Silence of the Gods Quotes

“the cultural acceptability of a ‘pagan’ identity in contemporary Latvia was underlined when Raimonds Vējonis, president of Latvia 2015–19, declared his religious affiliation as ‘pagan’.11 In Estonia, meanwhile, 51 per cent of respondents polled in 2010 declared their support for Estonia’s revived native faith movement, while a further 37 per cent declared positive feelings towards it, indicating that a large majority of Estonians may be open to the idea of Estonia as a pagan nation.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Whether animism, the tendency to interact with non-human beings as persons, is the most fundamental state of human ‘religiosity’ is a question beyond the capacity of the historian to answer. But one of the characteristics of the pre-Christian religions considered in this book is an urge to personify concepts and things, from the Sámi’s personification of the twelve days of Christmas as the ‘Christmas people’ to the Latvians’ personification of over a hundred aspects of life as divine ‘mothers’. It is possible to argue that, within Christian worldviews, saints simply took on this role of personifications and there is a long tradition of historians arguing that Europe’s Christianised peasants retained an animist mentality.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Stones with cup marks in Finland, Karelia, Estonia, and Latvia that are known to have been used since the Bronze Age and into the twentieth century for ritual offerings may represent Europe’s longest continuously functioning ritual sites, even if their meaning and significance changed over time. There is a sense in which Europe’s last unchristianised peoples were indeed representatives of the Continent’s deep religious past.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“On the other hand, the evidence recorded by missionaries, antiquarians, and ethnographers suggests that the religions of Europe’s unchristianised peoples, even if touched and possibly even transformed by Christianity, did not usually define themselves in opposition to it. Such peoples’ contact with Christianity was sporadic, resulting in the religious equivalent of a Przewalski’s horse – the ‘wild’ horses of the Eurasian steppe that are probably the descendants of ancient groups of domesticated horses, but who act to all intents and purposes like a wild species. The creolised religions that developed subsequent to contact with Christianity among Europe’s unchristianised peoples were functionally pre-Christian just as Przewalski’s horse is functionally a wild animal. And just as it would not be meaningful to describe Przewalski’s horse as ‘domesticated’ just because it had distant domesticated ancestors, so it is not meaningful to call creole religions ‘Christian’ just because they draw creatively on elements from Christianity.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“In one sense, it is true that pre-Christian religion dissolves on contact with Christianity, because Christianity introduces a way of thinking about religion and religiosity more self-conscious than anything that exists in most non-literate pre-Christian societies, where the concept of religion as a distinct sphere of life may not even exist. Even if it somehow reconstitutes itself, pre-Christian religion will never be the same again.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Since the nineteenth century, the appeal of paganism as the survival of something ancient has dominated the historiography of northern Europe’s pre-Christian religions, leading to polarisation among historians adhering to ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ conceptions of the ‘paganness’ of early modern Europe. For the minimalists, paganism was a chimera created by Christians eager to enforce their own version of a ‘perfect’ Christianity; the alleged ‘pagans’ were merely demonised adherents of folk Christianity. For the maximalists, not only was paganism a living and powerful force that defined itself against Christianity, but most ordinary Christians were pagans at heart as well, giving only lip service to the church.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Ultimately, nineteenth-century interest in ‘native faiths’ was not so much a religious as a nation-building project; the ambiguity of the medieval sources on pre-Christian religions made it possible for romantic nationalists to imagine those religions as they chose. For some they were a purer, Indigenous version of Christianity; for others, they were a form of proto-secularism and anti-colonialism. The end result was that nineteenth-century scholars were as often involved in processes of invention as they were in recovery.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“the later the date to which pre-Christian religions survived, the more marginal and marginalised they became, with the consequence that their adherents became less and less willing to talk about them”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Some of the most compelling evidence for the persistence of pre-Christian or creolised cults into the nineteenth century can be found in instances of people responding to contemporary social developments via an apparently pre-Christian worldview. If Edmund Veckenstedt is to be believed, Samogitians in the nineteenth century introduced a new goddess, Kolera: a woman in a white dress who travelled the country in a coach bringing cholera.80 Similarly, Latvians added ‘Mother of Tobacco’ at some point to the number of divine mothers.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“The late survival of the cult of Peko compared with other pre-Christian beliefs might be accounted for by the fact that it took the form of a secret society; as Ronald Hutton has documented in Britain, ‘diabolist’ rural secret societies like the Society of the Horseman’s Word perpetuated folk cults in a way that would not have been possible in rural society at large.