The ancient Balts comprised tribes that later consolidated into three larger ethnic groups: Lithuanians, Latvians and Prussians.
Together, they constituted the Baltic cultural and linguistic unit. Most of the Old Prussians who lived in the territory of eastern Germany, northern Poland and the Curonian Spit (or Kurshi Inlet) were exterminated during the period of Germanic expansion in the fourteenth century; those remaining were assimilated and had disappeared as a separate ethnic group by the seventeenth century.
Nowadays the Prussian language is being revived artificially. In modern Europe, Lithuanian and Latvian are in many respects the linguistically most archaic spoken Indo-European languages. Though culturally and linguistically close, contemporary Lithuanians and Latvians differ genetically. Recent human DNA analyses show that Latvians are genetically closer to the Finno-Ugrian-speaking Estonians.1 The reason might be that the territory of contemporary Latvia from the middle of the second millennium BCE constituted a kind of melting pot for numerous ethnic groups. When the Baltic peoples at this time arrived in present-day Latvian territory it was partly inhabited by Finno-Ugrian-speaking tribes who had settled along the Baltic coast and the banks of the river Daugava. At that time, as shown by hydronyms, the territory inhabited by the Baltic tribes extended beyond Moscow east-wards and across the banks of the river Vistula southwards.As early as the first millennium BCE, these relatively isolated peoples had switched from a hunting and fishing mode of subsistence to an agrarian culture. Some ancient folk tales and legends about a hero of superhuman strength being born to a she-bear and having the ears of a bear, and accordingly named “Bearears”, might suggest that these people in their hunting and gathering stage had a cult of the bear, along with a cult of female deities, the Mothers. Some traces of this fascination with the figure of the bear have survived to this very day.
Thus, in Lithuanian a woman is called meska, “she-bear” during the week after she has delivered a baby. In Latvia, a custom that subsisted into the twentieth century involved laying a baby on a bear’s skin to ensure strength and good health. In modern times, legends regarding the bear were used as raw material for the Latvian national epic Ldcplesis, "Bear Slayer”, written by Andrejs Pumpurs (published in 1888). The surviving legends regarding Bear Slayer relate the transition of hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian society (Ankrava 2006).The religious practices of the Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian tribes seem to have had a lot in common, such as some shared sanctuaries and a similar though not identical pantheon of gods. These religious practices being inseparable from everyday life allow us to conclude that we can speak about the Baltic religion only nominally. In practice, each tribe may have had different rituals and practices. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a shared outlook on the world (Balys 1953). In the following description of Baltic religion, emphasis will be placed on Latvian religious traditions.
Despite numerous invasions and being repeatedly colonized, Lithuanians and Latvians have preserved a sense of national identity to this day. At one time or another since the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) these peoples have been subject to German, Polish, Russian and Swedish colonization. Historically and geographically they made up the demarcation line between the western Hanseatic League and the eastern Golden Horde, and thus between Western and Eastern cultural traditions. As colonies, they were subject to extensive political and economic exploitation. Nevertheless, although formally Christianized, they continued to various degrees to pursue their traditional religious life. The colonial restrictions in Latvia prevented Latvians from pursuing any religious or administrative career and kept them away from professional occupations, business, trade or arts until the middle of the nineteenth century. This isolation partly explains why Latvia in particular remained one of the strongholds of pre- Christian religion in Europe. The other is the fact that most of the local aristocracy was exterminated already in the fourteenth century. Whereas in Lithuania (and other European countries converted to Christianity) the local aristocracy served as a mediator between Rome and the local population, in Latvia this element did not exist. For centuries, people in Latvia treated the new religion with suspicion as something foreign and forced upon them by colonizers. As a result, traces of pre-Christian practices can be found in Latvian spiritual and daily life even up to the present day. The influence of Christianity only became more intensely felt in the seventeenth century, when the Lutheran Church established itself in this area.