Laima

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A child is born, and at the threshold of the house a decision is already made. Not by the mother, who has only just survived her labor; not by the father; not by the gathered women of the steam-bath where the birth was attended. The span of the new life — how long its days will run — and the shape of its fortune, whether it will be lucky or luckless, rich or poor, loved or wronged, are laid down in that first hour by a power who comes to the cradle and pronounces. What she sets cannot afterward be unmade. The word for what she does is, in Lithuanian, lemti: to allot, to ordain, to fix the portion. The word for her is Laima.

The name is the plainest theology the Baltic peoples produced, because the name is also a common noun. Lithuanian laimė and Latvian laime mean luck, happiness, good fortune — the everyday word a person uses for a stroke of luck or a happy turn. From that root the goddess takes her name, so that to speak of Laima is to speak of fortune itself made into a person. There is no learned title standing between the abstraction and the deity. The thing a life is granted and the one who grants it carry, very nearly, a single name.

The name and the standing

Laima is named by both of the surviving Baltic peoples — the Lithuanians and the Latvians — and in both her name is the word for luck. This double attestation is one of the firmer things that can be said about her, and it matters, because much of what is claimed for the Baltic gods rests on a single people or a single witness. Laima is shared. The standard reference accounts derive the name straightforwardly from the Baltic word for luck and fortune, and connect her across both languages to the same domain: she is the goddess of fate, of fortune, and of childbirth, the patroness of pregnant women and the one who ordains the course a new life will take.

Where she stands among the other powers is best read from the Latvian songs, and there her standing is high. In the immense corpus of Latvian folk-song she is among the most frequently named of all the deities — set in the company of Dievs, the bright sky-father, and Saule, the sun-mother, the great powers of the heaven. She is not a minor spirit of the household crannies but one of the named gods of the upper rank, invoked again and again, addressed directly, asked for her favor and reproached when she withholds it. A reader who comes to the dainos looking for the Baltic pantheon finds Dievs and finds Saule and, beside them, finds Laima — the three of them recurring through thousands of separate quatrains as the powers most present to the singers’ lives.

Her kin, in the songs, are other fate-women. The Latvian tradition sets her beside two sisters or doubles, Dēkla and Kārta, and the three of them divide the work of destiny among them. The accounts that have come down vary in how the labor is split, but the most commonly reported division gives Dēkla the care of the child, Laima the fortune and the luck and the moment of birth, and Kārta the spinning and the cutting — the measuring out and the ending of the thread of a life. A further figure, Māra, the great mother of the Latvian songs (in whom the later Christian centuries fused something of the Virgin), stands near them as a power of fertility and of the earth. Whether these are truly separate goddesses or aspects of one is exactly the question the tradition does not settle, and it is a question worth keeping open rather than closing.

The decree, the labor, and the wedding

What Laima does is the most consequential thing a power can do: she fixes what will be. Her central act is the decree at birth. When a child enters the world she comes — or, in some songs, has already come — and she ordains its lot. The length of its life and the measure of its fortune are set then, in that first hour, and the setting is irrevocable. The point is made with unusual force in the tradition: her final pronouncement cannot be undone, and not even Laima herself can afterward change it. This is the hard edge of fate as the Balts understood it. Luck is not a mood the goddess is in; it is a portion she has measured, and once measured it stands.

Because the decree is made at birth, Laima belongs above all to the threshold-times of a life — the passages where one state gives way to another and the future is, for a moment, open before it closes. The first of these is the birth itself, and here she is not a distant arbiter but a present helper. She attends the woman in labor. She is the patroness of the pregnant and the one called upon in the pains of childbirth, invoked in the songs sung in the steam-bath where Baltic women bore their children, surrounded by other women, with their offerings and their petitions to the goddess who stood by the laboring body. The same power who lays down the cold decree is the warm one beside the bed. She decides the fate and she eases the entry into the life she has decided.

