Žemyna

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A man about to drink does not drink at once. He tips the cup, and a little of the beer falls onto the ground, and only then does he raise it to his mouth. The gesture is older than the men who keep it, and in the countryside of the Lithuanians it was kept long after the churches had been built. The ground takes the first of every cup, because the ground is owed the first of everything. The name of the one to whom it is owed is Žemyna, and her name is simply the word for the earth.

The name that is the ground

Lithuanian žemė means earth — the soil, the land, the ground underfoot. Žemyna is that word made into a goddess, or rather she is the goddess who was never separate from it. To say her name is to say the field and the road and the floor of the house and the place where the dead are laid, all at once. The diminutive forms — Žemynėlė, Žemėlė, “little earth,” “dear earth” — carry the tone in which she was most often addressed, which was the tone of a household speaking to something close and necessary rather than the tone of a temple.

The name is very old. Comparative linguists place it among the oldest stratum of the Indo-European inheritance, the layer the Baltic languages preserve more conservatively than almost any other branch. Behind Žemyna and behind Lithuanian žemė stands a reconstructed Indo-European earth-word, and behind the goddess a reconstructed earth-goddess, the same root that surfaces in the Thracian Zemelė and, more distantly, in the Greek Semelē — the earth-mother under several names across the spread of the family. The kinship is in the bone of the word; it does not require that the Lithuanians borrowed anything. They kept what was always there.

Her Latvian counterpart makes the matter plainer still. Across the border the same power is Zemes māte, “Mother Earth” — not a proper name worn smooth by use but a title that says exactly what she is. The Latvian religious imagination filled with such mothers, a māte for the sea and a māte for the wind and the forest and the field, and among them the earth-mother stood at the center, because the earth is what all the others touch. Žemyna and Zemes māte are two dialect-faces of one figure, the great female ground of the Baltic world.

She belonged to no high sanctuary. The Balts raised few temples; they worshiped the hill and the grove and the stone and the fire, and a goddess who is the earth has the least need of a building of anyone. Her shrine was the furrow and the threshold and the patch of bare ground where the libation fell. This is part of why she comes to us as she does. The men who first wrote her name down were strangers to her cult, and the cult itself had no priesthood and no scripture to set against their accounts — only the practice of households, which is the hardest thing for an outsider to see and the last thing to die.

The mother of the grown and the buried

Žemyna is the fertile earth, and she is the earth that takes the dead, and in her these are not two facts but one. The Baltic religious sense did not draw the line a sky-religion draws, the line that sets the granary against the grave and the living against the buried. The grain rises out of the ground and the body goes down into it, and the ground is the same ground. She feeds because she holds, and she holds because she feeds. To understand her is to refuse, for a moment, the instinct that fertility and death belong to different gods.

So her year is the year of the field, and her rites are the rites of its turning. The chief seasons of her honor were the spring plowing and the harvest — the opening of the soil and its closing. The early-modern accounts and the long-collected folk practice agree on the shape of it. At the start of the spring work, before the first furrow was cut, a piece of bread was plowed into the ground — bread saved, in some descriptions, from the previous harvest, so that the old crop went back into the earth to call up the new. The encyclopedic summary of the cult records it directly: at the commencement of work in the fields, the farmer plowed a piece of bread into the first furrow, and libations of beer were poured to the earth-mother at the opening of every festival, with bread and ale and herbs buried in the ground or set into water or tied to a tree in her honor — the Baltic earth-cult as Britannica sets it out. The first of the crop was hers; the last of it was hers; the cup was hers before it was the drinker’s.

The household kept her daily as well as seasonally. The libation poured out before drinking was the small, constant form of her worship, the one a man performed without ceremony at his own table. With it went the kiss to the earth — the bending to touch the lips to the ground, performed in the morning before the day’s work and in the evening at its close, and at the great passages of a life, the wedding and the burial. The kiss was thanks and it was acknowledgment: thanks for what the earth gives, and acknowledgment that the one who kisses her will one day be given back to her. That double sense — gratitude and surrender in a single gesture — is the whole theology of Žemyna pressed into one motion of the body.

A name survives for the rite in its fuller form. The seventeenth-century observer Matthäus Praetorius described a ceremony he called žemyneliauti, “to do the Žemyna-rite,” performed at major household celebrations: bread distributed, prayers and greetings spoken, offerings of food given over to the goddess, the cup tipped to the ground. The Lithuanian word preserves the goddess inside a verb — the act of honoring her became a thing one simply did, the way one might say “to keep the feast.” It is the kind of evidence that matters most for a domestic cult: not a doctrine but a habit with a name.

Her kin and her household of related powers were earth-powers too. Beside her stand Žemėpatis, whose name means roughly “earth-master” or “earth-spouse” and who in the sixteenth-century lists is the god of cattle and the farmstead’s beasts, and Žemininkas, “the one of the earth,” the god of the land and its working. Where her male counterpart is named at the cosmic scale, the sources point upward — to the high god, or to the thunder-god whose rain quickens the soil she is. The pairing of the rain-bringing sky and the receiving earth is among the deepest patterns in the Indo-European inheritance, the storm above and the ground below, and the Lithuanian Perkūnas — the thunderer who splits the oak — stands to Žemyna in roughly that ancient relation, the masculine sky over the feminine ground. It is a relation, not a marriage attested in any myth-text the Balts left, and the distinction is worth keeping: the pattern is firm, the particular wedding is reconstruction.

