Jumis

Also Known As: diminutives Jumītis and Jumiņš, in the songs Jumītis; Latvian jumis, an ordinary noun for any doubled fruit or twinned ear of grain; paired in the folk songs with Jumala, Jumaliņa
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Latvian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is doubling itself, present in any stalk that carries two ears, any pair of nuts fused in one husk, any flower that has come up twinned.
Role in Mythos: He lives in the growing grain and must be found, tied and housed at the end of the harvest so that the field bears again.
Relation to Humans: Farmers did not petition him so much as handle him, leaving him the last of the crop to live in and then catching him on the final day of reaping. He was the one god a Latvian household could physically pick up, carry indoors and keep in a barn over the winter.

By the end of a good September the field is stubble and chaff and the dry rasp of straw underfoot, and one narrow strip of rye is still standing. Nobody has forgotten it. The reapers close on it slowly, and somewhere inside that last handful is a stem carrying two ears instead of one.

A stalk like that is a jumis. So is a hazelnut grown double inside one husk, an apple with two cores, a berry that has come up twinned. The word is ordinary Latvian, the sort of thing a farmer says without thinking, and it is also the name of a god. The difficulty of telling those two apart is not a flaw in the record. It is the shape of the whole belief.

Jumis lived in the field. That is the first and most consistent thing the tradition says about him, and it explains a custom that otherwise looks like carelessness: the last of the crop was deliberately left uncut, standing, so that he had somewhere to be. A field reaped clean to the edge was a field with nowhere for him to sleep. So the strip stayed, and the harvest ended not with a clean sweep but with a small deliberate remainder, a room left for a lodger.

The day that ended the grain harvest was Apjumības, folded into the church calendar as Miķeļi, the feast that falls at the autumn equinox when day and night come level again. Latvia’s Ethnographic Open-Air Museum still keeps the name and the ritual. On that day the household performed Jumja ķeršana, the catching of Jumis, and the point was to get him out of the field and into the building where the crop was stored, because a god left outdoors all winter is a god who might not come back.

The songs did the work. As the last of the grain went down the reapers sang at him, telling him where to run, naming the barn, naming the granary. Then they went through the final handful looking for the doubled stalk, and when it was found they tied it. Knotted it, sometimes, or bound it into a wreath of ears that hung in the house until spring, when the seed shaken out of it went into the ground before any other seed. That was the whole transaction. The god of next year’s bread spent the winter as a bundle of straw on a nail.

He came with a sister, and the songs are frank about what he wanted from her. Janīna Kursīte, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion, sets Jumis beside Jumala, at one point his twin and at another his betrothed or his wife, and quotes the verse in which he goes looking for her: Jumīts meklēj Jumaliņu, pa tīrumu staigādams, Jumītis walking the field searching for Jumaliņa, the brother seeking a bride by asking his sister for one. That is the closest thing he has to a myth, and it lands him squarely in a much larger family. The Rigveda has Yama and his twin Yami, who tries to talk her brother into exactly the thing this song circles around. The Avesta has Yima. Old Irish has emain, the word for a twin. The names are cognate, and so, apparently, is the story underneath them.

The etymology keeps pulling in the same direction. Latvian jumis sits on the same root as jumt, to thatch a roof, and jumts, the roof itself, and debesu jums, the vault of heaven, all of them from an Indo-European root meaning to tie together. Kārlis Karulis, in his Latvian etymological dictionary, gives the original sense of jumis as bound or connected. A roof is two slopes joined into one ridge. A twin is two lives joined at the start. A double ear is two heads on one stem. It is the same idea wearing three coats, and the Baltic countryside wore it literally: on farmhouse gables from Vidzeme to the Curonian Spit, carpenters crossed the roof-boards and finished them as two horses’ heads facing away from each other, a pair tied into one.

Because he was doubling, he was also twins. A young woman who wanted to bear two children was to find a jumis and eat it, a pair of nuts or berries grown together, taken whole. The belief ran to livestock as well, and a fused ear fed to a cow was expected to work the same way. It is old. In an eighth-to-eleventh-century burial ground at Kaugaru Beites in Latvia, excavators found a jumis nut laid in the grave of a young girl.

His powers were narrow and they were exactly the ones a farming household needed. He made the field yield, and he made it yield again the following year, because his presence carried across the winter in the knotted stalk. Every crop had its own: a Jumis of the rye, of the barley, of the flax, of the nuts, each caught in its own field at its own harvest. He could be transferred, since seed from his wreath sown first passed the luck into the new ground. He answered to being handled rather than worshipped.

The limits are just as plain. He had no power anywhere but in a field, and none over weather, cattle, luck, birth or death, all of which belonged to other beings entirely. He could be lost, and losing him was easy: reap the last strip without looking, or fail to find the doubled stalk, or leave him out in the stubble through the winter, and the following year’s grain was on its own. He depended on people. A god who has to be caught before he can help you is a god who can be missed.

There is one honest caution to enter, because the Latvian pantheon has a documented problem with invented gods. Nineteenth-century national romantics, working to build a mythology as grand as the Greek one, wrote deities into existence outright, and a fair number of names that circulate today were manufactured in a poem. Jumis is not one of them. He is in the folk songs collected from the countryside, in the ritual calendar, in the etymology and in a girl’s grave. What is modern about him is the picture: the crossed lozenge sign sold today as the Jumis sign got that name in interwar Latvia, from Ernests Brastiņš and the Dievturi movement he founded, who set about attaching the names of deities to traditional ornaments. The sign is old. Calling it Jumis is not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jumis in Latvian mythology?

Jumis is the Latvian god of the grain field and of fertility, believed to live in the growing crop. His name is also the everyday Latvian word for a doubled fruit or a stalk of grain bearing two ears, and it is that natural doubling that marks his presence.

What is the “catching of Jumis” ritual?

Jumja ķeršana, the catching of Jumis, was performed at the end of the grain harvest on Apjumības, the day also known as Miķeļi at the autumn equinox. Reapers sang to Jumis as the last grain fell, telling him to run to the barn, then searched the final handful for a double-eared stalk and tied it. The knotted stalk or the wreath made from it was kept indoors through the winter and its seed sown first in spring.

Why was the last strip of grain left uncut?

Because Jumis was thought to live in the field, and cutting it clean would leave him nowhere to stay. The last of the crop was left standing deliberately as a place for him until the moment he was caught.

Who is Jumala?

Jumala, called Jumaliņa in the diminutive, is the female counterpart of Jumis, described in the folk songs as his twin sister and at other times as his betrothed or wife. One well-known verse has Jumis walking the field looking for her, seeking a bride by asking his own sister, which places the pair alongside the Indo-European twin figures Yama and Yami in the Rigveda.

Was eating a jumis supposed to do anything?

Yes. A woman who wanted twins was to find and eat a jumis, meaning two nuts or berries grown together, and the same power was credited to a fused ear of grain given to livestock. A jumis nut was found buried in the grave of a young girl at Kaugaru Beites in Latvia, in a burial ground dated between the eighth and eleventh centuries.