Bangpūtys

Also Known As: also written Bangputtys, Bangputtis and Bang-puttys; called Bangų Dievaitis, the young god of the waves, and Vėjaitis; from Lithuanian banga, a wave, with pūsti, to blow, or putos, foam
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Baltic Mythology, Lithuanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He raises the north wind and the waves that come with it, capsizes boats over the deepest water of the Curonian Lagoon, and scatters the fish away from men who have crossed him.
Role in Mythos: He is the local storm god of the Nemunas delta fishermen, avoided rather than courted, whose authority stops at the waterline.
Relation to Humans: Fishermen handled him almost entirely by keeping out of his way, hanging rowan in their nets, staying quiet on the water and refusing to sail after sunset rather than asking him for anything. The single rite recorded in his honour, written down in the 1690s, has a spoon stolen and then burned, and no source explains what the smoke was meant to buy.

The wind that mattered came out of the north and it came fast. Out where the Curonian Lagoon drops away, in the deep middle water the fishermen of Rusnė called the budumas, a flat-bottomed boat could be running easy under canvas one minute and shipping cold spray over the side the next. The men had a phrase ready for it. Bangpūtys has gone mad. If the boat went over, they had a shorter one. Bangpūtys turned it over.

His territory was never large. He belongs to the delta of the Nemunas, to the reed margins and the brown shallow water on the Prussian side of the river, and nearly every scrap of evidence for him comes from Rusnė or from within a few hours’ sail of it. The name is transparently Lithuanian and it is a job description: banga, a wave, joined to pūsti, to blow. The wave-blower. Gottfried Ostermeyer worked the etymology out in 1775 and used it to correct a colleague who had filed the god under Neptune, pointing out that the shape of the word makes him a ruffler of waves and therefore a wind, not a sea. Later collectors preferred a second reading, from putos, foam, which makes him the one who whips the water white. Both roads arrive at the same place, at a god who is felt as weather.

The earliest notice of him runs to two lines. Toward the end of the seventeenth century Matthäus Prätorius, a Lutheran pastor working the mixed Prussian, Curonian and Lithuanian parishes near the lagoon, set down that Bangputtys was the god of storms, and that to honour him a spoon was stolen and then burned. That is all. Nobody wrote down what the spoon was for, or who did the stealing, or what the smoke was supposed to purchase. Three centuries later the rite is still unexplained, and the small grubby practicality of it, the theft of a wooden spoon out of somebody’s kitchen, is the most convincing detail in the whole record.

He surfaces properly in a song. Ludwig Rhesa printed it in 1825 and Vilius Kalvaitis collected it again from Prussian Lithuanians in the 1880s and 1890s, in variants that shuffle the details and keep the shape. Two young fishermen run out from the Rusnė yard under sail and let their nets down in the budumas. They bring up two little sea calves, most likely seals, and that is the mistake. The Bangų Dievaitis takes offence at the catch, and the north wind comes up on them. One throws out a golden anchor. The other climbs the mast to look for the dune ridge and calls back that he cannot see the shore at all, only his sweetheart, which is either a vision or a boy’s answer to a question he has no answer for.

The song is doing more work than it appears to. It places him in the middle, over the deepest water, never at the edge. It gives him the north wind as his own face. And it suggests the seals were his, that hauling them out of the mesh was a trespass on something he kept. Talk of the shore in these songs is not scenery. The sand is where his reach ends.

The fullest portrait of him was recorded in 1964 from a man who had been fishing the lagoon since before the century turned. August Deivelaitis, born in 1879 at Šyškrantė, counted himself a Curonian and was among the oldest fishermen left around Rusnė. Vėjaitis, he said, or as others called him, Bangputys, was reckoned a spirit of the waters. Male. Very foul. Like some aitvaras, always the same, and there was no getting onto good terms with him. He was worse than Jumpira, the half woman and half fish who appeared in the water ahead of him, whose name had drifted in from the German Jungfrau. When one showed, the men expected the other, because the two of them went about together.

So they managed him the way you manage weather, by not provoking it. Before dark the nets came out of the house dragged across the threshold, with rowan sprigs pushed into the mesh and rowan and maple lashed to the stones that weighted them. Nobody shouted on the water and nobody whistled. Swearing at the fishing ground was spoken of as a crime rather than a bad habit. After sunset the boats stayed in, because Bangputys would take it badly and somebody would pay for it. And now and again a man was carved out of wood and then beaten, along with the net, which may well mean they were thrashing an image of the god himself.

