the Jesuits, when the people saw the priests and students overturn and mock the deyues they joined in the desecration, astonished that they suffered no retribution from the gods.Footnote ¹¹² Another missionary travelling through Samogitia the following year reported something similar after destroying shrines in granaries, when he was followed by children smashing vessels used for libations shouting ‘Truly, worthless and stupid gods!’Footnote ¹¹³

In the fourth century, Maximus of Turin had denounced the covert worship of pagan gods in storehouses and granaries in northern Italy and Gaul,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and granaries remained a focus of folk belief concerning the activity of fairy-like beings in England into the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The missions in seventeenth-century Lithuania usually involved the cutting down of sacred trees,Footnote ¹¹⁶ the purification of granary shrines with holy water, and the setting up of crosses.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The feeding of ancestors at banquets held at burial sites was a recurrent complaint. Most of the cults, such as the worship of Dimstipatis and Pagyrnis, and the feeding of snakes, were domestic (and, to some extent, secret) in nature.Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, some religious practices were focussed on churches; a Vilnius synod held in 1602 reported that people threw chickens and other offerings onto the altars of churches on the church’s patronal feast,Footnote ¹¹⁹ while another report noted that people brought offerings to sacred groves and trees at Easter and Michaelmas,Footnote ¹²⁰ suggesting a complete merging of pre-Christian belief with half-understood Christianity. Similarly, the belief that no work should be done on the twelfth day of Christmas, condemned by the Jesuits in 1605, was not uncommon elsewhere in Christian Europe (although sometimes associated with Holy Innocents’ Day rather than Epiphany).Footnote ¹²¹

Much of the Jesuits’ work involved exorcisms. On one occasion in 1605, the priests exorcised a house where both the people and horses were plagued by spirits, but the old men of the household were concerned the spirits of the dead had been offended by the exorcism; they therefore made two holes in a beam and concealed two eggs as offerings to ‘the god of the earth’ and ‘the guardian of the dead’. These were discovered by the Jesuits, who smashed the eggs and exorcised the beam with holy water.Footnote ¹²² As in Latvia, the role of the popus was a matter of concern; in 1609 the Jesuits of Nyazvizh complained of ‘the inveterate negligence of the popi, who discharge almost the duties of priests’.Footnote ¹²³ The missionaries were still discovering new deities worshipped by the common people in the seventeenth century, such as Beaukuris, ‘guard of the crop’, first recorded in 1611.Footnote ¹²⁴ But there were some successes; a 1612 visitation of Rietavas proudly recorded that the clergy had persuaded people to bury their dead in the churchyard and not in the countryside.Footnote ¹²⁵

In contrast to the Jesuit annual letters, seventeenth-century visitations of the diocese of Vilnius undoubtedly played down the significance of pre-Christian religious practices. The 1605 visitation merely alluded to ‘superstitious people’, but focussed primarily on the ignorance of the clergy and the presence of ‘heretics’ (Calvinists) and Orthodox.Footnote ¹²⁶ The 1622 visitation made mention of the work of the Jesuits in learning the local language and teaching the faith to ‘rude country-dwellers’, implying ignorance of it.Footnote ¹²⁷ The absence of any mention of unchristianised people from these visitations, when Calvinists, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Tatars are frequently mentioned, is probably down to the fact that unchristianised Lithuanian-speakers were deemed to be Latin rite Catholics (however tenuously). Indeed, the Lithuanians agreed; as a Jesuit annual letter reported in 1602, the Lithuanians ‘were found to have done nothing other than seized upon the name of Catholic’.Footnote ¹²⁸

In 1625 the bishop of Samogitia made a visitation of his diocese which was greatly concerned with the problem of ‘heresy’ (Calvinism) but made no mention of pagan practices at all; the bishop simply noted that on account of the shortage of clergy ‘so many myriads of children die without baptism … the rest live without the nourishment of the Word of God and the sacraments’.Footnote ¹²⁹ The 1639 visitation described the population of Samogitia as good Catholics,Footnote ¹³⁰ although since ‘many old men and aged persons’ were baptised during the visitation, and several were delivered from ‘vexations of incubi and demons’ by confession, this seems not entirely to have been the case.Footnote ¹³¹ In the same year the missionary Jerzy Szawinski reported that

