Thursday 27 November 2008

The Littlest God







In a remote corner of the European continent, under the watchful gaze of Russian border posts, survives the European Union’s last pagan god. His name is Peko, and he is the size of a baby. He is also very fond of beer. This little deity survived crusades, modernisation and communism by hiding away in the most obscure corners of the Baltic region. His survival, in the face of long centuries of persecution, is nothing short of miraculous. This is his story.

The small Baltic state of Estonia is, today, a quiet little country newly part of the European Union. It sits on the edge of Russia, at a latitude equivalent to that of the Shetland Islands. It is a country notable for two reasons; its emptiness, and its forests. Estonia is a very thinly populated place, with only one and a half million inhabitants; less than the population of many British cities. Travelling through it, it’s impossible not to be struck by the sleepy, timeless atmosphere of the place.
In the forests, the sense of ancient changelessness intensifies and becomes all pervasive. Forest covers around 40% of the area of the country; in the past, it covered far more. Located far from the main centres of population of the continent, the extinctions that have eliminated so many species from so much of Europe have left Estonia largely untouched. The place positively crawls with life; wolves, bears, elk, beavers and wild boar all still reside here in large numbers.
The deep woods have, through the course of the years, provided refuge to more than just animals. Their density prevented people from traversing the region easily, as did the lakes and marshes that punctuate the terrain. The difficulty of penetrating the woods helped to keep those who lived behind their leafy walls isolated from the European mainstream. The peoples of Estonia were, as a result, kept slightly removed from many of the changes that swept the wider continent. They retained a Finno-Ugrian language, while the regions to the east that would become Russia were settled by Slavs; and they remained structured into small regional and tribal groupings, whilst all around them state organisations were emerging.
In religion, too, they were conservative. By the end of the 11th century AD, the Christian faith had become well established in many regions around Estonia. To the west, in Scandinavia, Catholicism was displacing the worship of the Esir, and had also spread to Poland on the southern coast of the Baltic. To the east, Orthodox Christianity had spread among the Slavonic Rus, and was now the official religion of an area far larger than the Byzantine empire from which it had spread. A fierce competition was developing between these two religious tendencies, the aim of which was spiritual control of as large a part of the continent as possible.
It was this religious competition that was to rudely awaken Estonia from its remote slumber, and thrust it into the maelstrom of European power politics. At the start of the 12th century AD, Catholic soldiery, dispatched under the title of crusaders, arrived in Estonia from Germany. Their objective was to forcibly convert the pagan inhabitants to the Catholic church, and bring another tract of the continent under the sway of the papacy. The teachings of Jesus that emphasised gentleness and the avoidance of violence were, at this point in time, rather less emphasised in Catholic teaching than at certain other stages in its history. The order of the Sword Brothers, and the brotherhood of Teutonic Knights who followed them, were the decline in this emphasis made incarnate; armed to the teeth, and equipped with all the heavy metal accoutrements of war that the savage mind of the middle ages could conceive of, these orders of warrior monks held as their ideological raison d’etre the sacred tenet that those who would not convert to the worship of the god of mercy must be put to the sword.
Their campaign was, of course, successful. The lightly armed Estonian tribesmen stood little chance against the armoured heavy cavalry of Germany- in reality, the tanks of their day. In the aftermath of the bloodshed, the crusaders imposed rule by the church militant. The whole of the country, with some regional exceptions, fell under the control of an aristocracy whose legitimacy rested upon their origin in the crusading movement. Under such an administration, the old pagan ways stood little chance of survival. Sacred groves were cut down, and churches erected where they had once stood. The most important idols of the gods were destroyed. Henrik of Livonia records a specific instance of the latter, recounting how the idol of the Oeselians (inhabitants of the modern island of Saaremaa), a god he called Tharapita, was thrown into the sea and ‘drowned’ by the inhabitants of Riga. With priests slain, holy places destroyed and the festivals outlawed, the pagan religion disappeared from sight.
It did not, however, die. Instead, it went underground. As in so many parts of northern Europe, tales of the old gods survived; the characters now ostensibly transformed from divinities to human ancestors of the Estonian people. In this way, the myths that came to form the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg, persisted down through the centuries to be collated during the 19th century. Rituals, too, survived- transformed, in order to legitimise them in the eyes of Christian overlords, into simple invocations of ‘good luck’. Thus, the practice of placing coins in the pits of old sacrificial stones has survived to the present day; and special bundles of hay were used up until the early 20th century as surrogate fertility idols kept in barns, to bring luck to the harvest.
Such limited survivals occurred in much of Europe. In one part of Estonia, however, the survival was on a much more significant scale. Setumaa is, today, a sleepy rural region in the far southeast of Estonia, spilling over into neighbouring parts of Russia. It is an attractive place; though completely flat, its typically Estonian multitude of rivers, lakes and forests that make for pleasant walking. The villages, with their old wooden architecture and traditional feel, feel a world away from western Europe- in fact, even in comparison to northern Estonia, there is a discernibly different. This is because Setumaa is home to the Setu nation; a tiny people numbering only around 10,000 in total. The Setus, despite their small numbers, keep alive both a language and a culture that is theirs alone.