The Reaper (Żniwiarka), Kanuty Rusiecki, 1844 — a young woman with a handful of cut rye and a sickle, the harvest that was the season of Žemyna’s honor. Kanuty Rusiecki, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

To her chthonic and fertile world belongs the žaltys, the harmless green grass-snake — the Natrix natrix of the wet meadow and the streambank — that was kept and fed in the Lithuanian house and never, on any account, to be harmed. The snake had a corner by the stove; it was given milk; it was thought to bring the household its luck, the cattle their vitality, the grain its increase, the woman of the house her children. To kill it was to call disaster down on the home. The grass-snake sits exactly where Žemyna sits, at the seam between the fertile and the underground — a creature of the soil and the threshold, of moisture and increase, that lives in the floor of the house as she lives in the floor of the world. The cult of the žaltys is, in the sixteenth-century notices, attached to the earth-god Žemininkas, and in other strands of the folk record the sacred snake is bound to the sun-goddess Saulė instead, who is said to weep when one is killed. Which deity owns the serpent is not settled, and the honest account leaves it open; what is not in doubt is that it belonged to the chthonic-fertile complex over which the earth-mother presides — the green life that comes up out of the ground and goes back down into it.

The European grass snake (Natrix natrix), the žaltys, kept and fed in the Lithuanian house and never to be harmed — a creature of the soil and the threshold. Darius Baužys, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

How much of this is the pre-Christian goddess and how much is the long afterlife of an agrarian habit is a real question, and the sources do not let it be settled cleanly. The libation, the kiss, the bread in the furrow, the snake by the stove — these are attested in living folk practice, recorded in the centuries when the church already stood over the village. That they descend from the worship of Žemyna is the natural reading and the scholarly one, but it is an inference, not a thing any pre-Christian Lithuanian wrote down. The gesture is certain. The exact theology behind it is reconstructed, and where it is reconstructed this account says so.

How she comes to us

The Balts were the last pagans of Europe. Lithuania was Christianized in 1387, when the baptism of the grand duke was followed by mass baptisms at Vilnius, and Samogitia — the western Lithuanian country where the old ways held longest — only from 1413, when the grand duke himself went up the rivers to baptize the first groups of Samogitians, with the diocese established a few years after. They left no pre-Christian literature of their own. Everything written about Žemyna before the age of folklore-collection was written by someone outside her cult, and most of it late — the conversion of Lithuania sets the frame for how far the written record stands from the thing it records.

Her name belongs to the catalogs of gods that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced. The most famous is the little treatise De diis Samagitarum — “On the gods of the Samogitians” — assembled by the Polish Protestant writer Jan Lasicki, composed around 1582 and published in 1615, a short list of some seventy-odd Lithuanian gods with a line or two on each. It is one of the most precious and one of the most suspect documents in the whole field. Lasicki had never lived in Lithuania and did not speak the language; he worked from a second-hand informant, a Polish land-surveyor who had served in Samogitia. The result preserves real things and garbles others past recovery, and no single name in it can be trusted without corroboration. Žemyna’s name — in the spellings of the period — turns up in this stratum of the record alongside the others, and is named again by writers closer to the ground: the Lithuanian churchman Mikalojus Daukša in 1595, who knew the language and the country, and the seventeenth-century Praetorius who set down the žemyneliauti rite. The catalogs are the kind of source whose distance must be marked on the face of every claim drawn from them — external, interested, often working at one remove from anyone who had performed the rite — and the figure of Žemyna comes through them better than most, because what they report of her, the bread and the beer and the kiss, the folk practice independently confirms.

That folk practice is the second and richer current. The Lithuanian and Latvian countryside kept the agrarian rites of the earth for centuries after the formal conversion, and when collectors began in earnest in the nineteenth century to write down the daina — the folk-song — and the calendar custom, they found the earth-mother still in them: the libation, the kiss to the ground, the bread of the first furrow, the snake by the stove, the rye-harvest feast and its prayers of thanks. This is tradition-internal evidence — the voice of the cult itself rather than of an observer of it — but late in the collecting, and the gap between the singing and the writing-down is part of what must be weighed. The continuity is striking and it is also genuinely hard to measure, and the careful scholarship of the cult, such as the long study by Nijolė Laurinkienė of Žemyna and her mythical world, spends its effort precisely on telling the layers apart — what the early notices give, what the folk corpus preserves, what only the comparative method can suggest.

The comparative method is the third current, and the one that reaches farthest back. The very name that is the proof of her antiquity is also a problem of method: because Žemyna is the earth-word, the linguist can be sure the goddess is old and the same time can be unsure where the common noun ends and the proper name begins. She stands among the earth-mothers of the Indo-European world and beyond it — the Greek and Roman earth-figures, the receiving ground of many traditions, the mother who gives the grain and takes the body. These are resemblances of structure and of inheritance, not identities; the Lithuanian goddess is herself, addressed in her own diminutives and kept by her own kiss. Naming the kin is not the same as collapsing the difference.

What the figure finally offers is a religion in which the ground is not inert. The modern habit divides the world the goddess unites — soil into chemistry, death into biology, the field into one department and the grave into another. Žemyna is the name of the refusal of that division. The earth that the farmer opened with the first furrow, the earth the householder kissed at dusk, the earth the cup was poured upon, the earth the dead were given back to: it was all one body, and it was owed honor because everything came from it and everything returned. The gesture that survives — the little of the drink let fall before the rest is drunk — is the smallest visible piece of a sense of the world that took the ground for a mother and behaved accordingly.

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