Szawinski went on to enumerate the veneration of žeminės (earth spirits), laukinės (field spirits), pagirnės (domestic spirits) living under rocks, and aitvarai,

Szawinski interpreted the festival of Ilgės in Samogitia, and Rudenės in Lithuania, as an attempt to placate these spirits. He noted that the spirits often burnt down people’s houses when they were neglected, but that people could be liberated from them by confession – which perhaps explains the reference to people being delivered from demons by confession in the visitation of the diocese.Footnote ¹³³ In one respect, however, Szawinski noted that the Samogitians displayed exemplary piety: they treated priests with great reverence and genuflected or even prostrated themselves when they approached. Similarly, they showed great veneration at the elevation of the host during mass and beat their chests so hard that the noise was alarming to foreign visitors to Vilnius Cathedral.Footnote ¹³⁴

This reverence for priests, and for the consecrated host, is perhaps what we might expect to find in a society undergoing religious creolisation; it is, after all, in priests and in the consecrated host that Catholicism teaches that sacred power resides, and therefore the Samogitians’ interest in these things could be interpreted as an indication of their interest in sources of sacred power rather than in the Christian faith per se. Nevertheless, the old ways were fading; Szawinski reported that recent missions had finally suppressed the worship of snakes.Footnote ¹³⁵ But overall he seems to have felt overwhelmed by the task of bringing Samogitia to faith: ‘For the lands are infinite, and the thousands of souls uncountable, where witchcrafts, sorceries, and other tricks of demons are many.’Footnote ¹³⁶ In 1666 the Jesuits reported that only one in a hundred people had heard of the Incarnation or the Trinity, although they were sacrificing and feeding the ancestors at Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. They were terrified of the sign of the cross, however, believing it to be a way of summoning the devil (perhaps a garbled understanding of exorcism?).Footnote ¹³⁷

The phenomenon of ‘found cults’ that conferred a much older Christian identity on a recently converted territory, like the Virgin of Candelaria in Tenerife, was not wholly absent from Lithuania. A 1646 visitation of the diocese of Vilnius noted that an ancient image of Christ found in the River Nemunas was being venerated at Zapyškis, where according to tradition the church was built on the site of a pagan temple.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, the 1646 visitation was not specific about pre-Christian practices, reporting only that some ‘remain ignorant of religion and of the Christian faith’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Seventeenth-century visitations of the Lithuanian dioceses tended to concentrate on administrative matters and on formal canonical compliance, while detailed reports on idolatry and the errors of popular religion were left to missionaries.

In 1654 a new Jesuit college was founded at Pašiausė between Šiauliai and Panevėžys, on the border between Samogitia and the rest of Lithuania. The following year, the Grand Duchy was invaded and devastated by both Sweden and Muscovy; Vilnius fell to the Russians in 1656, while Samogitia was occupied by the Swedes. The missions of the Jesuit college in Vilnius to rural areas came to an end, but the Pašiausė college managed to carry on, reporting on missions in 1657 and 1658.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Occasionally we hear the voices of the Lithuanians themselves in these missionary records. In 1640 the Jesuits encountered a fifty-year-old man who declared that ‘This alone appears clear to the clergy and nobility, that for us the earth must be worshipped forever.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ At times the missionaries seem to have compromised with local beliefs and set themselves up in direct competition with traditional practices. In 1657 the Jesuit Jakub Paszkiewicz found people receiving magical herbs from sorcerers; he dealt with this by distributing blessed rue and sage on the Feast of the Assumption, ‘and many used these herbs as a very efficacious medicine against all illnesses’.Footnote ¹⁴²

A similarly creative compromise with pre-existing traditions occurred at Gelvonai in 1670, when the archbishop of Gniezno decided that a church could be built on the site of a rock venerated by local people which contained the apparent imprints of two feet. In an inquisition held on the question of whether devotion at the miraculous rock should be encouraged or forbidden, it was noted that the rock was covered by a roof and featured a crucifix with the instruments of the passion. At the same time, however, the rock was frequented by ‘Jews, Scythians, and heretics’ and was a site of ‘drinking, lascivious dances, fights, woundings, murders, rapes of women and other inconveniences’. Whether the rock had been a site of pre-Christian veneration before it was Christianised is unclear, but it seems highly likely; the glacial erratics that litter the Lithuanian landscape drew the attention of ancient people and became the focus of pre-Christian worship that continued as late as the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴³

