Auseklis

Also Known As: also Auseklītis, Ausekliņš, Auseklīts, Auseklenis, Ausekliņis; the feminine Auseklīte also occurs. From the Baltic root aus-, “dawn”, with the suffix -eklis, the same root behind Vedic Ushas, Greek Eos and Latin Aurora
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Latvian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the morning star given a body, a rider and a betrothal, and the one sky-dweller the moon cannot find in the evening.
Role in Mythos: He is the first suitor and rightful bridegroom of Saules meita, the Sun’s daughter, in the cycle of songs about the celestial wedding.
Relation to Humans: Nobody prayed to him at an altar, because no Latvian temple or priesthood is recorded anywhere; what people did instead was sing about him, in thousands of four-line songs sung at work and at weddings. The eight-pointed star that later carried his name was drawn on cradles and woven into blankets to keep a sleeper safe through the night.

The last star out is the one they sang about. In the hour when the byre latch still carries frost and the sky above the rye has gone the colour of skimmed milk, a single point of light hangs low in the east and declines to fade with the rest. Latvian farmers had a name for that light, and the name belonged to a boy.

Auseklis is the morning star, and in the folk songs of Latvia he is also a person: young, mounted, faintly indulged, and about to lose the one thing he wants. After Saule the sun and Mēness the moon he is the most sung of the sky-dwellers, and almost everything anyone knows about him comes from those songs and nowhere else. The German crusade reached the eastern Baltic in the twelfth century and the old worship went under it without leaving temples, priesthoods or a written cosmology behind. What did survive was the dainas, terse four-line songs carried by rhythm and by rigid rules of composition, which is precisely why the archaic material inside them kept its shape. Krišjānis Barons and Henrijs Visendorfs published the great collection between 1894 and 1915. The myths of Latvia are not narratives anyone ever told straight through. They are dramas reassembled from thousands of song fragments, and Auseklis stands near the centre of the biggest one.

The word does double duty, and it is worth being plain about that. Auseklis is the ordinary Latvian for the morning star, built on the same ancient root for dawn that produced Ushas in the Rigveda, Eos in Greece, Aurora in Rome and Aušrinė across the border in Lithuania. A word is not a god. But the songs hand this one everything a planet has no use for: an errand, a horse, a fiancée, a rival and a grievance. Marija Gimbutas called him a dievaitis, a little god, and noted that the horse was either bought by him or bought for him by the Sun herself. He is too young to do the work the older sky-dwellers do. He is playful. Singers reached for the diminutive so habitually that Auseklītis is nearly as common a form as the plain name, and a feminine Auseklīte turns up as well, which has kept the question of his sex from ever fully closing.

The songs like to place him among the stars and then point out that he is not there. Mēness musters the stars the way a captain musters a company, running down the line by night, and finds a gap where the youngest ought to be. The explanation of that absence is where the ordinary sky-watching tips over into myth: Auseklis is away at the wedding of the Sun’s daughter, sometimes as the bridegroom, sometimes only as one of the party walking with the bride.

Saules meita is the prize, and Auseklis courts her hard. One song has him ride all the way to Germany to do it. The betrothal holds until the hour he is under the horizon and cannot be reached, and it is Mēness, who was supposed to be counting stars, who takes her. Thunder comes to the wedding. Pērkons arrives in a temper, demanding to know why the Sun handed her daughter over, and he rides off striking the golden oak that stands as the tree of the Sun. The Sun mourns for three years. The songs do not agree on the order of any of this, and there is no version that can be called the true one; what stays stable across the variants is the shape of the injury. The moon shines when he should be working, or reaches for a bride who is not his, and out of that comes the quarrel that keeps the sky in motion.

Haralds Biezais, who worked through this material more thoroughly than anyone, read the whole cycle as a record of the sky rather than a story about people. Under that reading the golden and silver oaks, the birches and the limes are named star groups lying along the Sun’s path, and the Sun’s arrival at the apple garden is her entry into the cluster the Greeks called the Pleiades. Most scholarship identifies Auseklis with Venus. Not all of it does, and the identification has never been nailed down, which leaves open the possibility that the singers meant simply the first bright thing to show in the east and were not being astronomers about it.

