Hug a tree like a pagan from the margins of Europe

I used to be able to say, unequivocally and without hesitation, that I’d never hugged a tree. I can’t do that any more, and it’s all Francis Young’s fault. He told me to be creative with my spirituality, and I took him at his word.

Dr Young is a historian and folklorist specialising in the history of religion and belief, and also particular expert on the Baltic. With my inaugural arboreal embrace, I was following in the footsteps of the people that Francis has been studying in his most recent book, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2025). It’s a cracking read, and a revelation if, like me, you could do with being much better informed about the historical and religious story of the peoples living in the geographical northern and eastern margins of Europe.

In Silence of the Gods, Francis outlines how in the Baltic region, parts of the far north towards the Arctic, and an area of what’s now Russia today, non-Christian practices persisted for centuries after the church had become established across the rest of the continent. It wasn’t until 1387, as he explains, that Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe, became officially Christian.

Even after this, non-Christian practices persisted for centuries in the region, certainly into the 18th century, and in some places, to the present day. Given the wide spread of space and time we’re talking about, you won’t be surprised to hear that the actual nature of these pagan practices was varied, from shamanism in the far north, to polytheistic veneration of pantheons of multiple gods and spirits, to animism, and to worship of sacred places.

Woodland wonder

On that latter point, these sacred places often involved woodland: forests, groves and clearings, or particular trees. Indeed, Francis explained to me that in Lithuania the celebration of trees continues to be a national obsession to this day. Seeing wonder in woods is not something unique to the Baltic though – it’s a broader human condition.

“There is something about an ancient tree, a living being that is so much older than us, and has seen all the generations pass. Somehow that is in and of itself a focus of the sacred. I think you see these patterns again and again in Europe's indigenous religions,” explains Francis. “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 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.”

Back to the Baltic countries, the question is “why did these places and people not succumb to the temptation of Christianity like the rest of Europe?”. Francis’s answer is that it’s partly a language barrier, and partly a factor of geographical remoteness and sparsity of population. But also, it’s because many of the people in these areas lived a less settled way of life, a form of nomadic agriculture, which meant that a religion born of settled city-states didn’t hold much appeal.

That all meant that for centuries across Europe, there were people who were able to engage with their spirituality in a much more individual and creative way than generally was the case elsewhere on the continent. Where the Christian rules of religious observance were written down, it was harder for people to be inventive in their approach to worship.

Now, that’s very interesting, but what can we learn from this? Does this offer any insights into ways that we might live happier, or maybe more meaningful lives today? You can guess the answer is yes, because otherwise this article would end in a disappointingly abrupt way around about now.

Spiritual societies

“When we delve into the history of spirituality in this marginalised area of Europe, 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,” says Francis. “I find that a rather refreshing perspective on religion, and on spirituality, from which perhaps we can draw some life lessons for today.”

People who have effectively found themselves cut off from other religious traditions have forged their own, largely in a response to the environment in which they live

Before we carry on, it’s probably worth clarifying the difference between spirituality and religion. There are many answers to that, but in Francis’s view, it’s this: “Spirituality tends to refer to an awareness and connection with the numinous that does not necessarily have to have any link to organised 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 organised worship of a deity.”

So when we’re talking about these non-Christian people in northern Europe, spirituality seems a more appropriate word. How that spirituality was actually manifested is hard to get at, because in the absence of a literate tradition, we are relying on second-hand accounts of their practices from Christian writers. Clearly we should be mindful that we’re looking through that lens. The fact that literacy wasn’t embedded in their cultures is a key element in the story though, according to Francis:

“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. If you are constantly enduring this kind of cultural attrition, you have a choice: you can capitulate, or you can devise your own way. What I find really interesting about these people is that they chose to find their own ways of being spiritual.”

Sacred trees

It seems that the spirituality of these non-Christian people was malleable and reactive, able to flex under pressure from external sources. Let’s go back to these sacred trees. From the late 15th century onwards, Christian missionaries recognised that there were still people worshipping trees in the Baltics, and so chopped them down to put a stop to it. That didn’t work.

“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 worship it. But if your sacred trees are constantly being cut down, you need a way of making new ones,” explains Francis. “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, and ask the permission of the tree that had been cut down to make a new sacred tree. It had to be of the same species as the original tree. They would 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. That would make the new tree into a sacred one. And that, to me is extraordinary.”

Becoming a tree-hugger

Clearly a big part of the story is the persistent importance of the veneration of the natural world to these people. That’s something that has been lost, or at least denuded, in the Christian west, for want of a better way of describing it. I’m not a practising Christian, but I’ve read Tom Holland’s Dominion, and I buy into the idea that western morality and values are the inescapable product of Christianity. If I want to break free of that and find a bit of personal, creative, spirituality, it feels like trees are the way to go, in the spirit of Francis’s Latvian branch communicants.

And thus, I went and hugged a tree. It wasn’t a great tree or an ancient tree. And it wasn’t even my favourite tree, the Scots Pine, which I’ve always found to have a particularly satisfying shape. It was an oak tree, in a little woodland down the road from my house. I talked to it a bit and asked it if it minded me hugging it. It didn’t reply. It’s a tree after all. But it didn’t drop any acorns on my head so I think we were in accord. I quite enjoyed hugging it. It was a warm day, and the experience was somewhat cooling. It was pleasantly scratchy on my face. I lingered for a minute or two in a woody embrace, and thought about stuff that was on my mind. I pondered on the strength of the trunk and the roots that no doubt extended some distance beneath my feet.

“Most people 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,” suggests Francis. “And 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?”

Most people will have memories of a particular place that's very significant to them, or perhaps a particular kind of tree that they find particularly beautiful

I didn’t get as far as imbuing my hugging tree with sacrality, but I think it was a nice ritual (I’ve got an upcoming article in this series on the importance of ritual, so I’ll come back to that). I felt a little bit of a sense of arboreal power, which just made me reflect on myself a little more deeply than I ordinarily might. If that’s creative spirituality, I think it’s quite helpful. It certainly wasn’t a bad thing.

This builds on something that Professor Ronald Hutton told me in an earlier Life Lesson from History, when he opined that now is the perfect time for us to DIY our own religions, and that’s the benefit we get from living in a modern disenchanted world. I got a similar sense from Francis: “You can think about spirituality in a more personally creative way than simply going through a kind of shopping list and deciding ‘which of these spiritualities that I found online should I go with?’. 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.”

So the tradition I’m fashioning is to hug a tree. It’s not a new idea, I know. I’m not the first tree-hugger. But it gave me something a bit different, and maybe I’ll refine the ritual as time goes on. I salute the historical peoples of the pagan north and east of Europe, and Dr Francis Young, for reminding me that spirituality is in our gift to explore and fashion as we wish. Now, more than ever, we need to find connection with the natural world around us. So hug a tree, if you like, or do something else, but be spiritually creative and curious, and see where it takes you.

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