Hug a tree like a medieval pagan

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0:19Francis Young:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton. For this day. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus. Powered by Peloton IQ. With real-time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence. Helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at OnePeloton.com. spring is here and there's a whole new way to chai at starbucks that's made perfect for you choose your sweetness dial it up or keep things light add a touch of pistachio a hint of strawberry or vanilla or make it a spring classic with lavender because this season there's endless ways to chai at starbucks this episode is brought to you by indeed stop waiting around for the perfect candidate.

1:23Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hug a tree like a medieval Baltic pagan. That is a very specific lesson from history, but listen to my chat on this episode with Dr Francis Young, historian and folklorist and author of Silence of the Gods, the Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples, and you'll hopefully see how I've got to that point.

2:08Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier, or more productive lives.

2:28Francis, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. So before we dive into the lesson, can you like super quickly top line the story of the book, you know, quickly cover what you're talking about in that book? So Silence of the Gods is a history of the last peoples in Europe who didn't accept Christianity. from the end of the 14th century right the way through to about 1900. And it's an attempt to try and find out what those peoples actually believed, why they believed it, and why it was that they were so reluctant to adopt Christianity. But also it goes into their creativity, their religious and spiritual creativity.

3:13Okay, so when I emailed you to say, have you got a life lesson from history, you came back with a fascinating sentence to me, and I'll just read it out. Perhaps a personal life lesson I could talk about that's drawn from the book is that spirituality can be about creativity and personal choice, in contrast to the view that many people have that spirituality means being an adherent of this or that religion or path. So you've just sort of introduced us to that there in your earlier answer, but can you give us a bit more information on that, expand on what you're saying now? Well, I think when it comes to spirituality, quite a lot of people in the West and in Britain have an idea that that means buying into a pre-packaged offer.

3:54So you'll have people who will say that their spirituality is this or that path or this or that religion and so on. But when we actually delve into the history of spirituality in this marginalized kind of area of Europe, these edges of Europe, the far north and the far east, we find something which I think is a lot more interesting than these prepackaged spiritualities. And that is people who have effectively found themselves cut off from other religious traditions, and therefore they've forged their own, largely in a response to the environment in which they live. And I find that a rather refreshing perspective on religion and on spirituality, from which perhaps we can draw some life lessons for today.

4:46And I should say for anyone listening to this podcast, if you want to know a chapter and verse on the story that Francis looks in the book, then there's another podcast all about that on the main History Extra channel. So do listen to that for more information on that. I suppose one of the things here is that these people that you're describing, they weren't followers of religions of the book and they didn't have a literate culture to draw on, which means, I guess, that by default they weren't prescribed in what they were doing because it wasn't written down. Is that where the creativity comes in, in fact, that they can basically do what they want to do without having to refer to a set of rules?

5:24Yes, I think the creativity does come from the absence of a literate tradition, because clearly that pins down things like rituals and beliefs and stories in a way that an oral culture tends not to. But I think the creativity also arises from the challenges that they faced in that their traditions were constantly being disrupted by attempts to convert them to Christianity, none of which really worked until quite late on in the story. And so if you're constantly enduring this kind of cultural attrition where other people are trying to disrupt your beliefs, that cuts you off from your traditions.

6:05And you have a choice. You can either capitulate, or you can adopt the beliefs that are being forced upon you, or that people are trying to force upon you, or you can devise your own way. What I find really interesting about these people is that that's what they chose. They chose that they would find their own ways of being spiritual, and of exploring the spiritual aspect of what it is to be human, without capitulating to the demand that they become Christians. But also, in many cases, they seem to have lost their original or any kind of clear understanding of what their original religions were as well.

6:41So that, to me, is a really interesting instance of creativity. Can you describe any of these responses? Just give us a bit of a sense of colour of the sorts of things that they did. Well, for example, the Baltic peoples who lived on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea and include the Lithuanians and the Latvians had a longstanding tradition of worshipping sacred trees. Now, as a result of that, missionaries from the late 15th century onwards, they would carry out these campaigns of deliberately cutting down sacred trees. And these campaigns would carry on into the 18th century because there were so many of these sacred trees.

7:22But there's one remarkable source that describes how these people developed a ritual for making new sacred trees. Now, it seems highly unlikely that this was part of their original tradition, because the whole point of a tree being sacred is that it's very, very old. It's sacred because it's always been there and goes way, way back to your ancestors who also worshipped it. But if your sacred trees are constantly being cut down, you need a way of making new ones. And so, according to this account, people in Latvia would go to a sacred tree that had been cut down. They would recover a branch or some part of the tree, ask the permission of the tree that had been cut down to make a new sacred tree, go to another tree, it had to be of the same species as the original tree, ask the permission of that tree if it would become a new sacred tree, and then touch it with the branch of the tree that was originally sacred.

