In 1935 a politically active physician was exiled from his urban home in northern Italy to the countryside several hundred kilometres away. There he found himself in a world of squabbling petty gentry, overworked peasants and negligent, fornicating clergy. Ordinary people had recourse in their spiritual life more often to folklore, witchcraft and superstition, the exile noted, than to the parish church and its despised priest. The people placed their faith in gnomes and magic spells. They even said of themselves that Christianity (and hence Civilization) had never reached as far as their land. Even so those same apparent pagans did attend Mass on high holidays and venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary. The physician in question was the Italian anti-fascist Carlo Levi; the apparently God-forsaken land was Lucania (Basilicata), in southern Italy, not Lithuania. Similar stories of the remnants of ancient arcane behaviour might be told of peasants in other western European countries. When reading sixteenth-century Protestant polemical literature such as the De diis Samagitiarum caeterorumque sarmatarum et falsorum christianorum of Jan Łaski with its list of the pagan deities and of the Žemaitijans and Sarmatians and other false Christians, or the Annual Reports sent to Rome by Lithuanian Jesuits describing their missionary efforts in the Lithuanian and Livonian countryside, we might wonder whether for them Christ had stopped at the Polish border.