Perkūnas

Also Known As: Latvian Pērkons; Old Prussian Perkūns; Latgalian Pārkiuņs; called by the substitute names Dundulis, Dindutis, Dūdų senis, Tarškulis and Blizgulis, and often addressed as Dievaitis, an old diminutive of dievas, “god”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Latvian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He commands thunder, lightning, rain and heavenly fire, and carries an axe whose stone heads were believed to fall to earth and stay there.
Role in Mythos: Second or third in the recorded lists of Baltic gods, he purifies the earth, enforces justice and pursues his underworld rival Velnias across the sky.
Relation to Humans: People prayed to him for rain and for protection from storm damage and from a strike, and burned oak fires and killed goats, oxen and roosters in his honour. Being struck by his lightning was read either as a sentence passed on a scoundrel or as a strange kind of favour.

The first thunder of the year was worth waiting for. When it finally broke over the fields, low and rolling and close enough to feel in the breastbone, people went out into it rather than under cover. The ground had been shut all winter. Now something was hammering on it from above, and everything hiding in the roots and the wet stones and the black water of the bogs was supposed to be running.

That is the shape of Perkūnas in the Baltic imagination: not a distant sky-father but a working force, arriving loudly, doing a specific job. He is the god of thunder and lightning, of rain and storm and heavenly fire, and in the earliest lists of Lithuanian gods he stands second or third from the top. The Ruthenian translation of the Chronicle of John Malalas, copied in 1261, records worship offered “to Perkūnas, that is, to thunder,” setting him among a small company that includes the smith Teliavelis, who was said to have forged the sun and thrown it into the sky. That single line is the oldest firm sight of him. Everything richer comes later, most of it much later.

He looks like a man, though the folklore cannot settle on his age. Usually he is middle-aged, strong, brown-bearded, sometimes in fiery clothing or wearing a crown of flame and carrying a flaming sword. Elsewhere he is a grey-haired old man with a many-coloured beard, in white and black, a goat held on a cord in one hand and an axe or a horn in the other. He travels on a two-wheeled chariot of stone and fire drawn by red and white horses, or by goats, and in Samogitia he abandons the chariot and rides a burning horse instead. The stones in his sky are what rumble during a storm.

The axe matters more than any of it. Perkūnas is called the stone smith, maker of his own weapons, though the heavenly smith Kalvelis is sometimes credited with helping him. What he threw down could be picked up afterwards. Belemnites and old flint and bronze axe-heads turned up in ploughed fields were understood as Perkūno kulkos, the bullets of Perkūnas, and were kept in houses as protection against devils and as cures for toothache, fever and fright. A cold, blunt, slightly greasy-feeling stone in the palm was the residue of a god’s temper, and it was useful.

His enemy is Velnias, and the two of them structure the world between them. Velnias belongs underground, keeps company with the dead, and takes whatever shape suits him: a black cat, a dog, a pig, a goat, a pike in the river. The Lithuanian tales are oddly vague about what started the feud. Theft appears in several of them, with Velnias stealing a stone or the god’s hatchet, or driving off cattle, and in the wider Baltic Sea region the theft of the thunder-instrument is a story told again and again. The scholar who has worked longest on Perkūnas concluded that the quarrel does not really need a cause, because the two figures embody sky against underworld and order against chaos, and the tension is the point.

So Velnias hides, and Perkūnas splits whatever he hides in. This is why the oak is his tree. The oldest and largest oaks in Lithuania still carry his name, and references to Perkūno ąžuolas, the oak of Perkūnas, go back to the first half of the nineteenth century; a survey of Lithuanian place names found around 125 that contain the god’s name, clustered strangely around marshes, bogs and hills. In one song he is on his way to the wedding of the dawn and strikes a golden oak on the road, most likely to drive out whatever is coiled under its roots. In another cycle, after the celestial marriage of the Sun and the Moon has gone wrong, Perkūnas draws his sword and cuts the Moon in half for adultery, which is why it thins and dies and comes back every month.