Nobody ever drew him. The older records hint that a wooden likeness of him existed somewhere, and that beaten figure is the nearest thing to it, but no source gives him a face, a height or a shape. The bearded, two-faced, winged figure with a fish in one hand, a small keg in the other and a rooster fixed on its head, the picture that appears under his name in most modern accounts, is not his. Prätorius saw it on a fisherman’s boat at the village of Karkel, standing at the masthead where a flag should be and then moved down by the steering oar, and the fisherman told him what it was called: Wejopattis, the Lord of the Winds. It has been quietly transplanted onto Bangpūtys ever since. The four sons named for the four winds, and the austere unrelenting temperament that goes with them, arrived later still, out of twentieth century reconstruction rather than out of the record.

He may be the worn-down end of something larger. A century and a half before Prätorius, the Prussian source known as the Sudovian Book described Bardoayts, god of seafarers, worshipped only by men who went out onto the lagoon or the open sea. They held that a great angel stood in the middle of the water, and whichever way he turned he blew, and the boats went over and the shoals broke up. At his feast they ate fish and nothing else, no bread, and drank their soup from bowls made deliberately deep, because the god ruled deep water. Set that against a god of one river delta whose worshippers burned a stolen spoon, and the older figure looks like the parent and Bangpūtys like the local remnant, working a much smaller stretch of coast.

What he can do is narrow and entirely sufficient. He raises wind, and through the wind he raises the waves, and the waves take the boat. He is the north wind in person, and in the songs the same wind that drowns can also carry a vessel home or give back what the water swallowed, down to a gold ring. He drives the fish off from men who have irritated him. He keeps company with the drowning-woman and with the restless spirits that hang about boats, and the aitvaras, the flying household serpent of Lithuanian belief, is his nearest relation in temperament: airborne, unreliable, and better left alone.

His limits are just as narrow. He cannot follow anyone onto land, which is why the shoreline in the songs functions as safety rather than backdrop, and why a threshold and a doorway have a part in the charms against him. Rowan turns him. Maple turns him. A conversation about the ordinary business of the coast, spoken aloud in the middle of a storm, seems to have been thought to loosen his grip. He is not a god anyone bargains with, and nobody in the record ever asks him for a thing, except once, with a spoon and a fire, for something that is no longer written down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bangpūtys?

Bangpūtys is a Lithuanian god of storm and wind whose worship is documented among the fishermen of the Nemunas delta and the Curonian Lagoon. His name combines banga, a wave, with pūsti, to blow, making him the one who raises waves by blowing. He was first recorded at the end of the seventeenth century by the pastor Matthäus Prätorius, who called him simply the god of storms.

What did fishermen do to protect themselves from Bangpūtys?

They used avoidance and plant charms rather than offerings. Rowan sprigs were pushed into the nets, rowan and maple were lashed to the net weights, and the net was dragged out of the house across the threshold. Fishermen also stayed off the water after sunset, kept from shouting, whistling or swearing while fishing, and sometimes carved a wooden man and beat it together with the net.

Is the two-faced winged figure with a rooster on its head really Bangpūtys?

No. That figure comes from Matthäus Prätorius, who saw a carved wooden image on a fisherman’s boat at Karkel with two faces, large wings, a fish in one hand and a small keg in the other, and a rooster fixed on its head. The fisherman named it Wejopattis, the Lord of the Winds. Later popular accounts attached the description to Bangpūtys, but no source describes Bangpūtys himself.

What happens in the song about Bangpūtys?

Two young fishermen sail out from Rusnė and cast their nets in the deep middle of the lagoon, where they catch two little sea calves. This angers the god of the waves, who sends a north wind and a storm. One fisherman throws out a golden anchor while the other climbs the mast to look for the shore and reports that he can see only his sweetheart.

Where was Bangpūtys worshipped?

Almost all evidence for him comes from the Nemunas delta in what was then Prussian Lithuania, and especially from the fishing settlement of Rusnė and the villages around it on the Curonian Lagoon. He appears to have been a strictly local deity of the Lietuvininkai fishermen rather than a god of the wider Baltic world, and he is not known in Prussian mythology proper.