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“offerings to the herd gods (kara-jumalá) were still being made in Võrumaa (southern Estonia).66 In the Mulgimaa region of southern Estonia the cult of the domestic and granary spirit Pell survived into the second half of the nineteenth century; in 1958 an eighty-three-year-old woman recalled how an Orthodox priest had been summoned to exorcise Pell from a granary in Karksi parish when she was a child. The spirit sat ‘like a completely naked person’ on the steps of the granary, nursing an infant, before finally agreeing to depart.67 However, it was the cult of the grain and fertility god Peko in the Setomaa region which proved one of the most persistent of all, perhaps because Peko was worshipped in secret by rural fraternities rather than by the whole community at large. These fraternities protected the cult image of Peko, which was kept in the grain bin of a member of the fraternity throughout the winter. In late August or early September the fraternities held ‘Peko feasts’ at which they engaged in ritual games.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“the significance of the hiis (sacred grove) remained, and offerings for healing at holy springs and other sites continued into the 1920s and 1930s; people would leave an offering at a stone, for example, and then ritually ‘transfer’ their illness or infirmity to it by touching it.61 Offerings were made on the ‘sacrificial stone’ inside the trunk of the sacred linden tree at Sipa into the nineteenth century.62 Similarly, the custom of depositing grave goods with the dead for the next world survives to this day in some rural areas: coins, a needle, and some vodka may be placed with the corpse,63 and Valk argues there was little archaeologically visible change in the treatment of the dead in Estonia between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“In the 1897 census an astonishing 27.6 per cent of Maris declared themselves to be animists, in spite of the fact that there were heavy penalties for apostasy (and many – perhaps most – Maris had technically been baptised by this point), leading Taagepera to suggest that the real number of animists at the end of the nineteenth century was much higher.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Anyone who abandoned animism was considered by the Maris to have become Russian and was therefore no longer part of the community.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“A particularly shameful episode in Russian colonialism occurred in 1892 when ten Udmurt animist priests from the village of Old Multan near Malmyzh were falsely accused of performing human sacrifices – an accusation that echoed the ‘blood libels’ levelled at Europe’s Jewish communities since the Middle Ages. After a series of three trials, seven of the Udmurt priests were sentenced to imprisonment. The incident reached the western European press, prompting shock at the continued existence of pre-Christian religions in Europe, but there was much sympathy for the ‘Udmurt Seven’ among the Russian Empire’s intellectual elite.35 The seven priests were released in 1896 after a successful press campaign led by the Ukrainian writer Vladimir Korolenko.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“For example, Éva Pócs has shown that the presentation of the Hungarian táltos as a shaman is a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographers who assumed the culture of the Magyars ought to contain a shaman-like figure – by analogy with the cultures of other Uralic-speaking nations. In all likelihood, Pócs argues, the historical táltos was a weather-diviner and magical practitioner specialising in the weather.31 In a similar way, ‘neo-Shamanism’ in contemporary Sápmi is predicated on the idea that the Sámi noaidi must be analogous to the shamans of central Asia and the Americas.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“they were, rather, sets of beliefs and ritual practices creatively devised in response to community needs – rooted, of course, in the traditions of the community, but also highly innovative and flexible.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Indeed, it is an argument of this book that pre-Christian and creolised religions in Europe were characterised by their rich variety and regional particularity. The ‘diffusionist’ idea that each people has an original religion in its linguistic Urheimat that subsequently diversified or ‘degenerated’ into local variations betrays a Christian-inflected understanding of what religion is: a fixed set of beliefs and ritual practices that believers approach either rightly or wrongly.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“None of this meant, of course, that the nationalists were interested in pre-Christian religion for its own sake, or that they knew much about it. To most nationalists it did not really matter what their pre-Christian forbears had believed; the point was that a ‘national’ religion had once existed.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Latvian Dievturi achieved a degree of recognition from the Latvian state early on,29 and both Latvian and Estonian native faith movements became closely entwined with far-right nationalist movements. All of these movements were suppressed by the Soviet Union, which invaded and occupied the Baltic states in 1940, although they were to emerge in new forms in the post-Soviet era. Just as Daukantas’s philopaganism can be viewed as a secularist nationalist response, so the spiritual interests of Šidlauskas-Visuomis and other early revivalists, such as Vilius Storostas-Vydūnas (1868–1953) are perhaps better seen as esotericist spirituality rather than the kind of full-blown reconstructionist religion that arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. Šidlauskas-Visuomis and Vydūnas were esotericists who drew upon their own imagined forms of pre-Christian Baltic religion alongside Buddhism, theosophy, and Hindu spirituality to construct occult worldviews.