The inquisition heard numerous testimonies of miracles worked at the rock of Gelvonai, including from a woman named Catharina Alexandrowa Kudlubowska who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary standing on it – the implication was, therefore, that the footprints were those of the Virgin – at least for those who identified as Christians.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the end, the archbishop compromised by insisting the unacceptable practices at the site be banned and permitting a church to be built over the rock.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Gelvonai process has certain parallels with the foundation of the celebrated Marian shrine at Šiluva in 1608 after shepherds witnessed the Virgin Mary standing on a rock. The rock was later incorporated into a chapel on the site of the apparition (Plate 14). However, there is insufficient unambiguous information about the origins of the cult of Our Lady of Šiluva to be certain that it represents the Christianisation of a pre-Christian sacred rock.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Plate 14 The ‘apparition rock’ at Šiluva, Lithuania, photograph by Vilensija.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

While some pre-Christian religious practices were persecuted as witchcraft in both Sápmi and Livonia, this was not the case in Lithuania. A diverse range of magical practices existed in Lithuanian culture, with practitioners denoted by several different terms.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Prätorius noted over twenty different kinds of magicians among the Lithuanians, although most of these seem to have been practitioners of popular forms of divination rather than sorcery.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Lithuania’s very mixed population also meant that a range of different beliefs existed about witchcraft. The Grand Duchy’s Orthodox and Greek Catholic population, for example, held views of witches similar to those that prevailed in neighbouring Muscovy, where there was a comparatively weak tradition of witch-hunting.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The figure of the ragana remained an ambivalent one in Lithuanian folklore, casting the evil eye but also helping neighbours with herbal remedies,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ but Lithuanian folk belief in witchcraft did not lend itself to intense fear of supernatural harm.

Witchcraft (raganavimas) was apparently named after the goddess Ragana, portrayed in later folklore as a hideous old woman embodying dearth, barrenness, and destruction, but whose name may mean ‘she who sees into the future’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In the sixteenth century Jan Łasicki had described Ragaina only as a goddess of the forest,Footnote ¹⁵² and in 1619 the Jesuits noted that the Lithuanians considered ragana a word that should not be spoken.Footnote ¹⁵³ Statutes against witchcraft were promulgated in the Grand Duchy in 1566 and 1588,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ and the Jesuits routinely linked sorcery to lingering paganism, but this did not necessarily translate to judicial consequences. Indeed, it is difficult to identify a Lithuanian witch trial that contains any specific reference to pre-Christian beliefs that are recognisably different from the popular religion and popular magic practised in any other European nation.

Malgorzata Pilaszek’s analysis of Lithuanian witchcraft trials revealed a peak in the 1630s, with sustained judicial interest in witchcraft to the end of the seventeenth century, while trials declined from the early eighteenth century onwards. A quarter of trials ended with a sentence of death by burning. Pilaszek argued that the judicial and social pattern of trials in Lithuania was comparable to Estonia and Finland,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ but the absence of references to werewolves and other pre-Christian beliefs in Lithuanian witch trials is notable. Nevertheless, the Jesuits sometimes found themselves involved in witch trials; in 1666 a drought in northern Samogitia was blamed on witches, who were accused of making clouds full of rain pass overhead without falling. The Jesuits managed to reconcile the accused women to the church, ‘who burned while invoking the most holy names of Jesus and Mary’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Ultimately, the church in Lithuania seems to have regarded sorcery and witchcraft as errors to be corrected by missionaries and ecclesiastical visitors via repentance and confession; veneficas are often mentioned in missionary reports from the seventeenth century, but not usually in reference to any judicial proceedings.

