The Unrepentant Nation

In Eastern European Russia, mid-way between Moscow and the Ural Mountains, lies the region known as the ‘Volga Bend’. Here, the mightiest river on the European continent executes a dog’s leg turn, altering the direction of its flow from eastward to southward. In the process, it happens to traverse a narrow band of country in which the climate is sufficiently mild to produce conditions similar to those of north-western Europe. Here, settled farming communities have eked out a living from the earth and the forest for millennia, living a lifestyle very similar to that of our own ancestors; one quite distinct from that of their neighbours, the nomadic hunters of the northern woodlands and herders of the steppes.
The ethnic groups that inhabit this region are diverse and, often, exotic. Russians today form the majority; but also of particular significance are the Tatars, descendants of the Turkic tribes that accompanied Genghis Khan and his Mongols across Eurasia, and lorded it over Russia for centuries. Their ancient capital, Kazan, once a rival to Moscow itself in the politics of the region, lies at the heart of the Volga bend. Another ethnos is the Chuvash, a unique people speaking the last known language similar to those of the Huns and Khazars.
Perhaps the most unusual of all the peoples in the region, however, are the Mariy. They are not a large nation, numbering only around 600,000; nor are they particularly important in the eyes of history, since they have never had their own independent, centralised state. What does makes them special is their religion. This is not Islam, as in the case of the Tatars and Bashkirs to the east, nor Orthodox Christianity as among the Russians, Mordvin and Chuvash. Rather, many of them follow an ancient form of autocthonous paganism, which seems to have been the religion of the people since their initial ethnogenesis. As such, they are one of a very few peoples in the world today who can be described as a ‘heathen nation’; a term here defined as a settled, technically advanced people who have preserved their ancient religion from destruction.

The Mariy live, today, scattered across the entirety of the Volga Bend region as far east as the Urals. Their numbers are greatest on the left bank of the Volga between Nizhniy Novgorod and Kazan; the region today known as ‘Mariy El’, Mariy-Land in the native tongue. The inhabitants of Mariy-El are known as the Meadow Mariy. A smaller community, more fully assimilated to the Russian cultural mainstream, lives on the opposite bank of the Volga; these are called the Mountain Mariy. In the approaches to the Urals resides a third grouping, called the Eastern Mariy on account of their geographical distribution.
Linguistically, they are a part of the Uralic language family; a grouping that includes the Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians, along with a long list of less well-known peoples that live scattered from the western border of Russia to the depths of Siberia. Their culture shows, materially, influences from both the Slavic nations of Europe and the Turkic peoples of the Asian steppe, along with components shared with other nearby Uralic peoples that may be regarded as, if not native, at least of ancient origin.
The material culture of the Mariy is simple, designed to service the needs of a people engaged in farming, hunting, and harvesting the forests. The absence of a native elite throughout most of their history has kept Mariy culture from indulging in the artistic forays seen in many other cultures- instead, folk art remains the predominant tendency. Clothes are simple but colourful, making strong use of the shade of white. Wood-carving is probably the principal craft; since forests dominate the region of their habitation, wood forms the principal medium from which craft goods are shaped, and from which buildings are constructed.
The importance of the forests in the culture of the Mariy is difficult to under-emphasise. The forests provided a source of meat separate from the herds, allowed the collection of furs and honey valuable in trade, and gave the people a refuge in times of danger. So close is the bond that the Mariy in fact refer to themselves as ‘the Little People of the Forest’, many claiming descent from forest animals converted into supernatural beings.
Naturally, the importance of the forests extends deeply into the religion of the Mariy. There are no grand sacred structures in their religion; no pagan temples or churches. Instead, communal worship is conducted in sacred groves, as was the case throughout much of pre-Christian Europe. It is estimated that there are around 360 such sacred groves scattered across Mariy territory.
The sacrosanctity of the groves often stems from the belief that a particular tree located within its perimeter is the place of residence of a local deity. Alternatively, the tree may be home to the spirit of a hero or ancestor who lies buried beneath it, and part of whose soul has taken up permanent residence in the tree above. A mixture of the two is also normal; gods or divine animals are often seen as the ancestors of men, and human heroes, as in ancient Greece, can attain to divine status. The boundaries between the human and supernatural worlds, and between the human and animal worlds are not as fixed as in western culture. Ancestral connections are one of the main holds the groves have upon the Mariy; families will often commemorate their connection to particular groves, and will travel to visit them when possible.
The form taken by worship is described as ‘collective prayer’, or ‘offering’. It involves the assembly of a number of Mariy, sometimes numbering up to the thousands. Prescribed prayers and incantations are chanted by the presiding priest, known in the Mariy language as a Kart. The Karts are ordinary Mariy who live among the people. They are permitted to marry, and are little distinguished from the great mass of the people; a trait that has allowed them to survive the long centuries of persecution. There has been, traditionally, no hierarchy or organisation among the Karts, though this is changing in the present day, and claimants to the title of Archkart are currently competing with one another for support amongst the community.

