Saulė

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In Lithuanian the same single word carries the burning disk in the sky and the goddess who is that disk: saulė. There is no separate divine name to learn, no title that stands apart from the thing itself. The sun is Saulė, Saulė is the sun, and when a daina is sung at the rising the word it lifts is the same word a child uses for the light on the floor. The Latvian saule runs parallel, and from the same stem the two peoples built their words for the world itself — Lithuanian pasaulis, Latvian pasaule, “[the place] under the Sun.” To live is to dwell beneath her.

That she is a she is the first remarkable fact, and the one the comparative scholars return to. Across the Indo-European world the sun is most often reckoned a god and a man — the Greek Helios, the Roman Sol, the Vedic Surya who rides a chariot of seven horses. Among the Balts the sun is a woman and a mother, and in this she keeps company with only a few of her kindred: the Old Norse Sól, the Old High German Sunna, the sun the Insular Celts seem to have imagined as feminine. The bright mother who drives across the heaven is, in the Indo-European family, the minority reading, and the Balts held to it longest and told it most fully.

The bright mother and her sky-kin

The name itself is old past reckoning. Saulė and saule descend from a Proto-Baltic form, and behind that lies the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for the sun, seh₂ul-, the same root that surfaces as the Norse Sól, the Latin sol, the Greek hēlios — so that the word for the goddess is one of the most archaic things the Baltic tongues preserve, a syllable carried unbroken out of the deep past. The linguistics here is firm scholarly ground: the Baltic languages are among the most conservative of the whole Indo-European family, and the sun-word is among their oldest freight — a descent that the standard reference accounts of Saulė trace from the same root that gives the Latin sol and the Norse Sól. This belongs to the science of the deep record, and it can be stated without hedging.

What the science cannot fix, and what the songs supply, is the household. For Saulė does not cross the sky alone. The dainos set her at the center of a family of lights, and the daily and yearly turning of the heavens is told there not as astronomy but as a domestic drama — marriage, betrayal, a wedding of the stars. Her husband, in the most widespread telling, is the moon: Lithuanian Mėnulis or Mėnuo, Latvian Mēness, a god as changeable as his face. Beside them moves the morning star, the Lithuanian Aušrinė, the planet that men elsewhere called Venus, named in the songs now as Saulė’s daughter and now as her servant — the maiden who lights the fire each dawn and makes the sun ready for another day’s crossing, while at evening a corresponding power, Vakarinė, the evening star, prepares the sun’s rest. And through this family moves the storm: Perkūnas, the thunderer, who in the great Baltic myth-complex is the one who keeps the order of the sky by force.

The relations among these powers are exactly the part that shifts from song to song, and the honest account marks the shift rather than smoothing it. The dainos are a vast corpus, recorded late and by many hands, and they do not agree on a single genealogy. In one strand Aušrinė is Saulė’s daughter; in another, her servant; in some Latvian songs the planets stand among the Saules meitas, the Daughters of the Sun, while in others a single daughter does the work of all. The Latvian songs add a further household across the sky-mountain — the homestead of Dievs, the bright sky-god, whose sons, the Dieva dēli, play and work with the Daughters of the Sun, courting them, racing horses, drowning and being saved. These are the materials of the so-called heavenly wedding, the celestial marriage-cycle that scholars have assembled out of thousands of separate quatrains. It is real as a pattern in the corpus; its precise lines of kinship are contested, and they should be read as a family told many ways, not a fixed chart.

The one episode the songs return to most insistently is the breaking of the marriage. The moon, restless, courts the morning star while the sun sleeps — or in another telling courts one of the Daughters of the Sun. The betrayal is discovered, and Perkūnas the thunderer punishes the moon, cleaving him with a sword or an axe. This is why the moon waxes and wanes: he is struck, and heals, and is struck again, month upon month, never learning. The sun and the moon, after this, are parted forever; she rules the day and he the night, and they pass each other only at the two seams of dawn and dusk. It is a story told to explain the visible sky, and it is also, plainly, a story about a household that did not hold — the sun a wronged wife, the moon a faithless husband, the thunder the one who enforces the broken law. The Baltic sky is peopled with kin, and its weather is their quarrel.

The crossing and the warmth that ripens

Saulė’s work is the work of light. She is the goddess of the sun itself and, with that, of the warmth that wakes the field and ripens the grain — the power on which all life on the earth depends, named in the songs as the giver and keeper of the living world. Her domain is fertility in the plainest sense: the sun on the furrow, the year turned from dark to growth and back. And she is, with a tenderness that runs all through the corpus, the patroness of the unfortunate — above all the orphan and the wronged. She looks down on everything and sees what is done below; the songs appeal to her as the one whose eye nothing escapes, who warms the motherless child and weighs the injustice no one else witnessed. The sun that sees all is, in this tradition, also the sun that pities.

The crossing of the sky is told two ways, and the songs keep both without troubling to reconcile them. By day she drives a chariot — golden or copper-wheeled — drawn by horses that do not tire, white or golden or silver or, in the brightest telling, the color of diamond. She wears gold-threaded shawls and golden shoes and a crown that sparkles; she is gold and red at the rising and the setting, white along the height of her course. Then, at the western edge, the day-chariot becomes a boat. For the night-passage she sails — across the sea, or down into the water — in a golden or silver vessel, to sleep in the western deep, in a silver cradle, the songs say, in the white sea-foam. Her dwelling stands at the sea’s end behind silver gates, on an island in the middle of the waters, eastward where she will rise. The amber of the Baltic shore belongs to her: amber is sacred to the sun, the bright stone of the bright mother, and the night-realm she crosses is imagined as a realm of amber and copper and silver, the sea that gives up the sun’s own colored gold. At the world’s edge, in some songs, stands an apple-tree — the tree at the rim of the sky, by the gate of the sun, a Baltic figure of the world-tree marking where the day ends and the water begins.