Crucially, most visitors to rural areas in Lithuania and Samogitia regarded the people there as superstitious Christians rather than as pagans. They were often baptised, after all – if unreliably, by elderly community leaders who took on this task, and therefore fulfilled the minimal requirement for people to be considered Christians. Furthermore, they were the subjects of a Christian ruler and came under the missionary purview of the Latin rite dioceses of the Grand Duchy. For the Jesuits in Lithuania, pre-Christian beliefs and rites were ‘frequent superstitions, the relics of ancient impiety’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In 1616 the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Argenti reported that in Samogitia, the saving faith of Christ was ‘intermixed with errors’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Rarely were the people described as following a different religion, or as being pagans, although the bishop of Płock, Marcin Szyszkowski, identified Baltic religion as ‘the Scythian faith’ in 1616.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In 1645 the Sacred Congregation Propaganda Fide referred to ‘gentiles’ in Samogitia, Courland, and Semigallia.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ But on the whole, before the 1670s missionaries portrayed the practices of the peasants as superstitious errors, the result of ignorance and stupidity, rather than as allegiance to an alien faith. At the level of canon law and moral theology, the offence the Lithuanians were confessing to missionary priests was superstition rather than apostasy.

In the 1670s, however, we find the first references to ‘Old Lithuanians’ (called by the Ruthenian term ‘Stara Litwa’ even in Latin documents) in visitation records.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Vaida Kamuntavičienė has argued that the Stara Litwa were not just Lithuanian peasants who creolised Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs, but people who did not attend church because they had no allegiance to Christianity.Footnote ¹⁶² Yet in spite of this new othering terminology, unchristianised Lithuanians were treated to all intents and purposes just like Lithuanians who had become good Catholics – other than being subject to the attentions of missionaries. In contrast to other territories, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had no apparent agenda of converting its unchristianised minority and even the church hierarchy seems to have had no plan for doing so (it was left to the Jesuits). Indeed, the only way in which the state potentially impinged upon pre-Christian belief was in the area of witch trials, where the church actively challenged the state’s authority anyway.

What was missing from the seventeenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in contrast to Sápmi, Livonia, and even Lithuania Minor, was antiquarian and ethnographic scholarship on pre-Christian religion. The Jesuits left valuable records of their missions, but for all their detail – especially about rituals – these stop short of trying to systematically understand or interpret Lithuanian religion. One reason for the absence of an ethnographic and antiquarian tradition was, perhaps, that such texts already existed from the sixteenth century. Another was the absence of any ethnic, linguistic, or cultural difference between Christianised and unchristianised Lithuanians; there was no cultural gap that ethnography needed to bridge and therefore a deficit of curiosity. But the main reason why an antiquarian tradition did not develop in the Grand Duchy was that it had a historical tradition. The Jesuit historian Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz’s two-volume Historiae Lituanae (‘Lithuanian Histories’, 1650–69) established a historiography for the Grand Duchy based on written documents. Lithuania’s unique historical position meant that it was not necessary for ethnographer-antiquarians to step into the place of historians by conferring a past on a non-literate people.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that commentators on unchristianised peoples in the seventeenth century were chiefly interested in two questions: whether the continued existence of pre-Christian religion represented a threat of witchcraft, and whether the customs and beliefs of unchristianised peoples were of antiquarian interest. Both of these questions were asked, of course, within the context of two overarching imperatives: the centralisation of the early modern state and ongoing efforts to convert Europe’s remaining unchristianised peoples to the ‘right’ kind of Christianity. During the seventeenth century virtually everyone in northern Europe came into contact with Christianity, with some impact on their belief systems, even if they did not become Christians in a sense acceptable to the ecclesiastical or state authorities. The search for a ‘pristine’ pre-Christian religion would be a fruitless one. But the peoples like the Sámi, the Estonians, the Balts, and the Finno-Ugric nations of the Volga remained unchristianised (or at least partly unchristianised) because their religious practices were ‘Christianesque’ creole religions, where the evidence suggests that elements of Christianity and Christian imagery were integrated into essentially pre-Christian spiritual outlooks.

