Despite the cultural and historical similarities between the Baltic peoples of Latvia and Lithuania, several different approaches to research on Baltic religion have developed. Lithuanian scholars, who consider relics of the cult of ancestors as part of their pre-Christian world, have primarily studied written sources, drawing as well on archaeological, linguistic, folklore, and ethnographic data. By contrast, in reconstructing the Latvian religious tradition, Latvian scholars have looked to not only the previously mentioned sources, but they have leaned heavily on information found in a specific folklore genre, that of poetic quatrains called dainas, the majority of which are intended to be sung. Dainas have a specific formulaic structure and are characterized by a high level of abstraction, as well as a functional realism. These characteristics allowed strata of archaic, cultural, and historical information to survive up to the time when dainas were...