National awakening and recent scholarship

The national awakening occasioned the abolition of serfdom in the middle of the nineteenth century (in 1819 and 1861) and promoted an interest for the national cultural legacy. In the second half of the nineteenth century a movement for collecting folk songs, folk tales and legends was initiated by young Latvian intellectuals such as Auseklis, Fricis Brivzemnieks and Krisjanis Barons.

The nature of the evidence sets specific limits to the historical understanding of Baltic religions in general and Latvian religion in particular that this recent scholarship has produced. To summarize some of the problems mentioned previously: datable archaeological findings are generally silent on religious matters. Many of the historical records are late, and were often composed by outsiders with a very limited understanding of the local cultures and languages. The folkloric evidence is plentiful, and clearly amalgamates ancient material with later (e.g. Christianizing) influences, but comes with no ready means of separating and chronologically arranging different historical strata, nor does it reveal much of the religious acts and artifacts of the pre-Christian Baltic peoples. The result is a representation of the past that is inevitably more ahistorical, homogenizing and static than the various Baltic religions surely were; more oriented towards identifying the names of deities and their mythological functions and less able to unveil the ritual practices that the Baltic peoples directed at these beings than one could wish.

The description of pre-Christian Baltic (and particularly Latvian) religion as presented below is a composite picture derived from a variety of such sources. The complexity and sheer amount of source materials precludes a detailed reference for each individual piece of information. For this level of detail, the reader is referred to the works listed at the end of this chapter.