Indigenous spirituality draws its strength from what makes it “indigenous” — it comes from inside, not outside. It arises naturally on the land where we live, in the daily and sacred encounters people experience who live there. We breathe it in the air, and drink it in the water. No founder or prophet needs to arrive to announce its truth; no sacred scripture needs to proclaim its right way to live. These are other things, not “wrong”, but also not the same thing: they’re rooted in belief rather than practice.
We start where we are, by paying attention. That’s one reason so many common elements exist world-wide in indigenous forms of spirituality — why elders from different tribes, communities and nations can gather together and recognize in each other similar experiences of the power and spirit of place. They can speak with “one voice” because the Land does. It says similar things wherever we live. Listen! Do you hear its Song?
I’ve written before about Romuva, the indigenous Lithuanian spirituality. To the north of Lithuania and Latvia, due south of Finland across the Baltic, lies Estonia, with its own flavours in Maausk “land-faith” and Taarausk “taara-faith“.
Like many of the nations that once comprised the Soviet bloc, with the fall of communism and its official atheism, Estonia enjoyed a re-opening to older native traditions and a revitalization of its national culture. Because a significant part of indigenous spirituality is “paying attention to where you live”, it’s also possible for humans to ignore place for a time, but that doesn’t cause place to disappear or cease to matter. For the same reason, we can always re-connect: it’s still there.
Encounter and learn the local gestures and practices, and you keep finding links to practices elsewhere. Sometimes journalists who help raise awareness about such connections are themselves perplexed by them, even as they report them. “While pagan and folk religions may seem archaic to the wider world, they are thriving across the Baltic states” notes a writer for a 2019 Religion News article. But often the “archaic” is part of just what people are seeking — something profoundly, instinctively human that we’ve been doing for centuries and millennia, out of a timeless natural awareness that the sacred is all around us. In that sense, the “archaic” is indeed “thriving”:
“Hiis” means “sacred grove” in Estonian. Past another wooden board with a runic symbol carved on it — it is customary to knock on this board — is a green clearing where visitors have tied ribbons around trees and placed eggs at their bases as a gift and left the dark remnants of a fire.
“All that is brought there has to be eaten there or burned in the ritual fire,” said 28-year-old Tõnu Rehela, who has been a member of Estonia’s nature-oriented, neopagan Maausk community since he was 16. “Through the fire, the gods eat. Through the holy tree, the gods drink.”
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A Druid Way 