Dēkla and Kārta

Also Known As: Dēkla is also Dēkle, Dēkliņa, Dēklīte; her name is most often read as the Latvian form of Saint Thecla. Kārta is tied to the verb kārt, to hang, and to the noun kārta, an order or layer
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Latvian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Dēkla and Kārta are fate goddesses who, with Laima, settle the course of a human life at the moment of birth.
Role in Mythos: In the Latvian folk songs they stand beside Laima as her two companions, and later writers shared the work out so that Dēkla watches over the child and Kārta over the grown adult.
Relation to Humans: A newborn’s whole life is laid down by them in the first hours, and nothing a person does afterwards can alter it. Singers called on them at births, and in many songs Dēkla’s name can be swapped for Laima’s without changing a thing.

The bathhouse is the warmest building on the farm, and that is why the birth happens there. The stones are still hot. The air smells of birch leaves and wet wood, and the women who have come to help keep their voices low. When the child arrives and has been washed, a cradle is hung for it from a springy pole, so that it sways at a touch. In the old songs, somebody else is in the room for this. She is the one who decides what kind of life has just begun.

Most Latvians would call her Laima. But in the songs of Kurzeme, the western part of the country, the singer may say Dēkla instead. And now and then, in a much smaller number of songs, the name is Kārta.

These are the three fate goddesses of Latvian tradition, and the two lesser ones are among the hardest figures in it to pin down. There is no story about them. No song tells how they were born, whom they married, or what they once did to a hero. They have no myth in the usual sense. They have a job, and the songs show them doing it: standing over a new child, measuring out a life, and going away.

The handing out of duties is neat. Laima belongs to the mother and the birth itself, Dēkla takes charge of the child, and Kārta governs the adult years. One reference work calls Dēkla the protector of babies and Kārta the spinner of the thread of life. Another lines them up with the past, the present and the future. Where the three are set side by side, Laima has the last word. It is a tidy scheme, and it is mostly the work of people who came along later and wanted the Latvian three to match the Greek Moirai, the Roman Parcae and the Norse Norns. The folklorist Jēkabs Lautenbahs made exactly that comparison. The songs themselves are far less orderly.

The numbers tell it plainly. In the great collection of folk songs gathered by Krišjānis Barons, Dēkla is named in 43 base songs, with 122 more texts that are variants of those. Nearly all come from Kurzeme. She acts alone in 19 of them, and nine of those were written down once and never again, which suggests few people knew them. In ten songs another singer has put a different name where hers stood: Laima, or Laima’s mother, or Māra, or God, or just the word mother. In sixteen she stands beside Dievs, the sky god, and the two seem to share the deciding as equals. Kārta turns up even less.

Picture a collector in the 1880s going from parish to parish with a notebook. In one farmhouse an old woman sings four lines about Dēkla laying down a child’s days. Two parishes on, another woman sings the same four lines, same tune, and the name is Laima. He writes both down. Neither woman thinks she has made a mistake.

So who are they? The best answer on offer is that they are pieces of Laima that came loose. Haralds Biezais, who spent a career on the Latvian gods, held that Dēkla is simply the Latvian form of Saint Thecla, an early Christian saint whose name the church carried into Kurzeme, where it settled onto the old goddess of birth and took over her work. Not everyone accepts this, and some put the likeness of the two names down to chance. Kārta he traced to the cradle. The Latvian verb kārt means to hang, and hanging the cradle was the act that fixed a child in its place in the world. On his reading the word for the act slowly became a name, the name became a goddess, and the goddess gained songs of her own. Pēteris Šmits, writing in 1926, preferred the everyday noun kārta, an order or a row, which would make her the one who arranges what Laima has decreed. He also said, frankly, that nobody had firm proof of how the name arose. Nobody has found it since.

Their looks are a blank. The songs never describe a dress, a hand, or a colour of hair for either one. The picture most Latvians know is a painting of 1921 by Ansis Cīrulis, which sets Laima, Dēkla and Kārta together on Christmas Eve, looking down at a newborn Christ. It is a fine picture and it is a modern one. The modern Dievturi movement, which revives the old religion, goes a step further and speaks of the three Laimas, one goddess seen three ways.

Their power is complete within its limits. What they fix at the cradle stays fixed. Wealth or hard work, a good marriage or a bad one, a long life or a short one: all of it is settled before the child has opened its eyes, and the songs treat it as beyond any human appeal. A power like that needs no weapon and no body, which may be why they were never given either.

The limits are just as clear. They decide and then they are done; they do not step in later to rescue or to punish. Where Laima is present, she overrules them. And their hold on their own names is weak. A singer could replace Dēkla with another goddess and lose nothing, and a rival word could explain Kārta away as a verb. They are goddesses who can vanish from a song in the space of one breath, and the life they measured out goes on regardless.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Dēkla and Kārta?

Dēkla and Kārta are two goddesses of fate in Latvian mythology. Together with Laima they form a group of three who decide the course of a person’s life at birth. Laima is by far the best known of the three and has the final say.

What is the difference between Laima, Dēkla and Kārta?

In the usual scheme Laima is tied to mothers and childbirth, Dēkla looks after the child, and Kārta governs adult life. The folk songs do not keep these roles apart, and Dēkla’s name is often swapped with Laima’s in versions of the same song. The modern Dievturi movement treats all three as one goddess and calls them the three Laimas.

Where does the name Dēkla come from?

The scholar Haralds Biezais held that Dēkla is the Latvian form of Saint Thecla, whose name took over the work of the birth goddess Laima under church influence. Not everyone accepts this, and some think the two names only happen to sound alike. Songs about Dēkla come almost entirely from Kurzeme in western Latvia.

What does the name Kārta mean?

Kārta is linked to the Latvian verb kārt, to hang, which points to the hanging of a newborn’s cradle. Pēteris Šmits preferred the noun kārta, meaning an order or row, which would make Kārta the one who arranges what Laima decides. Šmits admitted that there was no firm proof either way.

Are there any myths about Dēkla and Kārta?

No story about Dēkla or Kārta survives. They appear only in short folk songs, where they stand at a birth and fix the child’s fate. Dēkla is named in 43 base songs in the Barons collection, and Kārta in fewer still.