Then there is the sign, and here the history runs the other way round from what most people assume. The eight-pointed star drawn in a single unbroken line is genuinely old on Latvian textiles and woodwork, and it belongs to a protective tradition: it had to be completed without lifting the hand or the protection failed, and it was woven into blankets so the sleeper would not be ridden by Lietuvēns through the night. It is one of the two crosses of Lietuvēns, the other being the pentagram, and both were originally guards rather than threats. Calling that octagram “Auseklis”, though, is recent. Ernests Brastiņš, an artist and the founder of the neo-pagan Dievturi movement, published Latviešu ornamentika in 1923, and he and his followers systematically matched the names of Latvian deities to old ornaments. The sign is ancestral. The label on it is a hundred years old.

The name travelled well regardless. Miķelis Krogzemis, a peasant’s son turned schoolmaster and one of the Young Latvians, took Auseklis as his pen name in the 1870s and spent three collections of verse on his country’s landscape, history and gods before typhus killed him in Saint Petersburg at twenty-eight. The octagram became a fashionable motif in the interwar decades, and in the late 1980s, during the Third Awakening, it went up on banners and lapels as a badge of resistance and stayed there until Latvia was free.

His powers are small and exactly bounded. He announces the dawn, which is to say he is the visible promise that the dark has a limit, and his sign turns the nightmare away from a bed. That is the whole of it. His weaknesses follow from the same fact: he owns one hour and nothing else. He cannot be found in the evening because he is not there to be found. He is too young for the work the others do. The horse was a gift. And when the theft happens, he is below the horizon, which is another way of saying he is not present at the one moment that decides everything. He never gets her back. The avenging is done by the thunder, and the mourning is done by the Sun, and the smallest god in the sky goes on rising every morning with nothing settled.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Auseklis in Latvian mythology?

Auseklis is the Latvian god of the morning star, ranked after the sun goddess Saule and the moon god Mēness among the deities of the sky. He appears almost exclusively in the dainas, the four-line Latvian folk songs collected by Krišjānis Barons and Henrijs Visendorfs between 1894 and 1915. In those songs he is imagined as very young, mounted on a horse the Sun provided, and betrothed to the Sun’s daughter.

What happens between Auseklis, Mēness and the Sun’s daughter?

Auseklis is the rightful bridegroom of Saules meita, the Sun’s daughter, but the moon god Mēness takes her while Auseklis is below the horizon and out of reach. Pērkons, the thunder god, arrives at the wedding angry and rides away striking the golden oak that stands as the tree of the Sun, after which the Sun mourns for three years. The songs give conflicting orders of events, so no single version of the celestial wedding can be called the original.

Is Auseklis the same as the planet Venus?

Most research identifies Auseklis with Venus as the morning star, but the identification is not certain and some scholarship leaves it open. Haralds Biezais read the entire cycle of songs as a poetic record of real sky movements, with named star groups appearing in the dainas as golden and silver oaks, birches and limes. It is also possible the singers meant simply the first bright light to appear in the east.

What is the Auseklis symbol?

The Auseklis symbol is an eight-pointed star, an octagram traditionally drawn in one unbroken line without lifting the hand, since breaking the line was believed to break its protection. It is one of the two crosses of Lietuvēns, the other being the pentagram, and both were used to keep the nightmare spirit away from a sleeper. The ornament itself is old, but naming it after the god dates to Ernests Brastiņš and the Dievturi movement in the 1920s.

Why is Auseklis known almost entirely from folk songs?

Latvia was Christianised during the German crusade of the twelfth century, and the pre-Christian religion left behind no temples, priesthood or written cosmology. The dainas preserved the older material because their strict rhythm and fixed compositional rules resisted change over centuries of oral transmission. As a result the mythology has to be reconstructed from thousands of short song fragments rather than read from a narrative text.