Māra

The willow has slippery leaves because Māra churned butter and wiped her hands on it. That is not a poet reaching for an image. It is the answer a Latvian folk song gives, in four lines, to the question of why one tree at the edge of the pasture should feel greasy between the fingers when the others do not. It also tells you the register this goddess works in. She is not thundering. She is not enthroned. She is out in the field with her sleeves pushed back and butter on her hands.

Cows above all. In the great Barons collection of folk songs there is one text, surviving in eighty-two variants, in which Māra goes out on a Sunday morning and paints the cattle in the pasture. Eighty-two variants is a lot of people agreeing about something. Elsewhere she sits up in a willow counting her herd, and the logic of the song is exact, because whoever can count a herd is the one who owns it. In that counting song every cow is speckled and not one is smoke-dark, and the missing dark one turns out to have been given away: to an orphan girl, married off at night rather than in daylight, with no mother alive to load a dowry cart for her. Māra covers the gap. She is the goddess you are left with when you have nobody.

What she looks like depends on what she is doing. The folk record hands her three or four bodies and never picks one. She is a woman in white. She is a cow, lowing, heavy with milk. She is a toad. She is a snake, which is less strange than it sounds, since snakes are hers, and anyone going into the woods who would rather not be bitten prays to Māra and to no one else. The one description that feels like it might be the oldest is not a portrait at all but a phrase, Baltā spīdošā Māra, white shining Māra, which reads less like a woman than like a quality of light.

Then there is her name, and her name is a problem.

Māra is Marija. Mary. The resemblance is not subtle, and in the first half of the twentieth century a serious line of Latvian scholars, Pēteris Šmits and Ludvigs Bērziņš and Ludvigs Adamovičs among them, argued that this was the whole story: that Māra was the Virgin with the vowels moved, a Catholic import worn smooth by four centuries of peasant use. The evidence is not nothing. Her feast falls on the fifteenth of August, which is the Assumption. The old cattle charms slide back and forth between the two women without embarrassment, calling on the dear cattle Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, in one breath and on dear Mārīna, holy little woman, in the next. A German pastor in seventeenth-century Livonia complained that the local peasants would pray to the Virgin and to their own gods interchangeably, on the reasonable grounds that either might come through.

The Latvian-born Swedish theologian Haralds Biezais took the middle road in 1955 and it has held up well. His Māra is an older fertility goddess whose real name the Latvians simply forgot, and having forgotten it, they reached for the nearest available name for a powerful woman and called her Holy Mary. The borrowing is real. The borrowing is also only skin deep. The folklorist Elza Kokare put numbers to it and the numbers are unkind to the Christian theory: dig into what Māra actually does in the songs, and it is milk and calving and childbirth and the fixing of broken things, none of which is anything the Mother of God was ever asked to do.

Kokare’s numbers are unkind in the other direction too, and this is where the entry has to be honest. Māra appears in about 796 published folk songs. Laima, the goddess of fate, appears in more than three thousand. Nearly two thirds of the Māra songs were collected in one region, Kurzeme, in the west; almost everywhere else, Laima outnumbers her ten to one. Worse, when Krišjānis Barons sat down to organise the corpus in the 1890s, he filed most of the Māra songs not as songs about Māra but as variants of songs about somebody else, usually Laima, occasionally Dievs. Most of Māra’s songs are Laima’s songs with the name swapped.

So the towering Māra, the supreme goddess, the feminine half of the cosmos, mother of all mothers: where does she come from? Largely from the twentieth century. The brothers Ernests and Arvīds Brastiņš, who founded the Latvian neopagan revival Dievturība in the 1920s and to whom Latvia owes the tidy triad of Dievs, Māra and Laima, argued that Māra was an authentic Latvian goddess of the first rank, giver and taker of life. Arvīds published Māte Māra, Mother Māra, from exile in Cleveland in 1967. Under Soviet occupation the subject was simply closed, and no Latvian scholar could touch it between 1940 and 1990. When the topic reopened in the late 1980s, a serious group of linguists and folklorists including Vjačeslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Konstantīns Karulis and Janīna Kursīte came back to the Brastiņš position with qualifications, deriving Māra instead from an Indo-European root for mother. That case is real, and it is also younger than the Model T. A reader should know which parts of this goddess are eight hundred years old and which are a hundred, and no one is served by blurring the two.

