Velnias

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A Lithuanian farmer who says velnias today means the Devil — the horned tempter of the catechism, the fiend of the church wall. But the word is older than the church, and the power it once named was no fiend at all. It was a god. Beneath the loan that Christianity laid over the name lies a deity of the world below: the keeper of the cattle of the dead, the giver of the buried treasure, the clever one who hides in the marsh and the stone and is hunted across the sky by the thunder. To tell Velnias is first to lift the later word off the older god, and to set the two apart — the chthonic lord on his own terms, and the Devil as a thing done to his name afterward.

The name and its kindred

The name appears in Lithuanian as Velnias, in an older form Velinas, and in Latvian as Vels or Velis. It belongs to a family of words that turn on the dead. In Lithuanian the vėlės are the souls of the departed; in Latvian the veļi are the same, the company of the shades. The figure of Velnias stands at the head of this kindred, and the Encyclopædia Britannica names him plainly as the god of the Lithuanian vėlės or Latvian velis, the phantom of the dead. He is the lord of the host of souls, and the etymological tie between his name and the words for the dead is the firmest single fact about him. He is the one whose realm is the realm of the departed, and whose name and the name of the departed are one word, divided.

Behind the Baltic forms scholars set a Proto-Indo-European root, *wel-, a root that has gathered around it a cluster of meanings — the dead, the meadow or pasture of the dead, and, in one line of reading, sight or insight. The single eye that the folklore so often gives him, and the gift of prophecy that goes with it, have been read against that last sense: the one-eyed one who sees. Whether the seeing belongs to the root or to the later tales is a question for the comparative philologists, and they have not closed it. What is not in doubt is that the name is anchored in the dead.

The standing of Velnias in the Baltic order is the standing of the below. The most active powers of that order are powers of the bright above — Dievs the sky, Perkūnas the thunderer, Saulė the sun who crosses the heaven, the moon, the morning star. Against them, and beneath them, lies the dark and fertile under-realm, the place of the dead and of the waters under the earth, and Velnias is its lord. The great earth-mother Žemyna holds the dead in her body; Velnias rules them as their god. He is the keeper of the gate that the living do not pass and return.

One older synthesis, repeated in the Britannica article, likens Velnias to the Germanic Wodan or the Norse Odin — the leader of the host of the dead, the one-eyed wanderer — and goes further, identifying him with Patollo or Pickollos, the death-god named in the early Old Prussian and Lithuanian chronicle pantheons. That identification should be held loosely. The chronicle gods of the Old Prussians are themselves a contested record, part construct of the Christian and Teutonic-Order writers who set them down, and Patollo in particular is among the most doubtful of them. The likeness to the Norse Odin is a comparison, drawn by modern scholars across the Indo-European field, not an equation; the host of the dead and the single eye are shared motifs, not a shared god. Velnias is a Baltic deity, and the comparisons illuminate him without dissolving him into his neighbors.

The lord of the world below

What Velnias governs is the wealth of the earth and the dead who lie in it. He is, first, the god of the dead — the souls go to him, and the folklore that keeps him remembers him as a one-eyed, prophetic trickster who can raise the whirlwind and lead the host of the departed through the air. He is, second, the god of the cattle. The comparison that the scholars draw most often is to a herdsman of the world below, a power who pastures the souls of the dead as a shepherd pastures a flock, and who keeps the herds of the under-realm as his own. And he is, third, the god of the hidden riches — the treasure under the stone, the wealth in the marsh, the increase that comes up out of the dark ground. Cattle, gold, and the dead: the three are one wealth in the old reckoning, the riches that the earth holds and the earth gives, and Velnias is their keeper.

He is a clever god, and a shifting one. The tales make him a master of disguise, a shape-changer who takes the form of a black cat, a dog, a pig, a goat, a lamb, a pike, an ox — or a man. He is bound to the low and wet places: the water and the marsh, the bog, the stone, the roots of trees, the dark hollows where the over-world does not reach. Where the thunder-god is the bright, straight, open power of the sky, Velnias is the oblique power of the below — quick, cunning, given to bargains and tricks, the wit of the songs and the fairy tales rather than the force of the storm. A whole class of Lithuanian fairy tale turns on the contest of the kalvis, the smith, against the velnias, the clever one of the underworld — the human craft set against the under-god’s cunning. The wit is part of the theology: the lord of the hidden is a hidden, devious power, and the stories play upon it.

The deepest myth in which he stands is the cosmic combat, and there he is the quarry. The chief and most active labor of Perkūnas the thunder-god, as the Wikipedia synthesis of the Perkūnas material sets it out, is to fight Velnias, the god of the underworld and death. Velnias steals — he creeps up from the below and takes the cattle, the water, the fertility, even (in some tellings) the thunderer’s own; and he hides what he has taken. He goes into the tree, under the stone, into the body of an animal — the black cat, the dog, the pig, the pike — and Perkūnas pursues him across the sky in a chariot of stone and fire. The lightning is the stroke of the hunt: the thunderer strikes the tree, the stone, the beast where his adversary is hiding, and the thunderstorm is the climax of the chase. It clears the ground of the powers of the below and returns what was stolen — the cattle, the water, the increase of the year. The storm is the visible sign of the combat that orders the world into above and below, the bright and the dark, the sky-god and his chthonic adversary.

