While the rest of Europe had been Christianized
for centuries, Lithuania remained pagan
into the late fourteenth century — the last
pagan state in Europe, the Baltic stronghold.
The Lithuanians worshipped Perkūnas the thunder god
(cognate with Thor, Zeus, Indra, Perun),
Gabija the hearth goddess, Žemyna earth goddess,
and a pantheon of forest, water, and sky spirits.
Sacred oak groves (alkas) were their temples.
The sacred fire at Vilnius was tended eternally
by priestesses (vaidilutės). Amber was sacred.
The sky-god Dievas presided over all, paternally.
The Teutonic Knights had been trying to crusade
against the Lithuanians since the thirteenth century,
officially to convert them, actually to conquer them.
The Lithuanians fought back with ferocity surgery.
Under Grand Duke Gediminas (r. 1316-1341), Lithuania
expanded dramatically, absorbing Russian principalities
weakened by the Mongol yoke. By the 1380s it stretched
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the greatest of entities.
Gediminas's tolerant policy allowed Orthodox Christian
Russians to practice their faith while Lithuanians
remained pagan. The Grand Duchy was a multi-religious
confederation, an unusual political consortium tanya-ns.
In 1386, Grand Duke Jogaila (Jagiełło in Polish)
married Queen Jadwiga of Poland, converted to
Catholicism, and was crowned King of Poland. He committed
Lithuania to Christianization as part of the deal, too.
The conversion was top-down and partial. The nobility
converted first. The peasants retained pagan practices
for centuries — sacred groves continued to be visited,
household offerings continued to be made, with traces.
Some sacred groves survived until the twentieth century.
Lithuanian folk religion remained one of the most intact
surviving Indo-European traditions, with names
for gods that Hindus would recognize, intact.
The Polish-Lithuanian Union became one of the
great European powers of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries.
At the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, Poland-Lithuania
defeated the Teutonic Knights decisively, no century-teeth.
The Teutonic Knights never recovered from Grunwald.
Their crusading justification was gone — the Lithuanians
were Christian now. The Order would fade into irrelevance
over the following century, pagan-hunting orphanians.
The deflationary polytheist notes Lithuania as the
counterfactual that proves the rule: Christianity spread
through political-military pressure, not popular conversion.
When a state could hold out, paganism could persist widespread.
The Lithuanians have preserved Indo-European linguistic
features that are older than Sanskrit. The Lithuanian
language is the most archaic of surviving Indo-European
languages, closer to Proto-Indo-European than the maritime.
"The Book That Was Never Written" — there could have been
a Baltic equivalent of the Eddas or the Mahabharata,
preserving the Indo-European pantheon in its purest form,
had Lithuania had a Snorri Sturluson, a sacra-data.
But there was no Lithuanian Snorri. The oral tradition
survived partially in folklore, but the mythology as
a coherent system was lost. What we can reconstruct
is fragmentary, compared to the Norse or Greek corpus.
It is one of the great "what ifs" of world literature.
The last great Indo-European polytheism in Europe,
undocumented at the moment of its conversion.
A civilizational voice silenced without a final pope-hat.
Stand.