Once you have set the reconstruction aside, what is left in the songs is stranger and better than the mother-goddess of the pamphlets, because the Māra of the folk record is not safe. She stands under an aspen and shakes it until it trembles, and in Baltic belief the aspen belongs to the dead. She waits at the far end of a bridge made of bones, over a river of blood, and welcomes the souls of men killed in battle. She comes up out of the sea to destroy flowers, and people hoop their houses round with silver to keep her out. She takes sleep away. In the great flood song it is Dievs who wants to drown the land and Māra who prevents it, and she does it by stroking his head until the mood passes, which is a domestic scene of some menace once you notice that the whole world is in the balance.

Her power is at its most concrete in the charms, where she is not worshipped so much as employed. To stop bleeding she is called in with a gold broom in her hand and told to sweep away the raven’s blood, a euphemism nobody wanted to say out loud. To mend a fracture there is a small perfect song: Dievs broke the jug, holy Māra picked up the pieces and bound it round with silver hoops, so it will not hurt, will not swell, will not leak like a stone. God breaks and Māra repairs, and this is said over a snapped wrist. In the labour charms she stops being a person at all and becomes the womb itself, addressed directly and ordered to lie still, stay in your place, do not shift, do not move, and threatened with thrice nine ropes and thrice nine hobbles if she will not behave. That is a woman in a farmhouse, in real trouble, speaking to her own body as a goddess and bullying it.

Her limits follow from the same trade. She has no myth cycle of her own, no birth, no marriage, no war, nothing you could call a career. She holds the earth, and Dievs holds the sky, and she does not cross into it. She has to be paid, in a hen or a sheep, in coloured wool tied to a linden branch, and where she is not paid she withholds. She can be shut out of a house by a silver hoop, which is not much of a defence to need. Thursday night was hers, the night she was born, and no woman would knit or weave through it, and nobody whistled, in case something answered.

Every August, in the Catholic east of Latvia, tens of thousands of people walk to the basilica at Aglona for the Feast of the Assumption, past a spring whose water is held to heal, to stand in front of a painting of the Virgin. The day is Māra’s day. The woman in the painting is Marija. Nobody making the walk has ever found this difficult.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Māra in Latvian mythology?

Māra is the principal goddess of Latvian folk song and folk belief, the deity of the earth and the material world, standing opposite the sky god Dievs. She is above all the protector of cows, milk and butter, and she is called on in childbirth, in healing charms and at the boundary of death. She is almost never named without an epithet, either Mīļā Māra (Dear Māra) or Svētā Māra (Holy Māra).

Is Māra the same as the Virgin Mary?

Her name is Mary’s, but very little else about her is. The Latvian name Māra derives from Marija, her feast day falls on the Assumption (15 August), and old cattle charms move freely between the two figures. But her actual functions in the folk songs, protecting cows, granting milk, mending broken bones and receiving the dead, have no counterpart in the cult of the Virgin, which is why Haralds Biezais concluded that Māra is an older native goddess whose original name was forgotten and replaced with Mary’s.

What does Māra protect?

Cattle first, especially cows, milk and butter, which in Latvian farm life were women’s work and women’s wealth. She also protects women in labour, and she is invoked in charms to stop bleeding, to heal snakebite and to set broken bones. In one healing song Dievs breaks a jug and Māra picks up the pieces and binds them with silver hoops, a formula said over a fractured limb.

Is Māra a good goddess or a dangerous one?

Both, and the folk songs make no attempt to resolve it. She gives milk, fertility and safe delivery, but she also shakes the aspen tree of the dead, rises out of the sea to destroy, takes away sleep, and meets the souls of slain soldiers at a bridge of bones over a river of blood. People hooped their houses with silver to keep her out and left her offerings of hens, sheep and coloured wool to keep her friendly.

Was Māra really the supreme goddess of the Latvians?

That claim is mostly modern. Māra appears in roughly 796 collected folk songs against more than 3,000 for the fate goddess Laima, and most Māra songs were filed by the collector Krišjānis Barons as variants of songs about Laima or Dievs. The picture of Māra as a supreme mother goddess in a trinity with Dievs and Laima comes largely from Ernests and Arvīds Brastiņš and the Dievturība revival movement they founded in the 1920s, not from the older record.

Related Entries

Laima, Dievas, Perkūnas, Žemyna, Veļi, Lauma, Ragana, Lietuvēns, Vilkacis, Mājas gari, Žaltys, Marzanna, Mokosh, Kikimora, Freyja