Early and medieval historical sources
Living on the fringes of eastern Europe, Latvians and Lithuanians were virtually unknown to the west until the Middle Ages. Possibly the first written references regarding the Baltic peoples are found in Roman historiography, where they were mentioned as the Hesti or Aestii by Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ca.
58/95-120 CE) in his De Germania 45. From this source we get the information that in the first century CE these “people of the east” worshipped “the mother of God” (matrem deum veneratur). Contemporary scholarship is divided in its opinion concerning this statement: some scholars connect it with the Finno-Ugrian tribes of Estonia, but most agree that Tacitus refers to the Old Prussians. It is in any case clear that he mentions the veneration of some primordial chthonic female deity.After a silence of several centuries, we arrive at another comparatively early source of information: the Anglo-Saxon traveller and historian Wulfstan who visited the Prussian coast between the years 887 and 901. He describes the Prussian concepts of life, death and burial rituals; King Alfred, to whom he reported his findings, later included this information in his version of Orosius’s Historiae Adversum Paganos (Englert & Trakadas 2009).
There are some other medieval chronicles providing information about the religious concepts of the ancient Balts. For instance, in his chronicles Adam of Bremen (d. 1081) supplied evidence about the existence of fortune-tellers among the Baltic peoples. The Henrici Chronicon Livonia (Chronicle of Henricus de Lettis), written during the first quarter of the thirteenth century, when describing the colonization of the Baltic area from 1180 to 1227, gives quite substantial information about the cultural and religious practices of the indigenous population. The same methods of fortune-telling that these early chroniclers mention were later described by the traveller Ghillebert de Lannoy (1385-1414), who visited Livonia from 1413 to 1414. Among other things, he wrote about the burial traditions of the Latvian Curonian tribe. The dead were cremated in a funeral pyre made of oak wood. If smoke rose directly to heaven, the dead soul was said to travel directly to the gods, but if the smoke blew sideways, the dead soul was not admitted to heaven. Sacrifice by burning an offering on an altar was a regular practice for divining future events before critical moments in life. It was by these same methods of divination that one Latvian tribe, the Latgallians, made their decision to become Christians. The Semigallians and Curonians sought answers from their gods about the outcome of their battles. Another ancient form of divination is described in the Livländische Reimchronik (Livonian rhyming chronicles; written in 1290), where a Lithuanian military leader, finding himself captive, discovers the fate of his soldiers in the field by gazing at an animal’s shoulder blade.