The Godkeepers

In a wooden cabinet in the National Library of Latvia sit two hundred and seventeen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six folk songs — dainas — hand-copied onto slips of paper by a single man over thirty-seven years. Krišjānis Barons, the "father of dainas," did not know he was assembling a scripture. He thought he was preserving folklore.

A generation later, a painter and archaeologist named Ernests Brastiņš read the dainas and saw what Barons had collected: not just songs, but a complete theology. The gods were in the songs. The ethics were in the songs. The cosmology, the seasonal calendar, the understanding of birth and death and the relationship between the human and the sacred — all of it, encoded in rhyming quatrains sung by women at spinning wheels and men at plowing fields. Brastiņš said: this is not folklore. This is religion. He called the religion Dievturība — "godkeeping" — and the practitioners Dievturi — "those who hold to God."

The Soviet Union arrested him in 1940. He died in a labor camp in 1942. The movement he founded was banned. Its publications were confiscated. Its sacred groves were cut for lumber. For fifty years, Dievturība existed only in exile — in displaced-persons camps in Germany, in Latvian communities in the United States, Canada, Australia — and in the songs themselves, which could not be silenced because they were too deeply woven into what it meant to be Latvian.

After 1991, the Dievturi came home. They are a small community — perhaps a few thousand — in a country where the question of what it means to be Latvian has never been more urgent. Their answer is the oldest one available: listen to the songs.

I. The Name

Dievturība (pronounced roughly DYEV-too-REE-bah) is a compound of two Latvian words: Dievs — God — and turēt — to hold, to keep. The literal meaning is "godkeeping." The practitioners are Dievturi — "godkeepers," those who hold to God.

The name was coined by Ernests Brastiņš in the 1920s to describe what he believed was not a new religion but the oldest one in Latvia — the indigenous spiritual tradition encoded in the dainas (folk songs), preserved in folk customs, and visible in the archaeological record. For Brastiņš, the Dievturi were not founders but recoverers. They were not creating a religion. They were recognizing one that had never died.

The choice of Dievs as the root is significant. Dievs is not a sectarian term — it is the standard Latvian word for God, used by Christians and pagans alike. Its roots are Indo-European: cognate with Lithuanian Dievas, Sanskrit deva, Latin deus, Greek Zeus, Old English Tīw. By anchoring the movement in the word for God itself, Brastiņš claimed the entire Latvian spiritual inheritance, asserting that the God the Latvians always meant when they said Dievs was not the Christian deity but the sky-father of the dainas — the God who rides a grey horse across the sky, who has a farmstead on the hill, who drinks beer at the summer solstice with Pērkons and Jānis.

The name carries a political charge: if the original meaning of "God" in Latvian is pre-Christian, then Christianity is the deviation, not the norm. The Dievturi are not returning to something exotic. They are returning to what was always there.

II. A Million Songs

The foundation of Dievturība — its scripture, its theology, its liturgy — is the daina.

A daina (Latvian: daina, plural: dainas) is a short lyric folk song, typically a quatrain of trochaic verse with a distinctive rhythm. Latvian dainas are among the most studied folk song traditions in the world, and for good reason: the sheer volume is staggering. Over 1.2 million dainas have been recorded by collectors from the eighteenth century to the present. No European nation has a comparable per-capita treasury of folk poetry.

The single most important collection is the Dainu skapis — the Cabinet of Dainas — assembled by Krišjānis Barons (1835–1923), a mathematician, journalist, and folklorist who spent thirty-seven years (1878–1915) collecting, classifying, and transcribing dainas onto slips of paper, which he organized in a purpose-built wooden cabinet with seventy drawers. The cabinet contains 217,996 dainas — each one hand-written, classified by subject matter, cross-referenced with variants. It is a monument to one person's devotion to a cultural inheritance he believed was dying.

The Dainu skapis was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2001 — recognition that what Barons built was not merely a folklore collection but a document of world civilization.

For the Dievturi, the dainas are what the Vedas are to Hinduism or the Torah is to Judaism: the primary source of revelation, transmitted orally across centuries, collected in written form as a rescue operation against forgetting. The difference is that no priesthood guarded them. The dainas belong to everyone. They were sung by farmers, fishermen, weavers, mothers, children. The theology was distributed, democratic, embedded in daily life. You did not need to read to know it. You only needed to sing.

