Aušrinė

The farm women of Viliūšiai had no clocks, so they measured what was left of the night with an arm held up against the sky. You went out before cockcrow, found the big white star low in the east, and judged how much air still stood between it and the ground. A fathom meant get up. Less than a fathom meant the light was already coming and half the morning was gone. In December they watched her very closely. In the short summer nights nobody bothered. The star had a name, and the name belonged to somebody.

That somebody is a grammatical problem before she is anything else. Aušrinė is an adjective built on aušra, dawn, exactly as vakarinė is built on vakaras, evening, and it means nothing more mysterious than “the one of the daybreak”. Languages hand out words like that without anyone ever having knelt to them. What tips her over from vocabulary into person is the sheer weight of what the songs and tales hang on the word. She is given a mother, a lover, a servant, a herd of cattle, a wedding, a hill where people burned things for her, and prayers that address her in the second person. Nobody schedules an adultery for a common noun.

The Sun is her mother, or her mistress, or both, and the tradition never tidies this up. Widely across the country people held that the Sun and the Moon were a married pair, the Moon husband and the Sun wife, and that their daughter was Aušrinė, with some tellers making all the stars their children. Then the same tradition sets her to work as the Sun’s maid. Four songs printed by Ludwig Rhesa in 1825 are the earliest place she appears, and in one of them the Sun is asked who lights her fire and lays her bed, morning and evening. The answer comes back as a pair of names: Aušrinė lit the fire, Vakarinė laid the bed. In another, a woman hunting a lost ewe goes first to Aušrinė and is turned away with an excuse any farm servant would recognise, that she has to be up early to get the Sun’s fire going.

The trouble starts because the Moon looks at her. In the song Rhesa called The Moon’s Wedding, the Moon married the Sun in the first spring; the Sun rose early, the Moon slipped away, walked out alone and fell in love with Aušrinė, and Perkūnas in a great rage cut him through with a sword. The countryside kept reading that story out of the sky for centuries afterwards, and it kept it precise. When the setting moon and the rising sun are visible together, Dzūkija called the moment padaužai, the beating. Around Druskininkai they said the Sun, furious at her husband, seized a sword and slashed his face. At Monkūnėliai in Seirijai parish the line was flatter than that: this morning the Sun knocked the Moon about, because he got close to Aušrinė. Around Marcinkonys the Sun catches the Moon with her, and the beating follows, and the Moon hides, which is why he wanes. A woman near Kražiai put the affair in three words. She used to fly about with the Moon, this way and that.

Where she came from is Algirdas Julius Greimas’s reconstruction, and it is the best thing anyone has done with her. He worked from a tale written down in 1889 in the village of Skujinė, about a maiden on an island in the middle of the sea whose hair is the same stuff as the Sun’s, so bright that a single strand of it lying in the water throws back a light like the largest star. She keeps a bull that swims across the water every evening and turns into a horse when you saddle it, and the hero is told to mount her as he would mount a horse and wind her hair round his hands, and to ignore her when she cries that the earth will drown if he does not let go.

Set that beside the scraps in which the Moon fails to rise for two days because a girl of poor family has been born more beautiful than anyone in the world and he could not stop staring, or the Sun admits she went dark for three days for the same reason, or confesses that she has to set at all because a stronger girl comes up out of the sea in the evening. Greimas’s conclusion is that Aušrinė is born twice, once in the depths of the water like Aphrodite out of the foam, and once as a light in the sky among the gods. Her three shapes answer to three elements: the maiden on land, the star in the air, the mare in the sea.

She does not travel alone. A second, much smaller light beside her is her Tarnaitis, her servant, and farmers watched the order in which the two of them came up. If the servant rose first it would be a good year, which meant a hard one for the master, who would have to go chasing labourers and pay what they asked. If she rose first the farmers were pleased, because then the servants would come to them and take whatever was offered. The same star, read off the same sky, meant opposite things depending on which end of the hiring you stood at. Marija Gimbutas thought this servant star was what the Latvians personified as the male Auseklis, which is worth holding on to, because it means the Latvian morning star lines up not with Aušrinė herself but with the small one walking behind her.

