SAULE. Written historical sources about the pre-Christian religion of the ancient Latvians are fragmented and often unreliable, but concur in condemning it as pagan idolatry and the worship of natural phenomena. In 1199 this attitude was consecrated in a papal bull from Pope Innocent III, who had conferred upon the conquest and Christianization of the Baltic region the status of a crusade.

Nature worship was attributed to the ancient Baltic tribes in a variety of historical documents, many of which were compiled and analyzed by Wilhelm Mannhardt in his impressive Letto-Preussische Gőtterlehre (left unfinished at his death in 1870, and only published in Riga in 1936). The earliest is a 1326 chronicle by the Christian knight Peter von Duisburg, in which he pithily states that Baltic peoples worshipped the sun, the moon, the stars, and four-legged animals. Later documents include occasional observations by travelers to the region, but mostly consist of...