None of this was worshiped at an altar in a roofed temple. The Balts raised few temples; they kept the holy hill and the grove and the stone and, above all, the fire. Saulė’s great day is the longest day — the summer solstice, the midsummer when the sun stands highest and the night is least. The Lithuanian festival is Rasos, later overlaid and renamed for Saint John as Joninės; the Latvian is Jāņi, with its refrain līgo. The night of midsummer is the night of fires: bonfires lit and leaped, wreaths woven, the magical fern-flower sought in the dark, and at the end the whole gathering waiting through the short night to greet the sun when she climbs back over the horizon near four in the morning. The herbs gathered on that night were held to carry the year’s fullest power. (The fires and the herb-gathering are described here as the tradition reports them, not prescribed.) The winter solstice answered it — the turning where the sun, at her weakest, begins her return, a moment the songs and customs marked and that the later calendar absorbed into the midwinter feast. The year, in this reckoning, is the long story of the sun’s strength rising and failing and rising, and the two solstices are its hinges.

She is seen as much as sung. In the folk art of both peoples the sun is a sign before she is a face — a ring, a wheel, a circle of rays, a rosette, a many-petaled flower, cut and carved and woven onto distaffs and chests and gable-ends and the iron tops of grave-crosses. The Lithuanian saulutė, “little sun,” and ratilas, “wheel,” name the rosette directly; the Latvian saules zīme, the sun-sign, runs all through the ornament, woven into the patterned belts whose rows of geometric signs the Latvians have read as a script of the old powers. Burning solar wheels and solar crosses were made for the midsummer rites. The sun, in this art, is geometry — the closed, radiant, turning figure that means wholeness and the eye that sees all sides at once.

Allegro from the four-panel cycle Saulės sonata (Sonata of the Sun), 1907 — the Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis drawing the sun out of the old cosmology into modern art. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What the songs kept

Of all the Baltic powers, Saulė is the one who came through most whole — and to see why is to understand the peculiar way this whole religion survives. The Balts were the last pagans of Europe. Lithuania was Christianized only in 1387, Samogitia later still; the Old Prussians had been conquered by the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century. And the Baltic peoples left no native scripture, no pre-Christian book of their own gods. Their religion reaches the present through three kinds of witness, each standing at its own distance, and Saulė’s case shows the three sharply.

The first witness is hostile and external — the Christian and Teutonic chroniclers who wrote about the heathen they were converting or fighting, men with an interest in what they recorded. They give us names and rites, read critically; they give us almost nothing of Saulė, for the sun-mother of the harvest and the orphan was not the dramatic dark god a crusading chronicler reached for. The second witness is the archaeology and the comparative linguistics — the deep record. Here Saulė is secure exactly at the level of the word: the name seh₂ul- carried out of Indo-European, the feminine sun set beside the Norse Sól, the solar wheels in the ground and on the graves. What the linguistics gives is the antiquity and the kinship of the sun-cult; what it cannot give is a story.

The story is the gift of the third witness, and it is Saulė’s own — the dainos, the folk-songs of the Lithuanians and the Latvians, hundreds of thousands of them, gathered from the nineteenth century onward when scholars and collectors went out among the villages to write down what the singers still knew. In that corpus Saulė is not a reconstruction but a living presence, named again and again, addressed as mother, watched across her crossing, married and wronged and consoling. This is the standing fact and also the standing problem. The songs are tradition-internal in their content — they sing the world from inside it — but they were collected late, long after the conversion, through generations of Christian overlay, and how far they preserve the genuinely pre-Christian religion is a real and unsettled scholarly question. Some of what they hold is surely old; some is medieval; some is the singers’ own. The corpus is enormous and uneven, and the careful reader takes it as a deep well of the tradition rather than a transcript of the ancient faith. The scholarship that has done most with it — the work on the Latvian songs, the studies of the celestial mythology, the comparative reading against the wider Indo-European sun-cult — proceeds by exactly this caution.

Within that frame the comparison to the wider family is its own kind of light, and it is a comparison, not an identity. Saulė is like the sun-goddess Sól of the Norse pantheon in being a goddess where so many of the Indo-European suns are gods — the same minority reading of the sun as feminine, met again at the far northern edge of the family. She stands apart from the masculine sun the Greeks gave to Zeus’s bright kinsman Helios, apart from the Jupiter-presiding sky of Rome with its Sol, apart from the Vedic Surya whose seven horses Indra’s pantheon set in the east. The chariot drawn by tireless horses is a shared Indo-European image, and the boat is the Baltic’s own addition, fitted to the amber sea. To say she resembles these is to say the Balts kept an old inheritance and turned it toward their own coast and their own weather; the resemblance is a family likeness, not a borrowed face.

She does not stand alone among her own, either. The sun that ripens the field works above the earth-mother Žemyna, who feeds the living from below; the thunder that orders her sky is Perkūnas, who splits the oak and hunts the chthonic Velnias through the storm; the lot of every life she warms is decreed at its birth by Laima, who measures fate. The sun crosses, and below her the whole Baltic household of powers goes on. The amber she sails through at night washed up on the shore of the Curonians and the other coast-peoples, the seafarers of the eastern Baltic, whose graves and hillforts hold the wheels and the sun-signs in the ground.

A daina sung at the rising still calls her mother. The word is the oldest word the Balts have, the sun is still the sun, and the bright woman who drives the copper chariot and sails the amber sea by night is, of all the gods the last pagans of Europe kept, the one who needed least to be recovered — because she was never quite let go.

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