Her powers are the powers of a threshold. She fixes the hour, and the hour she fixes is the one when work begins: seeing her, people got up, went to break flax, went out to hammer a scythe before sunrise, and the lads still sitting with the girls got moving. She kept people from getting lost, since a woman who knew her cattle pen lay to the northeast never strayed off the path while that star was up. On the hill called Aušrinės kalnas near Kaltinėnai, an account taken down in 1973 has her coming down at first light to bless the people praying there, who burned offerings and asked her for good fortune, and another from 1975 has young women in white sitting on the ridge at dawn to meet the rising sun with dancing and singing. At Girnakalniai the request was made in a single breath on sight of the new moon. Young moon, star of dawn, bless my life.

Her limits are equally concrete. She goes missing from the morning sky for the better part of a sixth of the year, and the explanation collected in 1888 is that beyond the great western waters there are enormous witches waiting with a sack, and if one of them lands her as she goes down into the sea she keeps her in it for a whole year, until Aušrinė tears her way out and resumes her road. A woman near Griškabūdis still had the bones of it in living memory: they stole her because she was beautiful, and she got away from them, and now she shines for us as something that escaped. For all her brightness she is also stuck in service, lighting another woman’s fire every morning, and the songs never let her out of it. She wins nothing from the affair. The Moon is halved, the Sun stays angry, and the fire still needs lighting at four in the morning.

The last limit is the record itself. Most reference books will tell you that she first appears in the sixteenth century, as the Ausca of Jan Łasicki’s catalogue of Samogitian gods, a goddess of the rays of the sun as they climb and fall. The scholarship that actually treats her at length does not accept it. Dainius Razauskas states the position without softening it: the historical sources say nothing about her, and everything we have comes out of folklore recorded from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Rhesa’s songs were themselves doubted for a long time, dismissed as inventions by Aleksander Brückner and put down to Latvian Curonian singers by Aukusti Robert Niemi and Jonas Balys, until field records like the 1973 account from the hill turned up repeating the same imagery with no route back to a book. And there may be a reason she never got into the old written sources at all. By the time anyone official was looking, she had put on the face of the Virgin Mary, who arrives in Lithuanian hymns and folk prayers wrapped in a starry blue cloak, called the bright star of dawn, sitting on a small golden chair with the light of morning breaking behind her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aušrinė?

Aušrinė is the Lithuanian goddess of the morning star, the planet Venus. She appears in Lithuanian folklore as a young woman of extraordinary beauty who lights the Sun’s fire each daybreak, and as the lover whose affair with the Moon broke up his marriage to the Sun.

What happened between Aušrinė, the Moon and the Sun?

The Moon, married to the Sun, walked out alone one night and fell in love with Aušrinė. In the songs the thunder god Perkūnas cut him in two with a sword for it. Lithuanian country tradition read this out of the sky directly, explaining the waning moon as the beating the Sun gave her husband after catching him with Aušrinė.

Is Aušrinė the same as the Latvian Auseklis?

No. Auseklis is the Latvian morning star and is male, a suitor of the Sun’s daughter, while Aušrinė is female and Lithuanian. Marija Gimbutas identified Auseklis instead with Tarnaitis, the small servant star that rises alongside Aušrinė, so the two traditions personify the same planet as different figures.

What was Aušrinė used for in daily life?

She was a clock and a compass. Lithuanian farmers judged the hour by how high she stood, rising to work when she appeared and stopping when the evening star set, and people navigated by her in the dark before dawn.

Why does Aušrinė disappear from the sky?

Folklore explains her absence from the morning sky as a kidnapping. Enormous witches wait beyond the western waters with a sack, and if one catches her as she sets into the sea she is held for a year until she breaks out and returns to her road. The story tracks the period when Venus is genuinely not visible as a morning object.

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