Scholars are, understandably, divided on the interpretation of such a fluid and ambiguous religious situation; the peoples of these regions existed on a sliding scale from believers with wholly Christianised outlooks (however lukewarm in their religious practice) to practitioners of pre-Christian ways who were barely aware of Christianity’s existence. S. C. Rowell has reacted to this ambiguity by interpreting the ‘pagan’ practices encountered by early modern missionaries in Lithuania and Livonia as ‘folk culture’, not much different from anywhere else in Europe.Footnote ¹⁶³ Paganism was in the eye of the beholder, and Jesuits found it in the Lithuanian countryside because that was what they expected to find. As I have already argued, however, the danger of adopting an extremely sceptical stance with regard to the survival of pre-Christian religions into the early modern era is that we thereby buy into an ‘essentialist’ interpretation of Christian and pagan identities that is unsupported by the evidence. It is no more plausible to say that everyone at Europe’s margins was a misunderstood Christian than it is to claim that they were proud and self-conscious pagans.

If we can rely on the testimony of the missionary accounts, the reality that emerges is more complicated than either of these essentialist stances. Sámi, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians usually thought of themselves as Christians; and in the eyes of the church, since most of them were baptised (albeit by lay community leaders), they technically were Christians. But they were often unsure of how to be Christians and, in the absence of clergy and a functional parish system, they fell back on ancestral tradition and half-remembered fragments of a Christianity that they or their ancestors had once been taught. The result was the formation of creole religions that merged Christian and pre-Christian elements into a functioning whole that served the purposes of the community at a time of pastoral crisis. And while it is true that these creole religions were not always very different from expressions of popular religion elsewhere in Europe, popular Christianity (however deviant) in a deeply Christianised society is not the same as a creole religion. While creole religions result from the merging of traditions from different sources, in a deeply Christianised society no memory remains of any other religion. If deviance takes place, it emerges from within a Christianised culture – as Ronald Hutton, for example, has demonstrated in the case of the formation of figures of folklore who acted outside of established Christian understandings of cosmology.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The difference in Sápmi, the eastern Baltic, and the Volga-Ural region was that Christianity’s roots were still so shallow in the seventeenth century that pre-Christian traditions retained their significance – even if that significance was now refracted by a half-understood Christianity. The religious situation at Europe’s unchristianised margins was therefore more readily comparable to the eighteenth-century Caribbean or modern Africa than to other areas of Europe, where Christianity was historically, socially, and institutionally entrenched. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued in relation to the religion of the Lele people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, contact with Christianity should not be understood purely in terms of a binary decision to convert or to hold on to ancestral religious traditions. Regardless of conversion, contact with Christianity and the introduction of a Christian worldview as one way of interpreting the world can have a transformative effect on traditional societies and their religions. In the case of the Lele, this contact encouraged them to view their religion more dualistically, identifying one of their deities with the devil of Christianity, which led in turn to a strong belief in witchcraft.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In a similar way, twentieth-century Mordvin animists worshipped the god Nikulapaz,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ a version of St Nicholas, and emphasised the filial relationship of the god Nishkepaz to the supreme god Chipaz – probably under Christian influence. Similarly, it is clear that the Mordvin evil being ‘Shyaytan’ is the Satan of Christianity.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Yet the admixture of these influences did not make Mordvin animists Christians.

As we have seen, pre-Christian religions are often characterised by their pragmatic approach to adopting new sources of sacred power and, therefore, contact with Christianity is likely to result in transformation as unchristianised people seek to accommodate elements of it for their own purposes. The old peasant at Kalkus in Estonia who sacrificed to the consecrated host but told people to stay away from church and blame their ills on the church stands for this paradox: that people can be hostile to Christianity and unwilling to adopt it, but still fascinated by the potential for spiritual power in a piece of bread claimed by the Christian priests to be God himself. Creole religions filled a spiritual vacuum left behind by missionaries who were good at destroying pre-Christian religions in remote regions, but not so good at putting in their place the full panoply of pastoral and spiritual support that a nascent Christian community needed to thrive. Their impact could thus be compared to the destruction or unbalancing of an ecosystem, whose consequences can be unpredictable. But just as life continues in different forms when an ecosystem is destroyed, so people responded creatively to the destruction of the spiritual ecosystems of pre-Christian cultures and newly fashioned makeshift religions filled the void. Ultimately, however, the limited nature of the information available to us and the dearth of voices from unchristianised communities in early modern Europe mean we can only guess at what such communities really thought and what their ritual behaviours were trying to achieve. What we can know is how antiquarians, ethnographers, and missionaries sought to portray them.