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“In 1925 Ernests Brastiņš (1892–1942) and Kārlis Marovskis-Bregžis (1885–1958) launched a revived Latvian pagan religion known as Dievturi. They even provided the new faith with a catechism (modelled, ironically, on Martin Luther’s) in 1931.26 An Estonian pagan revivalist movement, Taara usk (‘the Creed of Taara’), was also launched in 1925, proposing a revival of the cult of the Estonian thunder god Taara,27 and in 1926 the Lithuanian writer Domas Šidlauskas-Visuomis (1878–1944) founded a religion based on his interpretation of Baltic pre-Christian religion (combined with elements of Buddhism), which he called Visuomybė (‘Universal Faith’).”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Before its destruction, the stone had had a flat surface that reflected the rising and setting sun and bore marks resembling a sword, a temple, and human and animal footprints (Plate 20). The folklore gathered by Gisevius suggested the altar stone had been venerated until its destruction (although the laumės, fairy-like beings, were honoured at Rambynas rather than gods),”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Indeed, Prussia’s Lithuanian-speaking Lutheran minority in Lithuania Minor played a key role in the rebirth of Lithuanian national identity.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Such persecution peaked after the January Uprising of 1863, resulting in a total ban on the publication of books in Lithuania in 1866 and a ban on the use of Latin script, with the only books allowed being those printed in Moscow using Cyrillic script.23 However, whereas efforts at Russification in Latvia and Estonia resulted in thousands of conversions to Russian Orthodoxy, the Lithuanians remained stubbornly Catholic – in part because, as the governor of the Vilna Governorate observed in the 1860s, they had been converted directly to Catholicism from paganism.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“The idea that the dainas represent an authentic source of ancient Baltic mythology – indeed, almost a kind of Latvian pagan scriptures – is of immense cultural significance in Latvia. It is possible that the dainas do indeed encode genuinely ancient mythological information. But there is no way to be certain that the dainas actually preserve data on pre-Christian Baltic beliefs.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“For nations like Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, Christianisation had arrived in the Middle Ages alongside colonisation and ethnic and cultural subordination, rendering Christianity a problematic heritage.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“The Russian Orthodox church, in contrast to the Protestant reformers and the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic religious orders, failed to develop a coherent approach to conversion that ‘acculturated’ Christianity to the people it tried to convert. Minimal efforts were made to train priests in the languages of unchristianised peoples or to recruit and train clergy from non-Russian backgrounds, and the imposition of the Russian Orthodox faith by force became indistinguishable from the imposition of Russian political dominion and economic exploitation. The animists of the Volga-Ural region submitted, eventually, to baptism in the same way they submitted to Russian political hegemony; but in the same way that rule by Russia did not make these peoples Russian, so mere submission to Christianity did not truly make them Christian. And, as we shall see, animist faiths would reappear in the nineteenth century, in a process that is perhaps better described as re-emergence than as revival.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Even where the Chuvashes became Christians, they adopted a popular Christianity influenced by popular Islam – in particular the concept of kiremet’, a word derived from Arabic keremet (which was originally the miraculous power of a Muslim saint). Kiremet’ in Chuvash belief, however, was a spirit connected with a particular place which had the power to cause disease or disaster if not appeased, while kiremet’ was both a spirit and a place – who was believed to be brought to dwell in a place by an act of violence.130 While the church made efforts to demonise the kiremet’, Chuvashes responded by turning icons and churches into kiremet’.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“Interpretatio Romana remained a standard hermeneutic in the eighteenth century, with the lexicographers Jakub Brodowski (1730) and Philipp Ruhig (1747) interpreting the Lithuanian god Jagaubis as an analogue of the Roman god Vulcan.109 Brodowski identified Magyla, an assistant to the Lithuanian goddess of death Giltinė, as a furia (fury).110 As we have seen, the household gods were routinely identified with lares and penates. However, new deities were still being discovered (or perhaps conjectured); Brodowski’s dictionary added Blizgulis, a deity of snow, to the Baltic pantheon.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“The missionaries noted that there was a great gathering of people in the woods on the day after St Peter’s Day (30 June) known as Žaislė. Men and women played games and drank for two nights, but the Jesuits reported that the festivities often ended with someone being murdered. In a particular irony, the Jesuits found people making pacts with a devil they called Ihnat, the local name for Ignatius – perhaps in a strange sort of inversion of the immense power the Jesuits attributed to relics of their founder St Ignatius of Loyola.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples