Perkūnas

← Encyclopedia

When the air goes still and the cattle crowd the byre and the first white branch of lightning stands over the oak woods, the old eastern Baltic knew whose chariot was crossing the sky. The thunder that followed was the wheel-roll of Perkūnas, and the bolt that split the tallest oak was his stone, thrown at something hiding among the roots. He is the loudest of the active gods, and the most physical: not a remote sky-father but a working power, armed and in motion, forever in pursuit of an enemy who never stays caught.

Perkūnas outlasted his own worship by centuries, and the manner of his survival is the manner of the whole Baltic religion’s. The peoples who named him were the last in Europe to take the font: Lithuania accepted Christian baptism only in 1387, lowland Samogitia not until 1413, and the Old Prussians had been conquered by the Teutonic Order across the long crusade of roughly 1230 to 1283. No native pre-Christian scripture survives from any of them — not a hymn, not a liturgy, not a god-list set down by a worshiper. What is known of Perkūnas comes instead from three directions, each at its own distance: the hostile chronicles of the conquering Order and the later antiquarians; the enormous body of folk-song, the dainos, gathered from singers’ mouths only in the nineteenth century and after; and the cold instruments of archaeology, place-name study, and the comparative grammar of the Indo-European tongues. To read the god honestly is to keep asking which of the three is speaking.

The name and its kin

The god is called Perkūnas in Lithuanian, Pērkons in Latvian, and Perkūns — also recorded as Percunis — among the Old Prussians; the Sudovian form is given as Parkuns. The word is among the most discussed in the comparative study of religion, because it appears to reach back past the Balts into the deep Indo-European past. Linguists relate it to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European thunder- and weather-power written Perkʷunos, whose name carries one of two meanings, perhaps both at once: “the Striker,” from a root meaning to beat or strike, or “the Lord of the Oak,” from a word pérkʷus for oak or wooded height. A long-noted coincidence may unite them — the oak, the tallest tree of the northern forest, is the tree lightning most often splits, so that “the Striker” and “the Lord of the Oak” name a single observed fact about the world.

By this reconstruction Perkūnas stands among a family of storm-powers across the Indo-European world. He is like the Norse Thor, the hammer-wielder who guards the ordered world against the giants and the world-serpent; he is the eastern cousin of the Slavic Perun, who hurls the bolt from the high places; the Vedic rain-thunderer Parjanya bears a name some derive from the same root, and the Vedic Indra fights the dragon to loose the withheld waters. The Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter, the sky-fathers who keep the bolt in hand, were the gods the chroniclers reached for when they wanted a Latin word for him. The likeness is functional rather than an identity — Perkūnas is not Thor under another spelling — and the reconstruction itself is held with care. The clearest cognates of the divine name cluster in the western half of the Indo-European range, the Baltic and Slavic and Germanic and Celtic, so that the Proto-Indo-European status of the thunder-god (as against the thunder-word) is treated as less secure than that of the bright sky-father; some scholars, Martin West among the documenters and others among the doubters, divide over how much of the figure can truly be carried back. What is not in doubt is that the Baltic languages preserve, in unusually archaic form, a religious vocabulary the rest of Europe has mostly lost. As the standard overview notes, Perkūnas is “related in functions and image to the Slavic Perun, Germanic Thor, and Greek Zeus” (Encyclopædia Britannica).

In the ranking of the gods Perkūnas is not the highest but the most active. Above or beside him stands Dievas, the sky-god proper, whose name is simply the old word for god and for the bright heaven; Dievas is the quiet sovereign. Perkūnas is the heaven’s warrior, the power that does the sky’s work — and in the Latvian folk-song the line between the two sometimes blurs, the thunderer called Pērkona tēvs, the father of thunder, drawn up toward the sovereign’s place.

The work of the thunder

Perkūnas is described, where he is described at all, as a vigorous bearded man, neither young nor old, armed and in motion. He carries an axe, and in other tellings a sword, a club, stones, a bow, or an iron knife; he drives a two-wheeled chariot across the firmament, drawn in some songs by goats and in others by swift or fiery horses, striking fire from the wheels as he goes. The thunder is the rolling of those wheels; the lightning is the weapon thrown. The bolt itself, once it has come to earth, was held to lie buried in the ground as a hard stone — the flint arrowheads and the small bronze axe-heads turned up by the plow were called the bullets or stones of Perkūnas, kept as protection against sickness and against the evil powers, a belief the reference works record plainly (Encyclopædia Britannica).

His tree is the oak. Where lightning struck an oak the wood was sacred, and the formula Perkūno ąžuolas, “Perkūnas’s oak,” in Lithuanian — Pērkona ozols in Latvian — fixed the bond in speech. His places are the high ones: the hill, the wooded height, the open ground where the sky comes near. The Balts raised few temples; they worshiped the hill and the grove and the stone and the fire, and the thunder-god’s worship belonged to those open holy places rather than to any built house.

What he does there is double. He is, first, the bringer of the spring — the lightning of the new year purifies the earth and quickens the seed, the rain comes behind the storm, and the fields are made fertile by the same violence that frightens. He is, second, the keeper of order. His bolt is aimed: against the evil spirits, against the unjust, and even, in the songs, against the gods themselves when they break the law. He is the power oaths are sworn by, and Thursday — the thunderer’s day across the Indo-European week — was the day held proper for oaths and for weddings. Justice and storm are one office. The bolt that clears the air of demons is the same bolt that punishes the perjurer.

This double work comes to its sharpest form in the long combat that runs under the whole of Baltic storm-myth: the pursuit of Velnias. Velnias — the chthonic lord, the keeper of cattle and underground wealth, the cunning master of the world below, and emphatically not the Christian Devil he was later forced to become — is the adversary Perkūnas hunts. Where the thunder-god holds the upper air, the fire, and the height, Velnias holds the earth, the water, the low and hidden places. The storm is the visible shape of their quarrel. Velnias steals — fertility, cattle, in one strand of the songs a bride — and flees, hiding in a tree, behind a stone, in the water, or slipping into the body of an animal; Perkūnas drives across the sky after him and strikes wherever he hides, so that the bolt that shatters an oak or scorches a stone is a blow aimed at something crouched within it. The thunderstorm, in this reading, is not weather but war — the recurring Indo-European combat of the sky-power against the serpent or dragon of the deep, the same shape that sets Indra against Vṛtra and the Norse Thor against the world-serpent, here worked out across the Baltic heaven. When the storm passes and the rain falls, the stolen waters and the stolen increase are loosed back to the living world.

Around this central drama the folk-song hangs a wider family. The sun is feminine here — Saulė, the sun-goddess who crosses the day-sky in her chariot — and the dainos tell of a celestial household of the sun and the moon and the morning star in which Perkūnas plays a part, in one well-known strand striking the moon for an offense against the order of the sky. The earth beneath is Žemyna, the mother who takes the rain and feeds the living. The thunder-god’s own consort is named variously across the songs, and his children — counted as four or seven or nine sons, set to the seasons or the quarters of the world, with daughters who are the rains — belong to the shifting, fragmentary mythology of a corpus that was never a single book. Here the honest reader must mark the distance: the dainos are tradition-internal in their content but late in their gathering, and what they preserve of the pre-Christian religion, as against what they have reshaped over centuries of Christian singing, is itself a matter scholars weigh rather than settle.

The Prussian triad, read with care

There is a famous arrangement of the gods that must be handled as a problem and not as a fact. The chroniclers of the Teutonic Order and the antiquarians who followed them set Perkūnas at the center of a Prussian trinity, between Patrimpas — a young god of grain, water, and increase — and Patollo, also given as Patulas or Peckols, an old god of the dead and the underworld. The three were said to stand together on a sacred banner and, more grandly, at a central sanctuary called Romove or Romowe in the western Prussian land of Sambia, where an eternal fire burned before a great oak holding the three idols, tended by vestals and presided over by a supreme priest, the Krive.

The picture is seductive and largely built. Its fullest form comes from the chronicle of Simon Grunau, written around 1520 — nearly three centuries after the Prussian conquest — and Grunau is a writer modern scholarship treats with deep skepticism. His account of Patollo is read now as a pseudomythologeme: a name lifted from an unrelated source and mistaken for a god. The single near-contemporary mention of the sanctuary is older, in the Chronicon terrae Prussiae of Peter von Dusburg, finished about 1326, which speaks of the Krive as a priest of great authority over the Prussians, the Lithuanians, and the Balts of Livonia, and says the place took its name from Rome. But Dusburg was a brother of the Order writing of an enemy he had reason to magnify, and one influential reading holds that he may have built Romove deliberately, to present Baltic religion as a dark counter-church — a rival Rome with its own pope — and so to justify the crusade against it. Grunau then enlarged the sketch, and the romantic nationalism of later centuries loved the result and made it famous. No archaeological trace of the central sanctuary has been found, and the tidy hierarchy of high priest and vestals and a fixed temple sits poorly with everything else known of a religion of open hills and groves. The scholarship gathered in the survey of the sanctuary treats these accounts as exaggeration or deliberate Christian propaganda rather than factual record (Romowe). What can be said with confidence is narrow: Perkūnas was a real and central Prussian god, the thunderer the Old Prussians named alongside their other powers. The triad, the temple, and the priest-king are the chroniclers’ architecture, raised over a god who in the older worship needed none of it.

The survival of the god

When the Order’s crusade ended, the Old Prussian language and the gods named in it began their long extinction; the tongue died out in the eighteenth century, leaving only a vocabulary list and three printed catechisms behind it. Lithuania and Latvia were Christianized later and kept their languages, and in those two countries the thunder-god outlived his temples in song.

The dainos — the Lithuanian and Latvian folk-songs, hundreds of thousands of them gathered by collectors from the nineteenth century onward — carry Perkūnas still, no longer as the object of a cult but as a living figure of the sung cosmos: the thunder that punishes, the storm that weds and pursues, the father of the rain. They are the richest source there is for the Baltic gods, and the most treacherous, because they were written down so long after the old religion fell and have passed through so many Christian mouths. A line about Perkūnas in a song collected in 1860 cannot simply be read as a sentence about the god as he was worshiped in 1360. The scholars who use the songs — among them Marija Gimbutienė, who gathered the dialect-names of the thunder-god such as Dundulis, the Rumbler — work the corpus as evidence to be weighed rather than as transcript.

The comparative science is the third afterlife, and the strangest. To the linguist Perkūnas is not only a god but a witness: his name, fossilized in one of the most archaic surviving Indo-European languages, is a chief piece of testimony for the reconstructed Perkʷunos, set out at length by Mallory and Adams in their handbooks of Indo-European culture and by Martin West in his study of Indo-European poetry and myth. Through that name the Baltic thunder-god has been placed in a line that runs to the Slavic Perun, the Vedic rain-thunderer, the Norse Thor, and behind them all to a storm-power of the third or fourth millennium before the present — a god whose worshipers left no writing at all, recovered only from the agreement of his descendants’ names. The reconstruction is debated at its edges, as all such reconstructions are; what survives unshaken is the place of the Baltic word at the center of the argument.

There is also a modern Baltic faith, the Romuva movement, which honors Perkūnas and the other old gods today. It is a genuine revival of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and draws on the song-corpus and the scholarship, and it should not be read backward as an unbroken thread from the pre-Christian cult; the continuity it claims is one of recovery, not of survival.

What endures most plainly is the smallest thing. In modern Lithuanian perkūnas, uncapitalized, is still the ordinary word for thunder. The god has sunk into the weather he ruled — so that the language itself, every time the sky breaks over the oak woods, still speaks his name.

The Prussian gods Peckols, Perkūnas, and Potrimpo as imagined on a war-banner. Caspar Hennenberger, 1584, after Simon Grunau — a chronicler’s construction, not a contemporary record. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Perkūnas, painted by the Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in 1909, from the national-romantic recovery of the old gods. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Stelmužė Oak in eastern Lithuania, among the oldest in Europe — the oak being the thunder-god’s sacred tree. Algirdas Svid, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

→ Related: Saule Goddess · Zemyna · Velnias · Laima · Kernave · Rambynas Hill · Birute Hill · Apuole · The Old Prussians · The Yotvingians · The Curonians · Thor · Zeus · Jupiter · Indra · Odin