This pattern is not Baltic alone. The thunder-god who strikes the serpent or the chthonic enemy that hides in the depths is among the oldest stories the Indo-European peoples carried, and the comparative scholars set the Baltic combat beside its kindred: the Norse Thor against the world-serpent, the Vedic Indra who slays the dragon Vritra and frees the pent waters, the Greek Zeus against Typhon, the Roman Jupiter of the bolt. Calvert Watkins gathered the form of the inherited line — the hero who slays the serpent, and the freeing of what the serpent withheld — in How to Kill a Dragon, and the Baltic storm is a clear instance of the type. Velnias is the Baltic figure of the withholder: the one who hides the cattle and the water under the stone, and whom the thunder must break to set the world’s wealth flowing again.

The grass snake, the green žaltys of the Baltic hearth, sits near this world without belonging wholly to Velnias. The snake is the sacred creature of Žemyna’s household, the bringer of luck kept and fed at the hearth, and the kinship of snake and underworld is plain; but the žaltys is a beneficent power of the home, not the chthonic god, and the line between them should be kept.

The grass snake, Natrix natrix — the žaltys kept and fed at the Lithuanian hearth, the household snake bound to the fertile world below. Lukas Jonaitis, Vilnius, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The name seized, and the god recovered

Then the new faith came, and it came late. The Balts were the last pagans of Europe. Lithuania was christened in 1387, in the wake of the baptism of the grand duke Jogaila at Kraków the year before and the mass baptisms at Vilnius that followed; Samogitia, the western land, held out longer, its first groups baptized only in 1413 and its diocese established in 1417, as the account of the conversion of Lithuania records. The old religion did not vanish at the font. Among the country people it lived on for centuries, in the songs and the rites and the names.

But the name of Velnias the church took for its own. In converting the people the missionaries needed a word for the Devil, and they reached for the lord of the dark below — the under-god, the keeper of the dead, the cunning one — and fixed his name upon the Christian fiend. So velnias became, and remains, the ordinary Lithuanian word for the Devil; the Latvian velns the same. The Lithuanian-mythology record puts it exactly: the chthonic god related to the cult of the dead was equated with evil, and Velnias became the Lithuanian name for the Devil. The horned tempter of the church wall wears a stolen name.

This is the governing difficulty in the recovery of the god, and it must be marked as a difficulty rather than read away. The folklore that keeps Velnias keeps him already half-converted — the trickster of the fairy tales is the under-god seen through the Devil’s mask, his cunning turned from theology into comedy, his hiding-places turned from cosmology into the haunts of a fiend. The pre-Christian deity must be told on his own terms, and the Devil-overlay marked as overlay: a later thing laid upon the name, not the original meaning of it. To read the Christian Devil back into the chthonic god is to repeat the missionaries’ act of seizure, and to lose the deity altogether. The scholar’s task is the reverse — to lift the loan off and let the older lord stand.

The thinness of the sources sharpens the problem. The Baltic peoples left no native pre-Christian writing, and their religion survives at three distances. The hostile external chronicles — Peter von Dusburg’s Chronicon terrae Prussiae of the 1320s, Simon Grunau’s Preussische Chronik, Jan Lasicki’s De diis Samagitarum — were set down by Christian and Teutonic-Order writers, external to the faith and often interested in it as a thing to be conquered or condemned; their pantheons are part record and part construct, and they touch Velnias mostly through the disputed identification with the death-god Patollo. The rich folklore — the Lithuanian and Latvian dainos, the folk-songs and tales, collected in quantity only from the nineteenth century onward — is tradition-internal in its content but late in its gathering, and, in the case of Velnias above all, deeply overlaid by the Devil. The archaeology, the place-names, and the comparative Indo-European linguistics — the wel- root, the storm-combat type, the standing of Baltic among the most archaic branches of the family — reach back furthest, but reach the figure obliquely, through the name and the pattern rather than the cult. A claim about Velnias is only as firm as the distance it rests on, and the distances are long.

The comparison that has done most to recover him is the one drawn to the Slavic side. The Slavs worshiped a god named Veles or Volos, a cattle-god and a power of the world below, a shepherd of the dead pastured on the green meadows under the earth, named in the old Rus’ oath beside the thunder-god Perun. The two names, Veles and Velnias, share the wel- root and its tie to the dead, and the two gods share the domains — the cattle, the underworld, the souls — closely enough that the comparison is among the most secure in Balto-Slavic study. From it some scholars reconstructed a common myth: the thunder-god against the cattle-stealing serpent of the below, Perun against Veles as Perkūnas against Velnias, a single inherited combat behind both. The reconstruction, associated above all with the Russian scholars Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, is contested. The survey of the Veles material notes that there is no firm evidence Veles ever fought Perun, nor that he was serpentine at all; and it observes, pointedly, that the Baltic version of the clash — Velnias against Perkūnas — can be discounted as evidence for the reconstruction precisely because Velnias appears in it already degraded into the Christian Devil. The very combat that seems to confirm the inherited myth is itself under the shadow of the overlay. What survives clearly is the kinship of name and domain between Veles and Velnias; the shared myth behind them is a hypothesis, and a disputed one.

So the recovery of Velnias runs through guarded comparison and against a heavy loan. The figure that emerges is coherent in its outline and uncertain in its detail: a lord of the dead and of the wealth of the earth, kin in name to the departed, herdsman of the souls and keeper of the hidden treasure, the clever power of marsh and stone whom the thunderer hunts across the sky — and a god whose name the conquering faith carried off to serve its Devil, so that to find him at all one must first take the name back.

The Baltic tribes about the year 1200, on the eve of the crusades and the late conversion — the Lithuanian, Latvian, Prussian, and other Baltic lands. MapMaster, after Marija Gimbutas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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