Perëndi

The stone sits heavier in the palm than its size promises, dark and cool and rubbed smooth by hands that are no longer alive. A man accused of theft takes it in his left hand, lays his right hand flat across it, and speaks. By this stone of the cloud, I did not steal it from you, nor anyone of my house, and I do not know who did. If I am lying to you, may the cloud find me. Men who were telling the plain truth were frightened of that oath. It was the heaviest one they had.

The stone is a thunder-stone, kokrra e rrufesë or guri i rejës, believed to be formed in the instant of a lightning strike and to fall to earth with it. Albanian households kept them the way other households keep deeds and rings. A thunder-stone brought inside was thought to bring fortune and increase to the family, the livestock and the fields, and it was said that rifle bullets would not find the man who owned one. They were hung as pendants on the necks of cattle and on pregnant women, against bad luck and against the evil eye. Mark Tirta, who gathered much of this material, records lightning itself under a plain and startling name: zjarri i qiellit, the fire of the sky. It was also called arma e perëndisë, the weapon of the deity.

That word is where the difficulty starts. Perëndi means God. It also means deity, and sky, and heaven, and it does all of this without changing shape. Capitalized it is the Supreme Being; uncapitalized and pluralized, perënditë, it is simply the gods. A pile of grain heaped high in a barn is grain gjer mbë perëndi, up to the skies. The word runs across every Albanian dialect and out beyond the borders: a village in Myzeqe is called Perondí, a Bosnian family carries the surname Perèndija, and the Albanians of the Azov region say Parandí for God and parandítë for the gods, holding that the parandítë settle what a child’s life will be.

Here is the awkward part. The earliest Albanian book, Gjon Buzuku’s, never uses it for God at all. Buzuku renders Deus as Zot every time, and even Dominus Deus as Zotynë, our Lord. Perëndi surfaces later, with Luca Matranga at the end of the sixteenth century and Pjetër Budi at the start of the seventeenth, worked into the Albanian Pater Noster. And when those writers do use it, they often do not mean a god. Budi translates Regnum tuum, thy kingdom, as perëndia jote. Frang Bardhi glosses Caesar as Perëndi. Pjetër Bogdani turns the emperor of Turkey into Perëndia i Turqisë and four monarchies into katër Perëndija. The oldest written sense of the word is closer to sovereignty than to divinity. Its settled use as the name of God is almost certainly a later development, one that only every Albanian took for granted from the nineteenth century onward, and it arrived carrying the stressed -í that makes Albanian abstract nouns like dijeni, knowledge, and trimëri, bravery, and with them the feminine gender those nouns take.

Where the word came from is disputed, and the three answers pull in different directions. Eqrem Çabej and others read it as a homemade formation on Latin imperantem, the ruling one, the commanding one, which would fit Bardhi’s Caesar and Bogdani’s emperor exactly. Vladimir Orel derives it instead from the verb perëndoj, to set, as the sun sets, itself traced to Latin parentari, which would tie the word to the old Albanian cult of the sun rather than to any storm. The third reading splits it in two: per-en-, from a root meaning to strike, joined to -dí, sky and god. That reading places Perëndi in formidable company. The same striking root stands behind Slavic Perun, Lithuanian Perkūnas, Vedic Parjanya, Norse Fjörgynn and Hittite Peruna, and the second element runs back to *Dyēus, the daylight sky god who becomes Zeus and Jupiter. On the strength of that shape, Karl Treimer and Cicerone Poghirc argued for a sky and thunder god named Perëndi behind the noun, presumably worshipped by the Illyrians, related in his functions to the Albanian weather powers Shurdh and Verbt and to the storm-riding drangue.

It is an elegant argument and it rests entirely on the word. There is no myth of Perëndi. No birth, no consort, no quarrel, no death, no temple, no image, not a single narrative in which the figure does anything. The archaic Albanian divine name that survives with a clear pedigree is Zojz, cognate with Messapic Zis and with Greek Zeus, and Zojz is a name rather than a story too. What Albanian folk religion preserved was not a face but a weather system, and the practices attached to it. Ask what Perëndi looked like and the sources give nothing back, because nobody was ever describing a body. They were describing a sky.

That sky was addressed directly, and often. In the villages of Kurvelesh in the south, at the spring festival, people asked it for rain on the winter pastures, so that the corn would come and the lambs would grow horns. In drought, usually through the hard heat of June and July, they threw water upward so that it would fall again as rain, singing over the throw. In the southwest, the rainmaking songs called on the sun under several names at once, Dielli, Shën Dëlliu, Ilia, Perëndia, and after the third repetition the singers would say that rain was coming because the Holy Sun had gone dark.

The powers that come through are all weather and increase: lightning and the stones it leaves, rain called down on cracked pasture, the luck of a herd, the fate assigned to a newborn. The limits are stranger. Perëndi survived by becoming a common noun, and a common noun belongs to everyone. It was absorbed into Albanian Christianity and Albanian Islam without friction, printed in Bible translations and used freely by the Bektashi poet Naim Frashëri, who nonetheless reached for Zot when he wanted a personal creator to speak to. It stayed grammatically feminine, and it stayed less personal than Zot, more the heavens than a Lord. Whatever stood behind the word gave up its story in exchange for lasting, and the bargain held.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Perëndi in Albanian mythology?

Perëndi is the ordinary Albanian word for God, deity, sky and heaven, and also the disputed name of a sky and storm power in Albanian folk religion. Some scholars, notably Karl Treimer and Cicerone Poghirc, argue that a pre-Christian thunder god named Perëndi lies behind the noun. No myth about such a figure survives.

Was Perëndi actually worshipped as a pagan god?

There is no direct evidence of a cult of a god called Perëndi. The pre-Christian deity is a reconstruction argued from the shape of the word and from comparison with other Indo-European storm gods, not from any surviving story, image or temple. What is well attested is the folk practice: rain prayers addressed to the perëndi, and lightning called its weapon.

What does the word perëndi mean in Albanian?

Perëndi means God when capitalized, and deity, sky or heaven when it is not, with the plural perënditë meaning the gods. Its earliest recorded uses in Old Albanian literature are closer to ruler than to god: Frang Bardhi glossed Caesar as Perëndi, and Pjetër Bogdani called the emperor of Turkey Perëndia i Turqisë.

What is an Albanian thunder-stone?

A thunder-stone, called kokrra e rrufesë or guri i rejës, is a stone believed to form during a lightning strike and fall from the sky. Albanian families kept them as cult objects thought to bring prosperity to people, livestock and crops, hung them on cattle and pregnant women against the evil eye, and swore their most binding oaths on them.

How is Perëndi different from Zojz?

Zojz is the archaic Albanian name of the sky and lightning god, cognate with Messapic Zis and Greek Zeus and descended from the Indo-European *Dyēus. Perëndi is a separate word with a contested origin that became the everyday Albanian term for God. Whether the two ever named the same being is unresolved.

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Drangue, Kulshedra, Bolla, Zana e Malit, Ljubi, Stihi, Bardha, Baloz, Perun, Perkūnas, Zeus, Thor, Taranis, Ukko, Teshub