The second threshold is the wedding. Laima attends the marriage and walks beside the bride. The founding of a household — the passage out of the parents’ house into a new one, the beginning of the line that will produce more births for her to ordain — falls within her domain, and the bride appeals to her for a good marriage as the mother appealed to her for a safe birth. So the two great hinges of an ordinary life, the coming into the world and the making of a home, are both hers: she stands at the cradle and she stands at the marriage-bed. Between and beyond them her reach extends to the whole fortune of the days, and at the far end the tradition draws her toward death as well, the closing of the span she opened — though it is the spinning Kārta, in the usual telling, whose work is the cutting of the thread.

Two of her signs run through the folk material and are worth naming, because they are concrete where so much of this is abstract. One is the cuckoo. In the Lithuanian songs the cuckoo is the bird of fate and of foretelling — the bird whose call was counted to learn how many years one had left, the prophet of the span, drawn close to Laima as the fate-bird who tells what is coming. The other is a tree: the goddess is associated with the linden, the soft-wooded, sweet-flowering tree that in Baltic feeling carries something feminine and tender, the tree of the mother and the bride.

Cover of the first volume of Latvju Dainas (1894), the great collection of Latvian folk-songs through which Laima reaches the present — among hundreds of thousands of quatrains she is named beside Dievs and Saule. Rihards Zariņš, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

One Laima, or three, or many

The single most contested thing about Laima is also the most interesting: it is not clear, and may never have been clear, whether she is one goddess or several. The songs do not agree, and the disagreement does not look like a copyist’s error to be corrected. It looks like the tradition’s own way of holding the matter.

In a great many songs there is one Laima, a single fate-goddess who comes to the birth and pronounces. In others there are three Laimas, or many, who appear together and sometimes give differing — even contradictory — judgments over the same cradle, so that the lot a child receives is the resultant of several voices rather than one decree. The plurality is not a marginal variant; it is widespread enough that any honest account has to carry both readings at once. Sometimes Laima is one. Sometimes Laima is many. The modern Latvian neo-pagan movement, the Dievturi, who revived an organized worship in the twentieth century, speak of three Laimas understood as one deity in three aspects — but that is a modern systematization of the old ambiguity, a later reading, and it should not be projected back as if the ancient singers had resolved the question in that particular way.

The same uncertainty attaches to the trio of Laima, Dēkla, and Kārta. That the three names appear, and that they are fate-powers, is clear. The precise relation among them — three distinct goddesses, or one goddess under three names, or a core figure (Laima) with two specialized companions who may once have been her own functions split off — is genuinely unsettled, and the divisions of labor reported for them differ from source to source. The picture of three sisters who respectively spin, measure, and cut is partly a description of the Latvian material and partly a frame imported from the better-known fate-trios of other peoples, laid over the Baltic evidence to make sense of it. The frame illuminates; it also risks tidying a body of song that was never tidy. The careful position is that the Balts knew a fate-power, certainly female, named for luck, attended by or identical with other fate-women, and conceived now as one and now as more than one — and that the exact arithmetic is not recoverable from songs collected long after the world that sang them had changed.

What the songs preserved

Laima reaches the present almost entirely through one channel, and understanding that channel is the key to weighing everything claimed for her. Her worshipers were among the last pagans in Europe — the Lithuanians baptized only in 1387, the Samogitians in 1413, the Old Prussians conquered by the Teutonic Order across the thirteenth century — and they left no scripture of their own gods, no native pre-Christian book. What survives of their religion comes through three kinds of witness, each standing at its own distance — and for Laima the three are very unequal.

The first witness is the hostile external one: the Christian and Teutonic chroniclers who wrote of the heathen they were converting or fighting. They reached for the dramatic dark powers, the thunder-god and the chthonic lord, the rites that could be condemned. A domestic goddess of luck and childbirth, invoked by women in the birth-bath, was not what a crusading chronicler set down. So the chronicle record gives Laima little, and what it gives is thin and external.