Brastiņš's insight — his founding act — was to read the dainas not as folklore but as religion. He classified the gods mentioned in them, mapped their relationships, identified ethical principles, and argued that the dainas contained a coherent worldview: a theology of nature, work, fate, and the sacred that predated Christianity by millennia and had survived seven centuries of Christian overlay because it was too beautiful and too deeply embedded to uproot.

The dainas found their greatest scholarly advocate in an unlikely figure: Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (b. 1937), a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Montreal who spent decades studying the solar mythology encoded in the dainas — the songs of Saule, the sun goddess. Vīķe-Freiberga's research demonstrated the deep structural coherence of the daina tradition — that these were not random folk verses but a living mythological system. In 1999, she returned to Latvia and became the country's president (1999–2007) — the scholar of the old songs leading the new republic. Her presidency was itself a kind of daina: the song that bridges the ancient and the modern, the exile and the homeland, the sacred and the political.

III. The Gods of the Dainas

Latvian folk religion, as preserved in the dainas and folk customs, presents a pantheon that belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European family — closely related to Lithuanian religion, but with its own distinctive features.

Dievs — the supreme deity, the sky father. In the dainas, Dievs is not an abstract absolute but a personal god who participates in the world. He rides a grey horse. He has a farmstead on a hill. He wears a grey coat. He walks among his people at festival time, joining the celebrations, blessing the crops, dancing at weddings. This anthropomorphism is not naïve — it is a theology that insists the sacred is not separate from the ordinary. God farms. God drinks beer. God cares about the harvest. The distance between heaven and earth, in the Latvian worldview, is the distance between the top of the hill and the bottom.

Māra — the great goddess, and arguably the most important deity in Latvian folk religion. Māra is the earth, the water, the cow, the grave. She is the Mother — not in the abstract sense of a principle, but in the concrete sense of the one who gives, nourishes, and receives back. In Latvian folk belief, Māra's domain includes cattle (she is the protector of cows), childbirth, death, and the sea. Newborn infants were placed on the earth — Māra's body — as a ritual of first contact. The dead were returned to the earth — Māra's embrace. She is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, expressed not in theology but in gesture.

The relationship between Dievs and Māra maps roughly onto sky and earth, spirit and matter, but the dainas resist clean dualism. Dievs and Māra are not opposed. They are the two halves of a complete world. Some scholars, following the dainas' own logic, see Māra as the more primordial of the two — the ground from which Dievs rises, the body that precedes the mind. Others argue this overstates a matriarchal reading. The dainas themselves present both as necessary, both as active, both as present.

Laima — the goddess of fate, shared with Lithuanian tradition (where she bears the same name). Laima determines destiny at birth — she spins the thread of each person's life, measures its length, and decrees its quality. She is powerful and not always kind. A hard fate is Laima's decree, and even Dievs cannot undo what Laima has spun. In the dainas, women address Laima more often than any other deity — at birth, at marriage, at death, at every turning point where fate is in play.

Pērkons — the thunder god, cognate with Lithuanian Perkūnas, Slavic Perun, and potentially related to Norse Þórr through the Proto-Indo-European *Perkʷunos. Pērkons is the striker, the purifier, the enforcer of cosmic and moral order. His weapon is the thunderbolt; his tree is the oak. He strikes the devil (velns), he clears the air, he brings the rain that feeds the crops. In the dainas, Pērkons is loud, fierce, and just — the god you invoke when the natural order has been violated.

Saule — the sun goddess. Like Lithuanian Saulė, the Latvian sun is female — one of the most archaic features of Baltic mythology, preserved against the tendency of later Indo-European cultures to masculinize the sun. Saule drives her chariot across the sky, her golden cloak streaming behind her. She is beauty, warmth, generosity. The midsummer festival — Jāņi — is above all a celebration of Saule at her zenith, the longest day, the sun that barely sets.

