Getting to Know the Faith of the Mari People

Deep within Europe's vast forests and plains, where rivers wind through the landscape and old trees whisper stories from a bygone age, live the Mari people—a people with a rich and living animistic faith that has shaped their life and culture for centuries. Their world is filled with spirits; not merely hidden beings in fairy tales, but present souls in stones, trees, rivers, mountains and wildlife. For the Mari, nature is not a motionless backdrop, but a pulsating community of life with which people live in close interplay. This ensoulment of nature, or animism, forms the core of their faith and their understanding of reality.

To wander into the spiritual landscape of Mari culture is to enter a world where everything—from the smallest stone to the mightiest river—has a life force. It is a universe in which harmony between human and nature is necessary for the continued course of life. Through family rituals, communal ceremonies and festival celebrations, the Mari people declare their respect for the spirits of nature. They acknowledge their protection and power, and know that this fragile balance can easily be disturbed if people do not live with humility and understanding.

In the spiritual world of the Mari people, not only is nature alive and ensouled, but it is also filled with a rich and complex world of gods. Their pantheon comprises a number of gods and goddesses with various roles and powers, who for generations have been the object of awe and worship. The vetter, or nature spirits, fill the landscape and serve as protectors and facilitators of human life; the greatest god, Kugu Jumo, reigns as creator and generous protector. His female counterpart, Jumo, and other goddesses represent fertility, healing and the cycles of nature. Throughout the seasons, several important festivals and rituals are celebrated, such as the spring and autumn festivals where offerings are made to thank and honor the forces of nature, and to ensure good harvests and health for the community. These traditions show with all clarity the Mari people's deep bond to their gods and to nature, where the sacred and daily life merge in a continuous spiritual interplay.

But like any rich tradition, the Mari faith is also complex. Often, when outsiders study their spiritual practices, a comparison arises with what is called shamanism — a practice with deep roots in many indigenous societies around the world. Shamanism is characterized by rituals in which select individuals, the shamans, enter trance in order to leave their physical body and travel to the spirit world. There they ask for advice, healing or insight, which they bring back to their people. This journey is accompanied by symbols such as drums and feathers, and is often an individual manifestation of the animistic belief that different worlds are closely interwoven.

But the Mari tradition, while it contains important animistic elements, is distinctly different. Their religious leaders, kart and onaeng, are not shamans in the traditional sense of the word. They do not have drums or ecstatic journeys to the spirit world that characterize shamanism. Instead, the Mari rituals and cults are a collective matter, in which the role of the priests is rooted in the structure of the community and in rituals without trance or spiritual ecstasy. It is about work in the name of the community to maintain contact and balance with the spirits of nature, not about individual adventures in another dimension.

Many cultures, when viewed from the outside, can be misinterpreted as shamanic because they have elements such as divination, healing and contact with the spirit world. But the faith of the Mari people clearly illustrates the distinction between the broader concept of animism — the belief that everything in nature has a soul — and shamanism, which is a distinct practical religious method for communicating with spiritual forces. While all shamanism includes animism, not all animism is shamanism.

This distinction is not merely a theoretical difference. It is a powerful reminder of the diversity of indigenous traditions, which are often oversimplified or wrongly gathered under one and the same label. The faith of the Mari people must be understood in its own right, as an expression of a distinctive way of living and connecting with nature, a path that emphasizes the role of the community and respect for the spirit world of nature without the ecstatic descriptions that shamanism is often associated with.

In addition to the spiritual richness of Mari culture, historians and anthropologists have also discussed the Mari people's connection to the Sami, who live farther north. Although the two peoples are culturally and geographically separate, they have carried similar animistic conceptions and a long tradition of living in close interplay with nature. They can be regarded as distant relatives within a larger Uralic language and culture system, something reflected in surprising similarities in the worlds they create through myths, practices and their understanding of the spirits of nature. While the Sami have their noaidi who typically represents shamanism with drum, ecstasies and journeys, the Mari priests serve their role within a different spiritual framework, but with equally deep respect for nature and its forces.

This kinship with the Sami illustrates how indigenous peoples can share fundamental worldviews adapted to their respective environments and historical developments, while at the same time preserving distinctive features that make each tradition unique. The animism of the Mari people, as an expression of a living world in which everything has a soul, shows the breadth of how humanity can experience and honor the mysterious pulsation of the universe.

Through this glimpse into the Mari faith we see that for them animism is not merely a belief system, but a philosophy of life. It weaves together past and present, human and nature, the visible and the invisible, in an eternal dance of relationships and respect. And although it may look like shamanism from the perspective of an outside observer, the faith of the Mari people has its own unique voices and rhythms that continue to sing the eternal song of nature and life — without drums, but with a deep resonance of the soul.

Sources

Saberov Rushan Anvyarovich. "Mari 'Shamanism': Problems of Definition." Manuscript, Gramota, 2020. (https://www.gramota.net/materials/9/2020/7/11.html)

GeoCurrents.org: "Threats to Mari Animism," 2011.

Ojs.utlib.ee: "Contemporary Mari Belief: The Formation of Ethnic Identity," Estonian Journal of Ethnology.

TheVintageNews.com: "The Mysterious Mari People - Last Pagans of Europe," 2019.

MinorityRights.org: "Mari in the Russian Federation."

Fennougria.ee: "Mari," 2024.

Animism Wikipedia: "Animism," 2001.