Upinis

A piglet as white as one could be found went into the water at the ford, and the current took it. That is the whole rite, and very nearly the whole god. The man who wrote it down was Maciej Stryjkowski, a Polish-Lithuanian soldier turned chronicler, and he wrote it once, in one sentence, in a book printed at Königsberg in 1582: Upinis Dewos, who had the rivers in his power, and to him they offered snow-white piglets so that see-through water would flow. Nobody before him gives the name. Nobody after him adds to it.

The sentence sits ninth in a list of sixteen. Stryjkowski had just finished a roll-call of gods he thought the Lithuanians shared with the Prussians, Sambians and Latvians, and then began a second one, of gods he believed peculiar to Lithuania and Samogitia. That second list reads like a farmyard inventory with a price against every item, and the currency is poultry. The god of souring and fermenting took speckled hens. The earth god was honoured by keeping snakes and feeding them milk, and took black hens. Krūminė’s hens had to have low, thick combs so the rye would come up thick and low as well, and their meat was chopped small before burning. Lietuvonis, who let down the rain, took hens of every colour. The horse god took big vigorous cocks, the cattle god capons matching the coats of the herd, and the household god’s birds went into the stove fire and were not pulled out until they had burned.

Then the ninth entry, and it is the only one in the whole list that costs a pig.

Read the sixteen in order and they walk outward. They begin at the stove and the crock, move to the field and the weather, then to the beasts, then to the people sharing one yard. At nine the account steps past the last fence. Gintaras Beresnevičius, working through the sequence, took Upinis for exactly that hinge, the point where the list leaves the farm and enters the country of hunting and fishing, and suspected the god minded the fishing as much as the water. The chronicle itself will not go that far. It says rivers, piglets, clear water, and moves on to the bee god.

Push at the name and it comes apart in the hand. Upė is the Lithuanian for river, and upinis is the adjective built from it, riverine, of the river. In the 1830s the Samogitian scholar Simonas Stanevičius argued that the phrase belonged in lower case, that it named nobody and only recorded what he minded, the way calling Neptune the sea one would leave the sea god unnamed. Worse for Upinis, Stryjkowski had already given the rivers away. In the very list before it stands Potrimpos, whom the same chronicler calls god of rivers and all flowing waters. One chapter, two river gods, and no sign the author noticed. Stanevičius took Potrimpos for the genuine article and Upinis for a job description handed over where a name should have been.

Nothing describes him. No face, no height, no colour, no beast shape, and the later Lithuanian record does not quietly fill the gap. What the sentence does describe is the goods: przezroczysta woda, water you can see through, which is a plain and unpoetic thing to want out of a river in a country of peat and silt. He has no origin, no parents, no death and no story. He does not fight, marry, trick or lose. The record is a receipt.

The nineteenth century found this unbearable and improved it. Teodor Narbutt, whose ten volumes on the Lithuanian nation mix archive with invention, turned the god into a goddess named Upinė and gave her a sanctuary on the bank of a stream near the town of Zapyškis. Juozapas Jaroševičius followed him and rechristened the god Upyna. Pranė Dundulienė retold Narbutt with the stream shifted to Vilkija and eighteenth-century pilgrims washing there for a cure, leaving birds, fish and coins on the bank until the Catholic church closed the question by raising a Chapel of the Saviour on the spot. Rimantas Balsys took the whole structure apart. Lithuania has at least three rivers called Upyna, near Kuršėnai, Luokė and Nemakščiai, one Upynalė, one Upynikė and nine Upytės, and every one of those names comes straight off the ordinary word for river with nothing to attach it to any deity. The waters that really do carry the scars of old sanctuaries are the ones with alk-, švent- and rag- in their names, and none of those helps here either. The temple is a daydream with a date on it.

What survives the scrutiny is smaller and better. In 1600 the Jesuit college at Vilnius filed its annual report and included a peasant who came down to the same riverbank every year with a hen. He had crossed that river once and had very nearly not come out of it, and the bird was an apology and a retainer, an attempt to buy back the water’s goodwill before he needed it again. Nobody in the report gives the river a god’s name. There is only a man on a bank in the open air, the hen warm and shifting under his arm.

What Upinis can do amounts to one thing, done on request. The rivers are in his power and he settles whether the water runs clear or foul, which settles drinking, washing, fishing, fording and floating timber down to the towns. His limits are the same fact turned over. He holds nothing outside the water, he does not even hold all of that, since Potrimpos has the flowing waters a page earlier and a lake god called Ežerinis turns up in a different chronicler within a few years, and he never once acts. He takes a piglet and returns clear water. Every other god in his list gets a verb.

By the nineteenth century the named gods had thinned out and the water had been parcelled among its own. Vilius Kalvaitis put it briefly: on the lakes, the rivers and the lagoons there are gentlemen, and in the bogs and quagmires there are devils. In Dzūkija, Jonas Balys wrote down that the rulers of the water look like an old grandfather, that God set them over it, and that if a man is fated to drown it is that old man who does the drowning. Their work runs to two duties only, keeping the water from wandering off or mixing with other water, and taking what is owed. Further out in the reeds sits the fish shepherd, an old man with his hair let go, counting his flock. He calls his fish his pigs, and what carries across the water in the tales is his voice demanding one of them back. Nothing in the record joins him to Upinis. The piglet is simply in the river again, and this time somebody wants it returned.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Upinis in Lithuanian mythology?

Upinis is the Lithuanian river god, recorded in 1582 by the chronicler Maciej Stryjkowski in a list of sixteen gods he believed were worshipped only in Lithuania and Samogitia. He held the rivers in his power, and people gave him snow-white piglets so the water would run clear. That single sentence is the entire historical record of him; no earlier source names him and no later one adds anything.

What was sacrificed to Upinis, and why white piglets?

Snow-white piglets, given so that river water would flow transparent. The colour of the animal matched the result being requested, which is the same logic running through the rest of Stryjkowski’s list, where hens with low thick combs were offered so the rye would grow low and thick. Upinis is the only god in that list of sixteen who receives a pig rather than a bird.

Is Upinis a real god’s name?

Probably not a personal name. Upinis is the ordinary Lithuanian adjective for “of the river”, built from upė, and in the 1830s Simonas Stanevičius argued it should be treated as a common noun describing a god’s job rather than as his name. Stanevičius pointed out that Stryjkowski’s own chapter already contains another river god, Potrimpos, and thought that one was the real figure behind the label.

Did Upinis have a temple?

No. The sanctuary of a goddess called Upinė beside a stream near Zapyškis comes from Teodor Narbutt, a nineteenth-century historian with a habit of inventing material, and later writers repeated him. Lithuania’s many rivers named Upyna, Upynalė, Upynikė and Upytė take their names from the everyday word for river, and nothing links them to any deity.

What did Upinis look like?

No source describes him at all, not his face, his size or his shape. The old-man figures who rule Lithuanian rivers and lakes in later folklore, the water-masters and fish shepherds recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, belong to a separate and much later layer of belief that replaced the named river gods rather than describing them.

Related Entries

Ežerinis, Bangpūtys, Dievas, Perkūnas, Žemyna, Žaltys, Velnias, Lauma, Gabija, Saulė, Vodyanoy, Näkki, Vellamo, Boann, Hapi