8:15that would make the new tree into a sacred one. And that to me is extraordinary. I mean, it shows that these are not dead religions. These religions are often portrayed as being relics. They're sort of lingering on into the Christian era well beyond where they should do. But actually, these people are just as capable of coming up with new ways of expressing their religion as anyone else. This is quite a big and difficult question. I'm sure you could get very deep into it. But what is the difference between spirituality and religion? And indeed, let me throw in another word, magic. Oh yeah, these are hard questions.

8:54I mean, I think in the way that people use the terms today in everyday speech, spirituality tends to refer to an awareness and connection with the numinous that doesn't necessarily have to have any link to organized religion. And religion, in the way that we tend to talk about it in everyday speech, in Britain at least, tends to be to do with some kind of organized worship of a deity. Now, I'm not sure that either of those is a complete and comprehensive definition, but rather than definition in these terms. Perhaps we need to talk about just the way that people use these terms in everyday speech.

9:38And magic, likewise, people in everyday speech seem to understand the difference between religion and magic as between the difference between a kind of worship and submission to a deity in religion, whereas magic is more about a kind of supernatural technology. So it's the idea that there are certain words or gestures or rituals that can be used in order to obtain favor or a particular effect for the person using them. And something that you do see in the latter stages of these pre-Christian religions in Europe is that they will become more like magic. So often the only people who remember the traditions will be magical practitioners within the community who will still carry out some of the old rituals, not as community acts, but as more seditious acts for clients who have asked for some kind of magical protection or something like that.

10:35And so on one interpretation, magic is kind of a more degenerate phase of religion, but that in itself is quite a laden way of looking at it. That's not necessarily true, but that's how some anthropologists have seen the relationship between magic and religion i i realize i've driven you into trying to delve into a what i'm sure is a very complicated topic um so thank you for coming up with that simple approach so i asked um ronald hudson professor ronald hudson uh this question in a in a previous episode of this life lesson series i thought maybe i'd ask you as well that ceremony of trying to recreate the sacred trees is clearly a response there's there's a need there for people to have those sacred trees.

11:19Is there something implicit in human nature that requires some element of spirituality? And going further, on this specific example, do you think our default is actually to go back to some sort of nature-based spirituality? Yeah, my personal view is that we are, by nature, spiritual beings. I think it's a basic aspect of who we are. But I think that how we express that spirituality will depend very much on the environment that we live in. And I think that when it comes to these peoples living on the edge of Europe, for the same reason that they didn't take to Christianity especially readily, they also developed their own religions.

12:01In other words, they didn't take to Christianity that well, because if you live a semi-nomadic life in subarctic Europe, a religion that developed in the cities of the ancient Near East probably won't mean that much to you because it's about an economy and about an environment and about a society totally alien to you. And so they come up with their own spiritual approaches, which are meaningful to them. For example, shamanism is something which seems to be very widely spread throughout the subarctic world, not just in Europe, but also in Siberia, which in fact is where the term shamanism comes from, and North America as well.

12:44And so it seems the entire Arctic, you can find some kind of commonalities in the religious traditions of shamanism. And likewise, what we might call animism, although it's a rather precise term, but the sense that the entire world is sacred, that individual natural things contain spirits, that the relationship that a hunter has with the forest is like a contract with a person. This is something which we find throughout hunter-gatherer societies, throughout the world. I'm only an expert on Europe. I can't speak to what it's like in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea. But my understanding is that these are fairly common themes that we find throughout hunter-gatherer societies.

13:28And in the same way, when you've got unusual things in the landscape, if, for example, you live in a landscape that is mostly without hills, but you find all these boulders that are randomly in the landscape, the reason they're there is because they're glacial erratics that were brought down in the last ice age, but of course nobody's going to know that in a pre-modern world, then those boulders that are just sitting there and are geological aliens, they are going to become a focus for sacrality. In the same way, it seems that amongst Europeans, and probably well beyond Europe, ancient trees seem to have this numinous quality that we are drawn to, that there is something about an ancient tree, a living being that is so much older than us, that has seen all the generations pass, that somehow that is in and of itself a focus of the sacred.

14:21Now, exactly why that is. I mean, you know, we could discuss that for a long time, but I think you do see these patterns again and again in Europe's indigenous religions. Well, I mean, that's reasonable, isn't it? You cannot beat a good old tree. I mean, it has a certain character to it, doesn't it? I mean, that goes without saying, really. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that many of the concerns that people have now about the environment, they actually can be connected to much older and more primal anxieties about deforestation, which are not just to do with climate change, but they are to do with a sense in which deforestation or the felling of trees or the transformation of your environment is somehow depriving you of an ancient place of the sacred.

