By Alexandra Lilienthal
Who is Taara?
In 1925, five years after the end of the independence war1, a group of people came together in the Estonian capital to discuss the spiritual and cultural autonomy of Estonia. It was their belief that the main ingredient of such independence is religion. However, for a new country like Estonia, a new religion must emerge – one informed by science and the beliefs of “the innocent pagan” before the Northern Crusaders slaved our ancestors for 700 years. That grand project, briefly interrupted by Russian occupation, has 1058 members as of 2021.
As any other Estonian, I have visited hiid(pl – hiied), the places of power in nature where my ancestors connected with the cosmic Taara – the essence of everything and in everything, bringing the earth around you alive. However, today, these spaces hold little spiritual meaning to most people that visit them.
My first real contact with the believers of Taara was on a research trip for my New Age religions course in 2022, when I visited one of their meetings. Held in a new conference space in the second largest city in Estonia, the event could not have been more removed from the earth itself. However, from speaker to speaker, using no religious vocabulary and at times actively resisting it, the importance of our connection to the earth in spiritual, cultural, national, economic and political ways was addressed again and again. Spirituality was woven into stories of discovery, resistance and celebration of diversity in ways that left me questioning how can these people not call themselves religious, when they are so fundamentally spiritual?
Spirituality and bringing meaning
The anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet Union left scars on the expression of spirituality in Estonia’s society. While anthropocene linear history has disconnected us from the earth, the stories of nature as the protector – the forest and the bogs safe havens for the maarahvas – during the turbulent history, has kept the land and nature as an integral part of the Estonian identity. Not just a “Fatherland”. So it is really no wonder that the Taara belief has been reborn as it has. In recent years, the widespread forestry industry and the Rail Baltic project have given nature activists a lot of work to do. The emergence of the believers of Taara in the same spaces is no coincidence.
The land is globally being submitted to the economic logic of the neoliberal capitalist system. The Westphalian statehood and the ensuing private-public binary has striped the land from its meaning and Indigenous people globally have been fighting back. In the case of the Taara believers, the problem lies in the lack of authenticity – while there is knowledge of the general cosmovision of our ancestors, the practices have been lost to time.
The rituals used today were scripted in the last century. Therefore, are Taara believers just the enlightened part of the Indigenous maarahvas2, who have collectively lost their ancestral knowledge to the slow grind of the modernity project which has made us the Estonians we are today? The believers of Taara are deeply spiritual in a way that allows them to connect with the earth despite the socio-economic system they have been born into. That connection and the meaning their spirituality provides to their life allows them to see behind the curtain. Nature is not a boundless domain to be exploited, but takes on a spiritual meaning.
This search for meaning shows the inherent emptiness we experience in the westernized world through the exclusion of “the private” – the spiritual, the love, the care – from our governed public spaces. This privatization of spirituality in its widest form strips meaning from the world in a way that indigenous people have come to counter, calling for the indigenization of the international order. By reintroducing and reconnecting with the land and its spirit, the Inuit communities around the North Sea have been included in the whaling legislation, providing ancestral knowledge for law-making that is not simply human centered.
While the Taara believers lack ancestral practices, the cosmovision itself has led many of them to take up activism, often in the fields of nature reservation and climate change. Others dwell into Estonian history and work in cultural heritage. The important thing is that the belief gives the believer something bigger than life to connect with, pulling them out of the everyday structure and providing another point of view.
Spirituality and politics
As spirituality and religion have been pushed to the private sphere of life, first by the USSR and today in the system of the liberal statehood, this overlap of the spiritual with the political in the form of activism has become more relevant. While the content of the beliefs can be debated, the truths they include of life and ways of living put the liberal modernity project and the “civilized-uncivilized” hierarchy under question. Ancestral spirituality provides knowledge, practices and customs that can offer real alternatives to the current international systems in various ways of life, be it in fishing laws, peace-making efforts or sustainable cultivation practices, which go far beyond the last 500 years of western supremacy.
- The defensive campaign of the Estonian Army and its allies (most notably the UK and Finland) against Soviet Russia and pro-German Baltische Landeswehr between 1918-1920, following the I WW and the declaration of Estonian independence on 24th of February 1918. ↩︎
- The name for Estonian pre-republic. It translates as (1) the people of the land or (2) the nature people. ↩︎
Cover photograph: @SimoneVomFeld
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