He may not have been one god at all. Lithuanian tradition speaks of four Perkūnai, or five, or seven, or nine, or a hundred, sometimes ruling separate quarters of the world, sometimes described as brothers or sons. His mother is named Percunatele. His wife is harder to pin down, with the earth goddess Žemyna and the being called Laumė both proposed, and one strand of belief giving him a long-haired witch of a spouse who committed adultery in the heavens and was exiled to earth, where she still turns up on riverbanks on Thursday evenings looking for her children. Thursday was his day.

Worship of him was practical. Oak logs were burned for him, and goats, oxen, sheep, pigs and roosters were killed. In Latvia black calves, goats and roosters went to Pērkons in times of drought, and neighbours came to eat and drink together after beer had been poured onto the ground or into the fire for him. Honeycombs were put on the fire to break up a gathering storm. A fire started by lightning was thought to be quenchable only by particular means, sour milk among them, since ordinary water would not answer for a fire that came from him.

His powers follow from what he is. He brings rain and grants fertility, drives evil out of the ground at the first spring thunder, keeps order, and punishes those who steal, torment others or mock him. His limits follow just as neatly. He belongs to the sky and only rarely comes down to the earth where his enemy lives, so the hunt never ends; Velnias always has another hollow tree or another stone. In the folk stories he can be delayed by trivialities, and in one much-repeated type it is not Perkūnas who stops the devil finishing his work but a rooster crowing at the wrong moment for him.

Two things ought to be said plainly. Most of what is known about Perkūnas was written down by folklorists in the nineteenth century and after, long after Lithuania’s official conversion in 1387, and by then his name had begun to be swapped in narratives for God, for saints, for figures out of the Bible. And the celebrated Prussian material about him, including the banner showing him between Patrimpas and Patulas and the eternally green oak at the Romuva sanctuary, comes from the chronicle of Simon Grunau, written around 1520, which modern historians treat as largely invention. His temple in Vilnius may be real; a square stone structure and what were read as altars were found beneath the cathedral in excavations of the 1970s and 1980s, and the argument about what they were has not finished. Even his name is contested, pulled between a root meaning “oak” and a root meaning “to strike,” with several linguists now doubting that the Baltic, Slavic and Vedic thunder gods share any name at all.

None of which has cost him much. There are still oaks in Lithuania half a millennium old that go by his name, and the thunder still arrives in spring with the same low pressure in the chest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Perkūnas?

Perkūnas is the Baltic god of thunder and lightning, known as Pērkons in Latvian and Perkūns in Old Prussian, and one of the most important deities of the pre-Christian Lithuanians and Latvians. He governs thunder, rain, heavenly fire, fertility, law and order. In the earliest surviving lists of Lithuanian gods he is placed second or third.

What weapon does Perkūnas use?

Perkūnas is best known for his axe, though sources also give him a sledgehammer, stones, a sword, a bow and arrows, a club and an iron or fiery knife. He is called the stone smith and makes his own weapons, sometimes with help from the heavenly smith Kalvelis. Belemnites and prehistoric stone axe-heads found in the ground were treated as his spent thunderbolts and kept as charms against devils, toothache, fever and fright.

Why is the oak sacred to Perkūnas?

The oak is the tree most often struck by lightning, and in Baltic belief Perkūnas struck it because his enemy Velnias hid beneath its roots. Oaks in Lithuania are still called Perkūno ąžuolas, the oak of Perkūnas, and oak logs were burned in the fires kept for him. Around 125 Lithuanian place names contain the god’s name, including hills, bogs and individual trees.

Who is Perkūnas’s enemy?

His opponent is Velnias, an underworld figure associated with the dead who shifts shape into a black cat, dog, pig, goat or pike. The Lithuanian tales give theft as one reason for the feud, with Velnias stealing the god’s stone, hatchet or cattle, but the deeper opposition is between sky and underworld, order and chaos. Perkūnas hunts him during thunderstorms, striking the trees, stones and water where he hides.

What day of the week belongs to Perkūnas?

Thursday is Perkūnas’s day, called Perkūno diena in Lithuanian, matching the association of Thursday with thunder gods across many European traditions. It was regarded as a day for storms, for rain and for weddings. One strand of belief holds that his exiled wife appears on riverbanks on Thursday evenings.