Saulė

At the end of the sun’s path an oak grows beside the gate, and every evening she hangs her belt on it before she goes through. The songs are exact about this, and about a great deal else. They give her gilded slippers for dancing on a silver hill, silken skirts she puts out to air, golden reins held loose in one hand while her horses wade into the sea to be washed. Latvian singers built their goddess out of the working contents of a farmyard and then made every object in it shine.

The evidence for her is unlike the evidence for almost any other European deity. There is no epic, no temple inventory, no priestly account. What survives instead is a folk-song corpus of extraordinary size: Krišjānis Barons assembled 217,996 Latvian texts into six volumes between 1894 and 1915, and within the fullest modern collection of sun-songs, over four thousand texts carry the root word for sun. Around fifteen hundred numbered song types address a clearly personified Saule with motifs that are mythic and cultic rather than merely descriptive. She is a goddess reconstructed from lyric fragments, and the fragments agree with each other.

The record from outside the tradition is much thinner and much colder. In 1199 a papal bull turned the conquest of the Baltic region into a crusade, and the churchmen who followed described what they found with contempt. A chronicle by the knight Peter von Duisburg in 1326 says flatly that the Baltic peoples worshipped the sun, the moon, the stars and four-legged animals. Earlier still, a Slavonic translation of the chronicle of John Malalas, interpolated in 1261, gives Lithuania an origin story with a hammer in it: a smith called Teliavelis made the sun and threw it into the sky. Around 1400 the missionary Jerome of Prague spent three years failing to convert Lithuania and came back with a story about the sun being held prisoner in a tower by a powerful king until she was freed by a blow from a colossal iron hammer. He said he had seen the hammer himself, and that people venerated it.

So she was forged, or she was rescued, or she simply always rose. The tradition never settled the question, because it was not interested in the question. What it was interested in was the circuit.

Her day begins somewhere in the east, in a castle behind silver gates, and she crosses the Hill of Heaven in a chariot with copper wheels drawn by horses that do not tire. The Latvian songs give those horses yellow or golden coats, hooves and bridles of gold, and a hundred of them at once in the riddles. At the western edge the chariot becomes a boat, and she sails the world sea by night, or sinks into a lake to sleep in a silver cradle in white seafoam. The Lithuanian version has her sun-wheel roll down a mountainside at dusk. Underneath there is a second world, viņa saule in Latvian, “that sun” or the other sun, which is both where she goes at night and where the dead live. Every dawn is a demonstration that darkness did not manage to destroy her.

Because she alone knows the road between the two, she carries the dead along it. The setting sun takes with her the sighs and the sorrows, the blight and the illness, and the souls of everyone laid in the ground that day. She holds the keys to the gates, and after sunset the gates are locked, which is why several songs insist on completing a burial before the light goes. Women in labour prayed to her not to take the keys away yet, which suggests the same hands open the way in. One song is just a child watching a funeral procession leave: my mother went away with the sun, I called and she did not hear, I ran after her and it was no use.

The one thing in the tradition that looks like a plot belongs to her daughter. Saules meita, the Sun’s daughter, is courted by the Sons of Dievs, who are the Baltic version of the Vedic Aśvins and the Greek Dioscuri, and also by Auseklis the morning star and by Pērkons the thunder. There is no canonical text, only hundreds of variants circling the same wedding. The Sons of Dievs heat the bathhouse for her, tangle the golden cloth they are weaving in the sky, watch her through blossom, tease her and worse. In one line of the story the moon steals the bride while the morning star is below the horizon, and the bride’s family cuts the moon to pieces with a sword. In the Lithuanian telling the sun and the moon were married in the primeval spring, the moon left because his wife rose too early, he fell in love with the morning star Aušrinė, and Perkūnas split his face open for it. The moon’s phases are the wound, reopened every month.