15:10Now, look, if you're looking to be creative spiritually, but you're operating within a religion with prescribed rules and a book that lays down how you should live, that's a bit of a a problem, isn't it? Because that's the road to heresy or anathema if you go against what you're supposed to be doing. So how can you be spiritually creative if you adhere to a religion that's already there? Well, I think it depends what religion it is, and it depends what approach you take to authority within a faith. I think a lot of us have a view of Christianity, for example, that is quite formed by 19th century Protestantism.

15:50And 19th century Protestantism was deeply focused on questions of civility and behaving in a socially acceptable way and ensuring that you were socially respectable. You know, all these kind of, yeah, an authoritarian spirituality that was also quite focused on disenchanting the rest of the world in the sense that only a Christian way of looking at spirituality or enchantment or the natural world was acceptable. But that's not the only tradition within Christianity. When you look, for example, at the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, there's something which is a lot harder to pin down in his approach to the natural world and the infusion of the divine into the natural world.

16:38So I think even within the religions of the book, you can find these different ways of looking at the world. And of course, there are now religions in the UK like Hinduism, which have profoundly different approaches to authority and to the interaction of the supernatural with the natural. And of course, many people who follow no religion at all, and yet they would identify as spiritual, but not religious. So I think that there is a great deal of potential in the modern world for going beyond these kind of rather stereotyped views of what religion ought to look like. So let's just take that a little bit deeper if we can.

17:19So people who are listening, watching this podcast, there'll be people from a range of views, people who are members of the Church of England through to people for which established religion has absolutely no resonance whatsoever. What can they take from this conversation? What would creative spirituality mean to them? How would it help their day-to-day, do you think? Well, I suppose the message that I'd really like to put across is that you can think about spirituality in a more personally creative way than simply going through a kind of shopping list and deciding, right, which of these spiritualities that I've found online or which that I found in this encyclopedia or that I found in my local area or whatever, which one should I go with?

18:03You can be a bit more creative than that. And I think that these pre-Christian peoples in early modern Europe give us a good example of that, because they created something which I would call found religions. Found religions as in spiritualities or religions, whichever word you want to use, that are fashioned from the materials that they found around them. So in other words, they looked around their environment and they thought, where is the focus for the sacred? What can I see around me? What can I experience around me that seems out of the ordinary, that seems special and sacred to me? And I think that's something which most people can identify with, perhaps not in a religious way, but they will have memories of a particular place that's very significant to them, or perhaps a particular kind of tree which they find particularly beautiful or have a personal connection to, places which have some kind of numinous power.

19:00And what if you didn't just leave that in the realm of a happy and pleasant memory? What if you actually imbued that with the sacred? What if you went that extra step of fashioning your own way of thinking about what is sacred, what is a conduit for the divine? And that's what these peoples did. And they took elements from conventional religion. They would take elements from Christianity, because that was the religion that they encountered most frequently. But they combined it into a whole, which was something else. It was something that existed as a religion in its own right, however briefly.

19:38But it was. It was their own creation, their own found religion. That is a beautifully put way of thinking about it. Thank you for that. I wonder, before we finish, whether there's anything that you do in your day-to-day life that draws on your experience of the past. Now, I know that you, well, I think you're a lay reader in the Church of England. That's right, is it not? Yes, that's correct. So your worldview is informed by that, I'm sure. But is there anything that you do which draws on your knowledge of the past? And particularly, you're a historian of the Baltic area and northern and eastern parts of Europe, but also you're a historian of religion and folklore and all that way.

20:18You're a historian of lots of things, actually. So you've got lots of different tentacles you might put on. Is there anything that informs your day to day? Yeah, well, I mean, I really enjoy finding out about these different ways of interacting with the spiritual and interacting with the divine. And I don't think that we have all the answers, even when we have faith, as I do, in revealed scriptures. I am a Christian personally. and yet I don't think that we can say that the created world is without its revelations as well and there's a long tradition within Christianity of taking that view and I think that we disregard the approaches of indigenous peoples at our peril because they may bring us closer to the origins of human religiosity or human spirituality so I think that there is an element of us which is informed by our particular tradition that we grew up in or that we became convinced of.

21:20And yet, there's also a deeper element of what it is to be a spiritual human being, which I think can go beyond that. But I think that, yeah, I would encourage people to be creative and to explore the potential of spirituality as something which they fashion themselves, as well as something which you might inherit from a tradition. Brilliant. Well, Francis Young, thank you very much for that very interesting life lesson from history. Thank you very much.

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