While the Karts conduct the ceremonies animals, birds, grain and trinkets are sacrificed to the gods of the holy place in the manner the priest decrees. Sacrificed animals are then cooked and eaten in a communal feast, accompanied by the singing of songs and consumption of alcohol. As such, the collective prayer serves as an excuse for celebration of family and ethnicity, along with the opportunity to indulge in the eating of meat; something which, in peasant economies, is generally reserved for special occasions.
The idea of animal sacrifice is worth commenting on; involving, as it does, the taking of animal life, it is a practice that often appears unpalatable to the people raised in western cultures. It is worthwhile bearing in mind, therefore, that, for an agricultural people such as the Mariy, having meat to celebrate a special occasion necessarily involves the taking of animal life. This is, of course, also the case with Christmas turkey. The Mariy simply happen to perform a ritual to sanctify and dedicate the meat while killing it, rather than hiding the act away the way we do and celebrating the carcass afterwards. In the end result, the only difference is one of human cultural niceties; from the turkey’s viewpoint, the outcome is the same either way.

So what, and who, are these bloodthirsty gods worshipped in the groves? There is no standard enumeration; deities are often local or regional, holding sway over a certain region, or only honoured by a specific grouping of people. The major deities, however, are respected by all the people. The foremost of these is the ‘Great God’, Kugu Yumo, an ancient deity who somewhat resembles the god of the monotheistic faiths. He is seen as all-knowing and all-seeing; though these attributes, it should be noted, are also attributable to pre-Christian deities such as Odin in Scandinavia, who could see the whole world by means of his raven messengers. He was also involved in the creation of the world. He is honoured, being mentioned along with his most prominent helpers, in daily prayers; but is not the sole, or even primary, focus of Mariy religiosity.
Beneath Kugu Yumo comes a pantheon composed of the spirits of important physical objects, such as the gods of the sun, of the wind, of the forests and of the fields. Also included are the gods of important concepts, such as fate, oaths, and creative energy. As such, the religion is essentially animistic, attributing personalities to all the things of the world with which people will be required to relate, and allowing them to interact with these spirits by means of sacrifice. Animism can be understood as a religion based on the idea that all things- human, animal, or even inanimate- possess a discrete soul, or spirit. There are, in most enumerations, nine higher gods beneath Kugu Yumo; though the exact identities of these deities show some variation from list to list.
Religions to which the Mariy religion can be most easily compared include Japanese Shinto and Indian Hinduism. Shinto is also a survival of animism into the modern era, basically constituting the worship of nature. Where it differs from the Mariy faith is in the standardised, unitary nature of its pantheon, cemented by centuries of nationalist ideology. The diversity of Mariy deities more effectively mirrors the situation found in Hinduism, where an enormous number of local spirits are worshipped without the diversity threatening the unity of the religion over-all.
This, then, is the basic shape of the Mariy traditional religion. It exists both as a pure religion in its own right, and also mixed with Christianity to various degrees in syncretistic hybrid cults. There also exists a current within the Mariy religion, most effectively expressed in the writings of Popov and Tannygin (the latter himself a Kart), that is attempting to introduce a mystical schema similar to that found in some outside traditions into Mariy religion. In their presentation, the higher gods are viewed as hypostases of Kugu Yumo, who is seen as an emanational force under-pinning existence in a fashion reminiscent of the role attributed to Vishnu or Shiva in sections of Hindu tradition, or even of the neo-Platonic thought of late Roman paganism. While this tradition represents a modern intellectualisation of Mariy tradition, it is, nonetheless, an authentic outgrowth of that tradition and must, as such, not be dismissed out of hand. It may, if its creators succeed in their mission of standardising the faith, represent the future of Mariy religion.

