Austėja

Also Known As: Austheia in Jan Łasicki’s Latin treatise, printed 1615; the modern Lithuanian spelling is Austėja
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She was believed to bring increase to the bees, leading new bees into the hives and keeping the drones away.
Role in Mythos: She is one of two goddesses of increase in Łasicki’s list of Samogitian gods, named in the same breath as the earth goddess Žemyna and beside the bee god Babilos.
Relation to Humans: Beekeepers called on her when their bees swarmed, asking her to bring more bees into their hives from elsewhere and to drive the drones off. No other rite, offering, shrine or story of hers survives.

Somewhere in Samogitia, in the late sixteenth century, the bees boiled out of a hive in a loud, sunlit cloud, and the people who owned them asked a goddess for more. That is very nearly everything known about Austėja. Her whole record is one Latin sentence in Jan Łasicki’s short treatise *De diis Samagitarum caeterorumque Sarmatarum et falsorum Christianorum*, “On the gods of the Samogitians, the other Sarmatians and the false Christians”, compiled from reports in the late 1500s and printed in 1615. There she appears under the spelling Austheia: “There are also goddesses, Zemina of the earth and Austheia of the bees. Both are believed to bring increase, and when the bees swarm they are asked to lead more of them into the hives from elsewhere, and to keep the drones away from them.”

It is a working prayer, not a hymn. A swarm is the hour a beekeeper can gain a colony or watch one fly off over the trees, and the request covers both ends of the ledger: more bees arriving from somewhere else, and fewer drones, the stingless males that eat honey and gather none. Nobody asked Austėja for glory. They asked her for numbers.

Łasicki sets her beside Zemina, the earth goddess known in modern Lithuanian as Žemyna, and gives the two of them one shared job in a single Latin word, *incrementa*: increase, growth, the swelling of a thing over a season. The same paragraph names a male god of bees too, Babilos, “whom the Russians call Zosim”. So the Samogitian hives, in this one report, had two patrons, a god and a goddess, and the goddess was filed next to the soil itself. The treatise then turns straight to the honey, in a passage its editors trace to Guagnini’s description of Sarmatia: nowhere, it says, is honey whiter or less clogged with wax, and the wax went out by ship in great cakes to the Low Countries, France and Spain. The smell of that trade, warm and resinous, is the nearest the record comes to a setting for her.

Nobody described her. Łasicki gives no face, no parentage, no consort, no temple, no festival, no myth and no end. The later picture of Austėja that circulates in popular retellings, a goddess shaped like a bee or a patron blessing friendships between beekeepers, is not in the sentence and has no older root behind it.

The record after Łasicki thins rather than thickens. When Matthäus Praetorius came to catalogue Baltic belief in his *Deliciae Prussicae*, his list had no Austheia in it. According to a note by Wilhelm Mannhardt, the nineteenth-century German editor of Łasicki, Praetorius names, in place of the two bee gods Babilos and Austheia, a single Biczbirbius, a “bee-hummer”, built from the Lithuanian words for bee and for humming. Mannhardt himself guessed that Austheia might mean something like “the hummer” as well, and printed a question mark beside the guess.

Lithuanian folklore never names her either. Daiva Steponavičienė, writing in *Liaudies kultūra* in 2000, notes that the name Austėja does not occur in the folk songs, while the bee is everywhere in them: in wedding songs a bee building comb and carrying honey stands beside a girl plaiting her bridal crown and weaving linen for her dowry. On that ground Steponavičienė argues that Austėja is better read as a goddess of family increase, bees and humans alike, than as a narrow bee deity, a power over the passage from maidenhood to marriage. Pranė Dundulienė gave the “bee goddess Austėja” a chapter of her own in her 2008 study of the female deities of Lithuanian paganism, and Nijolė Laurinkienė, in a 2007 comparison of Baltic mother goddesses, sets her beside Žemyna and Laima as the protector of bees, the field of settled farming life. These are readings built on Łasicki’s line and on the folklore around it. None of them adds a second ancient witness.

The world around the sentence is better attested than the goddess, and it explains why a swarm deserved a prayer. The historian Eugenijus Saviščevas traces the Lithuanian word *bičiulis*, a close friend, to bees, and to the custom of sharing honey between partners, even across the line between lord and peasant. Forest beekeepers worked wild colonies in hollowed trees and took only half the honey, because taking more killed the colony, and the Lithuanian Statute forbade anyone, noble or not, to destroy a bee hollow or seize another’s. In that economy a swarm that settled in the right tree was wealth arriving on its own wings.

Her power, as recorded, is exactly the size of a hive: to draw bees in, to multiply them, and, working alongside the earth goddess, to make things grow. Her limits are written into the same sentence. She is asked, not commanded, and only at the anxious moment of the swarm, when the outcome was still in the air. Nothing records what happened when she declined.

Her name has done better than her cult. Austėja is a Lithuanian given name, and *austėja* is also the Lithuanian name for *Jasione*, a genus of small plants of dry pinewoods and hillsides whose tiny flowers crowd together into round heads.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Austėja in Lithuanian mythology?

Austėja is a Lithuanian goddess of bees recorded by Jan Łasicki in his treatise on the Samogitian gods, printed in 1615. Łasicki says she and the earth goddess Zemina (Žemyna) were believed to bring increase. Beekeepers prayed to Austėja when their bees swarmed.

What did people ask Austėja for?

When the bees swarmed, people asked Austėja to lead more bees into their hives from elsewhere and to keep the drones away. That request is the only rite of hers on record. No offerings, shrine or festival for Austėja are described.

Is Austėja found in Lithuanian folk songs?

No. The name Austėja does not appear in Lithuanian folk songs, though bees appear often, especially in wedding songs that compare a bee making comb to a girl preparing her dowry. The scholar Daiva Steponavičienė used those songs to argue that Austėja was a goddess of family increase for bees and humans alike.

What did Austėja look like?

No source describes Austėja’s appearance. The single sentence that records her names only her domain and what she was asked to do. Popular modern images of her as a bee-shaped goddess have no basis in that record.

Who is the Lithuanian god of bees alongside Austėja?

Łasicki names a male bee god, Babilos, in the same passage as Austėja and adds that the Russians called him Zosim. Later, Matthäus Praetorius recorded a single bee god in their place, Biczbirbius, the “bee-hummer”.