Jānis — a complex figure associated with the midsummer solstice. In the dainas, Jānis is a deity of fertility, growth, and celebration who appears once a year at midsummer and then disappears. Whether Jānis is an ancient god, a personification of the solstice itself, or a later development influenced by Christian St. John's Day is debated. For the Dievturi, Jānis belongs to the oldest layer — the solstice fire was burning long before anyone called it St. John's.

IV. The Founder

Ernests Brastiņš (1892–1942) was a man who lived several lives in one: painter, art theorist, archaeologist, religious visionary, and martyr.

Born in Liepāja on the Baltic coast, Brastiņš studied art in Riga and St. Petersburg before serving in the Latvian War of Independence (1918–1920). In the newly independent Latvia of the 1920s, he undertook an extraordinary archaeological project: the systematic mapping and documentation of Latvia's hillforts (pilskalni) — the pre-Christian fortified sites scattered across the Latvian landscape. He personally surveyed and documented hundreds of hillforts, publishing his findings in a multi-volume work, Latvijas pilskalni (1923–1928). The hillfort project was simultaneously scientific and romantic: Brastiņš was not merely cataloguing ruins. He was mapping the sacred geography of a lost civilization.

The archaeology led to the revelation. If the hillforts were the body of the old religion, the dainas were its voice. Brastiņš began to read the dainas systematically — not as quaint folklore but as theological texts. He identified the gods, their relationships, their attributes. He mapped the ethical system: the emphasis on darbs (work) as sacred, daba (nature) as sacred, Dievs (God) as immanent in both. He saw a coherent worldview that had been invisible because everyone had been looking at it through Christian lenses.

In the mid-1920s, Brastiņš formally organized the Dievturi movement. He published a newspaper, Labietis ("The Noble One"), and wrote foundational texts articulating the Dievturi worldview. He conducted the first modern Dievturi ceremonies — outdoor gatherings at significant hillforts and sacred sites, centered on fire, song, and the recitation of dainas.

Brastiņš was not a gentle scholar. He was combative, polemical, and politically engaged. He argued publicly against the dominant position of the Lutheran and Catholic churches in Latvian public life. He insisted that Latvian national identity was inseparable from the pre-Christian religion and that the churches were colonial imports. These arguments made him enemies in the religious establishment and allies in the nationalist movement — a double-edged alignment that would shape the movement's legacy.

When the Soviet Union occupied Latvia in 1940, Brastiņš was arrested. He was deported to a forced labor camp. He died there in 1942, at the age of forty-nine.

Brastiņš left behind a body of work — archaeological, artistic, and religious — that would outlive the system that killed him. The hillforts he mapped are still there. The dainas he interpreted are still sung. The movement he founded would go underground, survive in exile, and return.

V. God, Nature, Work

The Dievturi worldview is sometimes summarized in three words: Dievs, Daba, Darbs — God, Nature, Work. The triad is not a creed but a lens: reality is sacred (Dievs), expressed in the natural world (Daba), and participated in through purposeful action (Darbs).

Dievs — God is not transcendent in the Christian sense. God is not above the world, judging it. God is in the world, working in it. The dainas' image of Dievs as a farmer — sowing, plowing, harvesting alongside his people — is not metaphor. It is theology. The sacred is not elsewhere. It is here, in the field, in the forest, in the river, in the rain.

Daba — Nature is not creation in the sense of something made by a separate creator. Nature is the body of the sacred. The rivers, the trees, the animals, the seasons — these are not symbols of God but expressions of God. Latvian folk religion treats the natural world with a reverence that modern environmentalism recognizes but cannot fully replicate, because the reverence is not based on ecological reasoning but on religious experience. The oak is not important because it produces oxygen. The oak is important because Pērkons lives in it.

Darbs — Work is not labor in the alienated sense. Work is participation in the sacred order. The farmer who plows participates in Dievs's plowing. The weaver who spins participates in Laima's spinning. The mother who tends the hearth fire participates in the fire that holds the world together. In the dainas, work is never cursed. It is hard — the songs are honest about the aching back, the early morning, the cold rain — but it is meaningful, because it connects the worker to the pattern that holds everything.