One of the first things that visitors notice upon visiting the Setu country is the difference in the churches. These are of a different type to those found in the rest of Estonia; they are adorned with more complex crosses, and feature the occasional neo-Byzantine influence more associated with nearby Russia than with the German and Scandinavian influences that predominate further north and west. This difference is down to the fact that Setumaa is one of only a handful of areas in Estonia to follow the Russian Orthodox faith; a legacy of the Middle Ages, when, rather than falling to the German crusaders, the region fell under the rule of the Russian city-states of Novgorod and Pskov. When these states were absorbed into the rule of the Muscovite empire, the whole region was transferred into the ownership of the Monastery of Pechory (Petseri, in the Setu language).
Under the rule of the monks, the fortunate Setus were spared many of the excesses of crusader rule- and also of the policies of the Tsars who so oppressed so many of their subjects. They were never made serfs, always renting their farms from the monastery as independent farmers. They also escaped the intense campaigns of Christianisation conducted in neighbouring regions; the monks of Pechory, rather paradoxically, having little interest in what the local people got up to, as long as they attended church festivities and paid their tithes on time. Many old practices that died out elsewhere lingered on in Setumaa. The tradition of leaving water and a whisk in the sauna overnight for the use of the spirits- a practice paralleled among pagan Finnic nations further east- was one example; the practice of anointing the mouth of the icon of St Nikolas of Mozhaisk with food was another. The practice of ‘feeding’ idols was a form of worship recorded among the early pagan inhabitants of Estonia, and among the Nenets and Ugrian peoples of the Russian north- its translation, in Setumaa, into the practice of similarly feeding a Christian icon is a bizarre conflation of Christianity and paganism characteristic of the syncretic combination of religions.
Syncretism and old ritual were not, however, the only legacies of paganism to subsist in Setumaa. Under the blasé protection of Orthodox Christian monks, the Setus managed to keep alive the worship of a secret pagan god, right down to the 20th century. Even today, he remains an important national symbol. This god is called Peko.
Peko is probably the smallest god in all of Eurasia, being only about the size of a newborn baby. He has no arms or legs, but is typically given carved eyes and a mouth. A number of small holes are usually made in the top of the head of the household Pekko, into which votive candles can be inserted. He is made of a rounded length of wood, and requires no particular skill in carving to make; so that any Setu peasant, no matter how lacking in skill or resources, could have his own little god. Peko’s power was this; when hidden under the grain in the family granary, he would work to ensure that the coming harvest would be a good one. Thereby, he brought fertility, food and prosperity to the agricultural Setu people- and he also gave the gift of beer.
Peko’s worship was centred around two principal holidays that were secretly held in his honour. The first fell on roughly the same date as the Christian Pentecost. On this day, a feast for the men initiated into his worship would be held, hosted and paid for by one of the villagers. The method used to decide who should host the event each year was peculiarly, preserving traces of the ancient practices of human sacrifice. Before dawn, while the sun’s light did not yet fully illuminate the land, the initiates would conduct a ritual knife-fight. The first of the men to have their blood shed would face the expense of hosting the feast and the ritual next year.
The second holiday to Peko was held after the harvest, when it could be seen whether the little god had done his work properly or not. At both occasions, beer was drunk; being the drink brewed from grain, this was the drink most appropriate to Peko. The celebrants would, in fact, sing ‘Peko, Peko, come to drink the beer’ in order to summon him to the festivities; a rather more friendly and familiar form of invocation than the deferential prayers offered to the saints of Christian religion. The little god would also be offered sacrifices; presumably, he got hungry too.
The cult of Peko subsisted for a remarkable length of time, totally undiscovered by the monastic authorities. It did so by becoming a secret religion par excellence. The details of the correct performance of his rituals were known only to the initiated, who swore to keep them secret. The god himself was immune from discovery, since he spent all year concealed in the safe depths of the granary. The isolation of the Setu community helped shield him as well; since they spoke a language totally different to that of their Russian overlords, their community was always very insular, and little-visited by outsiders.
It was only during the early years of the 20th century that Peko’s worship began to fade. Scholastic education helped to undercut the belief in Peko’s powers, and modernity’s intrusion into the timeless Setu world meant that his traditions began to seem backward to some. The communist revolution, with its transformation of ancient property relations and break-up of the family farms, didn’t help either- and nor did the secret police and state-sponsored atheism that followed in its wake. As in so much of thee world, the arrival of progress and opportunity was, sadly, paid for with the loss of more ancient ways.