So what, then, does the future hold for Mariy heathenism? The present situation of the Mariy people is, in many ways, a difficult one. They are currently a minority even in their titular homeland, the Mariy-El republic. The administration of that region is currently in the hands of the party of radical Russian Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a man whose ideology includes a mixture of the fascist and the bizarre. As such, the human rights position in Mariy-El is far from ideal; in May 2005, the European Parliament even went so far as to pass a resolution sharply criticising Russia for the lack of basic rights accorded to the Mariy people. Activists in Mariy cultural organisations have been beaten up, and the previously mentioned Kart Vitaliy Tannygin has been arrested and imprisoned for allegedly promoting religious discord.
A further challenge comes from the resurgent Christian religion. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, evangelical protestant missionary groups have attempted to make inroads into remnant pagan populations. They have a presence in Mariy-El at the moment, though their mission has not yet met with extensive success. The Orthodox Church of Russia, too, is making its presence felt; Bishop Ioan of Yoshkar-Ola has criticised modern Mariy religious gatherings as ‘occult perversions of traditional paganism’.
The extent to which the other religions of Russia are able to act against Mariy paganism is, however, limited by the terms of the 1997 law on religion. This legislation states that religions ‘constituting an inseparable part of the historical heritage of Russia's peoples’ must be respected. More, it specifically includes among such religions ‘ancient pagan cults, which have been preserved or are being revived in the republics of Komi, Mari-El, Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Chukhotka and several other subjects of the Russian Federation.’ Due to the terms of this legislation, Orthodox priests decrying the Mariy religion are subject to imprisonment. They would, in fact, have committed the same offence for which Vitaliy Tannygin was arrested. The argument of Tannygin’s accusers was that he over-stepped the very mark that in other circumstances protects the Mariy, claiming his religion was superior to all others, and potentially exacerbating religious-ethnic tensions in Mariy-El.
The legal situation thus ensures that dealings between religions are forced to retain a degree of mutual respect and toleration. Whatever may be said of the character of the provincial government, or the state of human rights in Russia in general, it must be admitted that such legal protection means that the situation for the Mariy heathen religion is currently better than it has been at almost any time in the last few centuries. Under Communism, Mariy religiosity was repressed by the prevalent state ideology of atheism. Under the rule of the preceeding Tsarist regime, Orthodox Christianity was the state religion, and forced baptism campaigns were conducted against the Mariy. The people were forced to pay for the upkeep of churches in which they did not wish to worship, and faced imprisonment and deportation to Siberia if they were caught practicing their native traditions. This is now, definitively, no longer the case.
So will the Mariy religion experience a resurgence in the new, liberal environment? Not if it does so by attaching itself to an anti-Russian, nationalist agenda. The legal protection that has been given can easily be removed, should the Russian state deem it in its interests to do so. It is well-known that the Russian government is hostile to separatist nationalism in its constituent republics, as Chechnya has so amply proven. On the other side of the coin, stoking up the fires of nationalism could help to breed an environment of inter-communal hostility that might, given time, transform the ethnic mosaic of the Volga Bend into a northern version of the Balkans. Such an outcome is, from all perspectives, one to avoid.
So what is the alternative? In many countries, different religious traditions have a long history of co-existence; in China, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism have rubbed along side-by-side since the first millennium; and in Egypt Islam and Coptic Christianity have maintained peaceful relations since the 7th century Arab conquest. If mutual respect between traditions can be maintained, there is no reason that the religions of the region cannot all survive. If this is the case, then the unique tradition of the Mariy may yet prove a resource for that people to deploy in their efforts at future development. It is easy to imagine tourist interest arising in the sacred groves, and curiosity on the wisdom of the Karts arising in lands further west. If such potential can be translated into actual visitors and the arrival of tourist dollars, then the poverty that blights the republic of Mariy-El could be, in part, alleviated. It would be a wonderful thing indeed if the oldest, most repressed parts of the Mariy culture could be the engine that drives their future economic salvation; whether this will be so is in the hands of the Mariy themselves, of any westerners willing to trail-blaze the region, and, as the Karts might remind us, of the gods.

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.