We have read about Taarapita in the Chronicles of Henry of Livonia (Henrici Chronicon Livoniae), according to which he flew from the mountain where he was born (it is speculated that it was the Ebavere Hill in Northeast Estonia or Vaivara in the Blue Mountains) over to the Island Oesel. Local islanders screamed of joy over their Taarapita. Finally, when the whole country was Christianised, the inhabitants of Riga reportedly cast him out of the country and drowned him into the sea. It has also been speculated that the route of Taarapita’s flight corresponds to the fall of the Kaali meteorite (Lougas 1996, see also Viires 1990: 1420). The ancient Estonians must have perceived the meteorite as the god himself, who descended on earth with terrible destructive force and ear-splitting roar of thunder. The event definitely brought along changes in the contemporary worldview of the inhabitants of the area and in the more distant regions, and to be even more precise: it became a part of their worldview. Reverberations of this event have most likely been recorded in the Mediterranean region, or even Persia. The current study, however, will not aim to trace these reverberations. I will attempt to explicate the semantics and etymology of the name Taarapita, based on the works of Uku Masing (1939, 1995), on the elaborations by Lennart Meri (1976), on the overview by Ants Viires (1990), but also on the presentation of Aleksandr Kotljarevski in the Estonian Learned Society, held as early as in 1871. 2 In the following I will once again refer to the mentioning of Taarapita in the Chronicles of Livonia and will reconstruct the form as it appears in the chronicles. I will indicate that Taarapita is presently perceived in two ways: firstly, the misrepresentations concerning it (Taarapita as ‘the owl god’) and secondly, as a minor deity in the pantheon of Slavic gods. I will then observe the possible associations between Taarapita and other Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Altaic and Ugric gods and will pose a question whether Taarapita may have been known in Estonia before the Chronicles of Henry. And