This is the Dievturi ethic: the sacred is found not in withdrawal from the world but in engagement with it. There are no monks in Dievturība. There is no asceticism. The path to the sacred runs through the field, the workshop, the kitchen, the bed. The holiest person is not the one who prays most but the one who works most attentively — who sees the sacred in the grain, hears it in the song, tends it in the fire.

The theology is deliberately unsystematic. Brastiņš and his successors resisted the temptation to build a catechism. The dainas are the scripture, and the dainas are ambiguous, contradictory, multivocal — the way oral tradition always is. A daina about Laima's cruelty sits beside a daina about Laima's tenderness. Both are true. The Dievturi do not resolve these contradictions. They hold them — the way a song holds a melody and a countermelody at once.

VI. The Singing Revolution

Latvia's relationship with song is not incidental. It is constitutive.

The Latvian Song Festival (Vispārējie latviešu Dziesmu svētki) has been held since 1873 — a massive choral gathering that brings together tens of thousands of singers and hundreds of thousands of spectators. The festival is inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. It is, along with the Estonian and Lithuanian equivalents, one of the defining cultural institutions of the Baltic nations.

The song festivals matter for the Dievturi because the dainas were always at the center of them. Even under Soviet rule, when the festivals were officially organized to celebrate Soviet achievements, the singers sang the old songs. The dainas could not be banned because they were the national identity. You could not have a Latvian song festival without Latvian songs, and you could not sing Latvian songs without singing about Dievs and Māra and Laima and the solstice fire.

In 1988, during the glasnost era, the Baltic nations produced one of the most extraordinary nonviolent liberation movements in history. On August 23, 1989, nearly two million people formed a human chain — the Baltic Way — stretching 675 kilometers from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, linking the three Baltic capitals on the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had delivered them to Stalin. They sang. The broader movement was called the Singing Revolution, and it worked: by 1991, all three Baltic states were independent.

For the Dievturi, the Singing Revolution was not just a political event. It was a spiritual one. The songs that had carried the old gods through seven centuries of Christianity and five decades of Soviet atheism now carried a nation to freedom. The dainas were not just cultural artifacts. They were power. Laima had spun a new fate. Pērkons had struck.

VII. The Soviet Winter

The Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 was a catastrophe for the Dievturi movement.

Brastiņš was arrested and deported. His followers were scattered. Dievturi publications were confiscated and destroyed. The movement's organizational structures were dissolved. Sacred groves and hillfort sites were, in some cases, deliberately damaged — though more often they were simply neglected, which in the Soviet system amounted to the same thing.

The Soviet policy toward religion was theoretically atheist but practically selective. The Lutheran and Catholic churches were allowed to exist under heavy surveillance and control — they were too large and too international to simply eradicate. Indigenous religious movements like Dievturība were smaller, more vulnerable, and more politically dangerous: they linked religion to national identity at a time when national identity was being systematically suppressed.

During the Soviet period, the Dievturi movement survived in two places: exile and silence.

The exile communities were the more visible. Hundreds of thousands of Latvians fled westward during World War II, and among them were Dievturi practitioners who carried the tradition to displaced-persons camps in Germany and eventually to immigrant communities in the United States (particularly Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis), Canada (Toronto), Australia (Melbourne), and Sweden. In exile, the Dievturi maintained seasonal celebrations, published pamphlets and journals, and kept the theology alive in small circles. It was a diminished life — the hillforts were an ocean away, the sacred groves were under Soviet concrete, the dainas were sung in apartments instead of fields — but it was life.

The silence at home was more complex. Individual Latvians continued to observe folk customs that were functionally Dievturi practices — the midsummer Jāņi celebration, the winter solstice, the treatment of nature as sacred — without calling them by any religious name. The dainas continued to be sung, studied, and cherished, because Latvian folk culture was one of the few expressions of national identity the Soviet system permitted. The regime wanted docile folk dancers, not religious revivalists, but the line between the two was thinner than the censors understood.

VIII. The Revival

Latvia regained its independence on August 21, 1991. The Dievturi came home.