Nevertheless, Peko’s story does not end there. As rationality and industry swept across Europe, this beer-swilling, chicken sacrifice loving little deity found, incredibly, a new lease of life. It happened in the nick of time- a few decades before the advent Soviet rule after the Second World War. In the 1920s, Setumaa was a part of the independent Estonian Republic gifted its freedom by the post-Great War settlement; and it was during this decade that a famous Setu singer by the name of Anne Vabarna composed a new national epic for her people. As a title, she chose the name ‘Peko’.
Some accounts of the epic’s composition allege that Anne Vabarne created it under inspiration from the god himself. In the text of the epic it is, in fact, stated that he sent a butterfly and a horsefly as messengers to Anne, urging her to continue in her creative efforts. Whatever you think about the level of authentic pagan inspiration in the composition of ‘Peko’, it is certain that she did receive some input from a collector of Finno-Ugrian folklore called Paulo-Priit Voolaine, who had at his disposal a wealth of mythic material on the ancient culture of the region. He apparently urged her to produce further works on the topic; a sign of a deep and abiding interest on his part in the old religion.
The epic ‘Peko’ that Anne created has kept the memory of the little god alive. More, it has transformed him into a national symbol for the whole Setu nation. Anne Vabarna’s poem presents Peko as sleeping in an underground grave, from which he will eventually awaken to reign as king over a Setu nation, casting off foreign rule. No more is he the centre of a secret cult, hiding away from the sight of the powerful. In his epic, he is the proud symbol of a revitalised people- albeit one as tiny as he himself.
Peko’s comeback is pretty remarkable. After 700 years of hiding under the grain, Europe’s littlest deity has burst back the centre of his little stage, attaching himself to one of the continent’s most durable mythic motifs- that of the return of the saviour-king. Furthermore, the Setu people have created a new ritual in his honour; the newest national celebration of pagan origin in the whole of the European Union. This is the festival known as the ‘Day of the Setu Kingdom’. On this occasion, for one day of each year, the Setu nation celebrates a brief independence. They sing ancient tunes, gather together with their families, and speak their own proper tongue. It is an independence won, however briefly, not by guns or steel, but by the force of tradition and of song.
And the sovereign, crowned to preside over of this brief kingdom? Peko.
Crusades, persecutions, the destruction of the idols, the intrusion of Communist state atheism, and the horrors of Nazi occupation; none of these horrors that shook Setumaa could succeed in exterminating the littlest of all the gods- and today, he still endures. If you pass through Setumaa, raise a glass of beer to him. He’d surely like it.

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