Māra was the great mother-goddess of the Latvian pantheon, an earth-mother in the most domestic and practical sense — the goddess of the cattle in the byre, of the spinning-wheel in the cottage, of the cow's milk in the pail and the wool on the distaff. Her name probably derives from the Indo-European root that gives "mother" (meaning the same word as Latin Mater, Greek Mētēr), and in folk-Christian usage Māra was identified with the Virgin Mary — a substitution so seamless that the question of which figure preceded the other in the dainas is sometimes hard to settle.

Māra had many specialized aspects, each with its own name: Govju Māra (the Cow's Mother) for cattle, Lopu Māra (the Stock's Mother) for general livestock, Veļu Māte (the Mother of the Departed) for ancestral spirits, Lazdu Māte (the Hazel's Mother) for the hazelwood. The proliferation of "-Mother" titles in Latvian folk religion is striking; nearly every domain had its presiding female spirit, and Māra was the great unifying figure who oversaw all the lesser "Mothers."

She was approached with simple offerings — bread, milk, butter, honey — set out at her places, which were typically the threshold of the cattle-byre, the doorpost of the cottage, the trunk of an old tree, the corner of a field. She had no image, no temple, no priest; she was a presence rather than a represented figure, addressed by the women of the household in private rites. Through this very privacy she survived Christianization more thoroughly than the male warrior-gods who had had public cult, and well into the twentieth century Latvian peasant women observed Māra-rites that the priests at best tolerated and at worst denounced.