The movement was re-established almost immediately. Even before formal independence, a new Dievturi organization was founded in Riga, led by practitioners who had maintained the tradition quietly during the Soviet years and by exiles who returned. The first public Dievturi ceremonies in half a century were held at hillforts that Brastiņš himself had mapped.

The revival faced the challenge every destroyed tradition faces: how much had survived? The theology was preserved in the dainas, which had never been lost. The scholarly framework was preserved in Brastiņš's writings, which had been maintained in exile. But the living practice — the embodied knowledge of how to conduct a ceremony, how to tend a sacred fire, how to mark a birth or a death or a marriage in the Dievturi way — had been interrupted. The exile communities had maintained some practices. Home practitioners had maintained others. But no one had the complete picture.

The Dievturi responded by returning to the source: the dainas. If the songs encoded the religion, then the songs could regenerate it. This is the Dievturi's strongest claim to legitimacy: they are not inventing ceremonies from speculation. They are reading the instructions embedded in the oldest continuous literary tradition in the country.

In the post-independence period, Dievturība was officially registered as a religious organization in Latvia. The movement has sought recognition as one of Latvia's traditional religions — a legal status that carries practical benefits including the right to conduct legally binding marriages and access to public education. The established churches — Lutheran and Catholic — have resisted the expansion of the "traditional" category. The political debate is ongoing.

The relationship with the Latvian state is more comfortable than Romuva's relationship with Lithuania has been, partly because Latvia's broader cultural identity is even more explicitly tied to the dainas and the song tradition. But it is not without friction. The Dievturi represent a challenge to the dominant Christian narrative: if the Latvians' original religion is indigenous and pre-Christian, then the churches' claim to represent Latvian spiritual identity is historically contingent, not natural.

IX. Practice Today

Dievturi practice is organized around the seasonal calendar — the same calendar that the dainas describe and that Latvian folk custom has observed for centuries.

Jāņi (Midsummer, around June 23–24) is the high point of the Dievturi year and the most important secular holiday in Latvia. Even Latvians who have no interest in Dievturība celebrate Jāņi — gathering in the countryside, lighting bonfires, singing the Jāņu dziesmas (midsummer songs), weaving wreaths of oak leaves and flowers, eating Jāņu cheese, drinking beer, and staying awake through the shortest night to greet the sunrise. For the Dievturi, the folk customs ARE the religious observance. There is no layer of "sacred" on top of the "secular." The bonfire is the prayer. The wreath is the blessing. The song is the liturgy.

Meteņi (the late winter celebration marking the turn toward spring), Mārtiņi (the autumn feast associated with Māra and the closing of the agricultural year), and Ziemassvētki (the winter solstice, overlapping with Christmas) round out the major festivals. Each is celebrated with fire, song, food, and outdoor gathering — preferably at a significant natural site.

Individual and family practice is less formalized. The Dievturi worldview does not require a temple or a priest. The sacred is in the home — in the hearth, in the garden, in the relationship with the land. Daily practice may include: tending a household fire or candle with intention, observing the seasons, speaking to the natural world (a practice the dainas describe as normal, not eccentric), and singing — always singing.

Lifecycle rites — birth ceremonies, coming-of-age rites, weddings, and funerals — are conducted by Dievturi leaders, sometimes at hillforts or sacred natural sites. The rites draw on the dainas for language and structure. A Dievturi wedding may include the binding of hands with a woven sash, the lighting of a fire, the singing of specific wedding dainas, and the invocation of Laima to bless the couple's fate.

The community is small. Census data suggest a few thousand self-identified Dievturi in Latvia, with additional communities in the diaspora. The actual number of people whose worldview is shaped by the dainas and the Dievturi ethic — even if they do not formally belong — is certainly larger. The movement's influence exceeds its membership.

X. Shadows

Dievturība carries shadows that must be named honestly.

Nationalism. The movement was born in the crucible of Latvian national awakening, and the link between religion and national identity has never been severed. Brastiņš himself argued that Dievturība was the authentic Latvian religion and that Christianity was a foreign imposition. This argument has obvious appeal to nationalists — and in a country where approximately a quarter of the population is ethnic Russian (a legacy of Soviet-era migration), the equation of Latvian identity with a pre-Christian religion can shade into ethnic exclusivism. Not all Dievturi are nationalists. The theology itself is universalist — Dievs is the God of all, not just of Latvians. But the movement exists within a political landscape where questions of identity, language, and belonging are charged, and not everyone who invokes the old gods does so with pure motives.