Then there is the tree. Pērkons, furious over the daughter’s abduction, strikes the oak at the gate and shatters it. Saule spends three years gathering up the golden branches and does not find the crown of the tree until the fourth. Somewhere behind this sits the shape of an older cosmic axis: a stone hand-mill turning at the top of a bright oak, with the son of Dievs owning it and the daughter of Saule grinding.

Her powers all follow from the circuit and from her sex. She is the sower: the grey haze of pollen over a rye field in bloom is Saule walking through it in grey skirts, and the songs tell her to lift her hem and mind the blossom. She is asked what she is doing in the granary and answers that she is sifting silver and filling the bins. Because she sees everything, she is the witness, and because her course is regular, she is the standard by which fairness is measured. A master who works his serfs past sundown offends against the shape of the cosmos and not only against the poor. One song asks her outright to even out this earth, since the rich are ready to bury the living.

Her limits follow from the same place. She cannot stay. She cannot refuse the descent, and by evening she is pale, wan and worn out in exactly the way an old woman is. She has no weapon and she never fights anyone. When her daughter is stolen it is Pērkons who swings, and the wrongs the songs bring to her are answered with pity and warmth rather than with force. She dries the tears of orphans; she does not punish the people who made them.

Two things about the record are worth saying plainly. The rich material is overwhelmingly Latvian, from the dainas, while the Lithuanian side rests on a handful of chronicle notices and a later folk-song harvest, so a “Baltic” sun goddess is really one very well documented tradition and one thinner one held together by a shared word. And the tidy list of her planetary daughters that circulates in English, Indraja for Jupiter, Sėlija for Saturn, Žiezdrė for Mars, Vaivora for Mercury, is not part of that old record. It comes out of the nineteenth-century Lithuanian national revival, above all the work of Teodor Narbutt, who is known to have invented deities, and the identifications were still being argued over by astronomers in the 1970s. The sun-songs never needed a planetary family. They only ever needed a mother crossing the sky with the keys in her pocket.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Saulė?

Saulė, called Saule in Latvian, is the sun goddess of Lithuanian and Latvian mythology, and the word is also the ordinary term for the sun in both languages. She is female, unlike the sun in most neighbouring traditions, and is married to the male moon. She is known mainly through Latvian folk songs, where she appears as a richly dressed working mother who drives across the sky each day and sails the world sea at night.

Why is Saulė connected with the dead?

Saulė carries the souls of the newly dead into the otherworld when she sets, because she is the only one who knows the road between this world and the next. The Latvian songs call the otherworld viņa saule, “the other sun”, and say Saulė holds the keys to its gates. Burials had to be completed before sunset, since the gates were locked once she had gone through them.

What happens in the myth of the celestial wedding?

The Sun’s daughter, Saules meita, is courted by the Sons of Dievs, by the morning star Auseklis and by the thunder god Pērkons, and the resulting quarrel is the central Baltic myth cycle. In one version the moon seizes the bride while the morning star is below the horizon and is cut to pieces for it. Pērkons then strikes the oak standing at the gate of the sun’s path and smashes it, and Saulė spends three years gathering up its golden branches.

Is Saulė a Lithuanian goddess or a Latvian one?

She belongs to both, but the surviving evidence is lopsided. Almost all the detailed material comes from Latvian folk songs, of which Krišjānis Barons published nearly 218,000 between 1894 and 1915, while the Lithuanian side rests largely on medieval chronicle notices and later folklore collecting. The name is the same word in both languages, and the figure behind it is recognisably the same goddess.

Did Saulė create the world?

No. Saulė is not a creator in the Baltic sources, and one of the oldest written notices about her runs the other way: a chronicle interpolation of 1261 says a smith named Teliavelis made the sun and threw it into the sky. What she does is maintain the world rather than originate it, by keeping the daily circuit that governs growth, time and the passage of the dead.

Related Entries

Dievas, Perkūnas, Laima, Māra, Žemyna, Lauma, Žaltys, Veļi, Helios, Surya, Amaterasu, Máni, Inti, Shamash, Ushas