The second witness is the deep record — the archaeology and the comparative Indo-European linguistics, the Baltic languages being among the most archaic of the whole family. This witness secures her name. Laimė and laime are old, the personification of luck is the kind of figure the Indo-European peoples made repeatedly, and the comparative study sets her among the fate-goddesses of the wider family. But the linguistics gives antiquity and kinship, not biography. It cannot tell what she did at a particular cradle on a particular night.

The third witness is the one that made Laima what she is for us: the folk-song. The Lithuanian and Latvian songs — the dainos in Lithuanian, the dainas in Latvian — are short, often four-line lyrics, sung at work and at the turning-points of life, and they were gathered in their hundreds of thousands from the nineteenth century onward, when collectors went out among the villages to write down what the singers still carried. The towering monument of this work is the Latvian collection: the Latvju Dainas assembled by Krišjānis Barons and published in six volumes between 1894 and 1915, drawing on the archive Barons built and ordered — the famous Cabinet of Folksongs, a wooden cabinet of seventy drawers in which he sorted nearly two hundred eighteen thousand song-texts. In that vast body Laima is not a reconstruction but a living presence, named over and over, addressed, petitioned, praised, blamed.

The Cabinet of Folksongs (Dainu skapis), now in the National Library of Latvia — the seventy-drawer cabinet in which Krišjānis Barons ordered some 218,000 song-texts, inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2001. Photograph by Savannah Rivka, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

This is the standing fact about Laima, and also the standing problem. The songs are tradition-internal in their content — they sing the world from inside it, and inside it Laima really ordains the lot. But they were collected late, generations after the conversion, after long centuries of Christian overlay, and how far they preserve the genuinely pre-Christian goddess is a real and unsettled question. Some of what they hold is surely ancient; some is medieval; some is the singers’ own. The Cabinet of Folksongs was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2001 — a measure of the corpus as a cultural treasure of the first rank, and not, by itself, a guarantee of how old any single image in it may be. The honest reading takes the dainos as a deep well of the tradition, not a transcript of the ancient faith, and reads Laima out of them with that caution always in hand.

Set against the wider world, Laima takes her place among the fate-goddesses of many peoples, and the comparison is genuine — though it is a comparison and not an identity, and none of the others fits her exactly. She is of the kind of the Greek Moirai, the three Fates who in the pantheon over which Zeus presided spun and measured and cut the thread of every life; of the kind of the Roman Parcae, their counterparts under Jupiter’s sky; of the kind, above all, of the Norns of the Norse gods, the three women at the foot of the world-tree who shape the destinies of men and gods alike. The image they share — fate as a thread, spun out, measured, and severed by women — is one of the oldest figures of the Indo-European imagination, and the Baltic fate-women, with their spinning and their cutting, belong to it. To say Laima is like the Norns or the Moirai is to say the Balts kept an inheritance their kindred kept too, and turned it toward their own birth-bath and their own bride-songs. The likeness is a family resemblance, not a borrowed face; the cuckoo counting the years and the linden over the cradle are her own.

She keeps company, too, with her own pantheon. The lot she lays down is a lot in a world made and ordered by the other powers — the sun-mother Saule who warms the field on which the allotted life will be lived, the earth-mother Žemyna who feeds that life and receives it back at the end, the thunderer Perkūnas who keeps the order of the sky above it. Among these Laima is the one turned most intimately toward the single human life — not the cosmos but the cradle, not the year but the span, not the field but the child carried out of the steam-bath into the fortune she has just pronounced.

A daina is still sung at a Latvian wedding, and the word laime is still the word for luck on any tongue in Riga or Vilnius. Of all the things the goddess of fate decreed, the one she could not have foreseen is that her name would outlast her worship and pass into the daily speech of peoples who no longer bring offerings to the birth-bath — the abstraction surviving the deity, fortune itself keeping the shape of her name long after the one who measured it was last invoked over a cradle.

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