Reconstruction. The Dievturi claim continuity with pre-Christian Latvian religion through the dainas. Scholars are more cautious. The dainas are genuine — no one disputes that. But interpreting lyric poetry as systematic theology requires interpretive choices, and those choices are not neutral. Brastiņš read the dainas through a romantic-nationalist lens. Later Dievturi have read them through ecological, feminist, or psychological lenses. The dainas are capacious enough to sustain all these readings, but none of them are simply "what the dainas say." The gap between the living tradition of the pre-Christian Balts — which we cannot access directly — and the modern Dievturi reconstruction is real, even if the dainas bridge it more convincingly than most revival movements can claim.

Small numbers. A few thousand practitioners in a country of under two million. The Dievturi are demographically marginal. Whether the movement will grow, stabilize, or decline is an open question. Latvia's population is shrinking due to emigration and low birth rates. The young Latvians who might be drawn to Dievturība are also the ones most likely to move to Dublin or Berlin. The movement's survival may depend on whether the theology of Dievs, Daba, Darbs can speak to a generation that is more cosmopolitan and less rooted in the land than any previous one.

The Brastiņš legacy. Brastiņš was a martyr — killed by the Soviet Union for being Latvian and for leading a movement the regime deemed dangerous. But he was also a man of his time, with the limitations of his time. His writings contain assumptions about national and cultural identity that sit uncomfortably in a twenty-first-century context. His archaeology was pioneering but not always rigorous by modern standards. The movement must decide how to honor its founder without being trapped by his historical moment — a challenge every tradition with a charismatic founder eventually faces.

Relationship with Romuva. The Latvian and Lithuanian pagan revivals are sister movements — parallel traditions sharing the same Baltic religious substrate. They cooperate: Romuva's World Congress of Ethnic Religions (founded 1998) includes Dievturi participation. But they are also distinct, and the relationship is not without creative tension. The Lithuanians have the deeper scholarly tradition (Gimbutas, Greimas, Beresnevičius). The Latvians have the larger song collection (the Dainu skapis dwarfs even Lithuania's extraordinary folk song corpus). The question of whether Baltic paganism is one tradition or two has no settled answer.

XI. The Hearth and the Song

What keeps Dievturība alive is what has always kept it alive: the songs and the fire.

The Dainu skapis sits in the National Library of Latvia — Barons's wooden cabinet with its 217,996 quatrains. But the dainas are not in the cabinet. They are in the voices of the people who sing them — at Jāņi, at weddings, at funerals, at kitchen tables, in the car, in the shower. They are in the language itself: Latvian is saturated with the worldview the dainas encode. Every Latvian who speaks of liktenis (fate) or daba (nature) or uses a proverb from the dainas is, in some measure, practicing the old religion without knowing it.

The fire is simpler. You light it. You tend it. You sit around it. You sing. The bonfire at Jāņi, when the whole country seems to be ablaze with midsummer fires, is one of the largest ongoing pagan observances in Europe — whether the people around the fire call themselves Dievturi or not.

This is the Dievturi's deepest argument: the religion never died because it was never separate from the culture. Christianity was laid over it like a second skin, but the first skin was still there — in the songs, in the customs, in the names of the months, in the way Latvians relate to the forest and the river and the solstice. The Dievturi are not reviving something dead. They are naming something that was always alive.

Whether this argument is fully persuasive depends on where you draw the line between "religion" and "culture." The distinction matters to scholars and to bureaucrats deciding whether to grant legal recognition. It matters less to the woman lighting a fire at Jāņi and singing a song her grandmother sang and her grandmother's grandmother sang and that the Dainu skapis preserves from a time before anyone drew lines between the sacred and the ordinary.

The fire burns. The song continues. The godkeepers hold.

Profile researched and written by Dorje for the Good Works Project. Sources include the work of Krišjānis Barons, Ernests Brastiņš, Haralds Biezais, and Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.

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