Veliona

Also Known As: Latinised by Jan Łasicki as Vielona and Vielonia; from Lithuanian vėlė, “soul of the dead”, the same root that gives velionis, “deceased person”, and Vėlinės, the Day of the Dead
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She takes the food set out for the dead and holds authority over the vėlės, the souls lying under the turf.
Role in Mythos: In the single source that names her she is the god of souls, fed at the autumn commemoration of the dead and called by name to the winter slaughter feast alongside the dead themselves.
Relation to Humans: Households fed her at the same table where they fed their own dead, crumbling flat cakes in four places on the boards and speaking her name over them. What they wanted back was a quiet season, because the souls underground were held to govern whether the rye came up and whether the cattle bred.

The cakes went down on the table in four small heaps, crumbled, each one facing another across the boards. Somebody had baked them that morning. Nobody sitting there would eat them. In Samogitia in the last decades of the sixteenth century this was how a household fed its dead, the crumbs had a name, sikės, and the name spoken over them was Veliona.

That is very close to everything the record holds about her. Jan Łasicki, a Polish Protestant with an appetite for cataloguing other people’s errors, set it down around 1582 in a treatise printed thirty-three years later as De diis Samagitarum caeterorumque Sarmatarum, “On the gods of the Samogitians and other Sarmatians”. Her entry is one line long. Vielona Deus animarum: Vielona, god of souls, to whom offerings are made when the dead are fed. The cakes, he adds, are called Sikies Vielonia pemixlos.

She surfaces once more in the same book, at a warmer table. Skerstuvės was the slaughter feast, the day the household stuffed its sausages, and the words spoken there were these: Vielona velos atteik musmup vnd stala. Come, Veliona, with the dead, and eat sausages with us. It is one of the few invitations in Baltic religion that reads like an invitation rather than a bargain struck through gritted teeth.

Łasicki did not gather any of this himself. It came to him from Jakub Laskowski, a man who had lived in Samogitia for years and who, by the reckoning of everyone who has since checked his work, learned almost none of the language spoken by the people he was reporting on. Łasicki took what he was given and printed it.

In 1952 an American philologist named Walter Jaskievicz went through Łasicki’s list of gods name by name, in a Pennsylvania thesis published in Studi Baltici, and when he reached Vielona he took her apart in four sentences. The form Vielonia carries an -i- before the -n-, which makes it a Samogitian genitive singular. Read the phrase as Lithuanian rather than as a theonym and Sikies Vielonia pemixlos stops being cakes named for a goddess and becomes sikės, velionio peniukšlas: flat cakes, the dead man’s food. Laskowski had heard a countryman say what was being set out and who it was for, and he had promoted the corpse to a deity. The spelling with -ona, Jaskievicz added, follows the town of Veliuona on the Nemunas, written Wielona in Polish at the time.

His verdict on the whole treatise was brutal. Out of that long roll of gods, exactly two survived independent checking: Perkūnas the thunderer and Žemyna the earth. Lithuanian tradition already had a goddess who did the work of death, and her name was Giltinė, a word the language still keeps as a figure of speech for dying.

That should have been the end of Veliona.

It was not, because the name will not sit still. Vėlė is the Lithuanian word for the soul of a dead person, velis its Latvian twin, veļi in the plural. From the same root come Vėlinės, the Day of the Dead, still kept on the second of November, and velnias, the devil, who in the older stratum of the material is a god of the earth and of what lies beneath it. Kazimieras Būga tied the whole family to an Indo-European root meaning to die and set it beside Old English wæl, the dead of a battlefield, and Old Norse valkyrja, the woman who comes to collect them. A goddess standing at the head of that word-hoard is not an obviously absurd idea.

Nijolė Laurinkienė made the case for her in 2013, and it turns on earth rather than death. Alongside vėlė sits velėna, the top crust of soil bound together by plant roots, the sod. Lithuanian is thick with it. To die is to crawl under the velėna. He has been lying under the velėna a long while now. If the sod would only part, mother would rise. The dead, read this way, are simply the ones underneath the turf, and the goddess whose name they share is the one who keeps them, which makes her less a reaper than a landlady. Laurinkienė pushes further and suggests Veliona is a face of Žemyna herself, the earth turned away from the plough and towards the sleepers, since Žemyna also took offerings at funerals so that she would receive the little soul and shelter it.

The Latvian side of the family supports the shape of the argument. Latvians had Veļu māte, the mother of the dead souls, who waited for them, made a place ready, baked a flat cake and washed the tablecloth, and who held the keys of the grave along with Zemes māte, the mother of the earth. Pēteris Šmits, Kārlis Straubergs and Haralds Biezais all read Veļu māte as the earth mother in a narrower coat. Jonas Basanavičius went further and called Veļu māte, Zemes māte and Kapu māte three Latvian names for one goddess.

Łasicki leaves one more thread, and it is a strange one. He identified Vielona with another of his gods, Ezagulis, called on at that same sausage feast. Algirdas Julius Greimas read the name as ežia-gulys, the one who lies along the field boundary, the raised strip of earth where the bones of the Easter ham were buried to keep hail and lightning off the crop. Teodoras Narbutas read it instead as a grave mound. Either way the epithet puts her in the ground rather than above it, and Vytautas Ališauskas has proposed that Velnias is her masculine half.

What she does, when she is allowed to do anything, follows from all of that. She holds the souls in the earth, and because those souls were held to decide whether the rye came up and whether the cows calved, she holds those too. The arrangement was a contract. Feed the dead through the long autumn season the Lithuanians called Ilgės and now call Vėlinės, light a candle in the granary so the souls can see their supper, leave the food overnight and look in the morning to see whether it has been touched, and the year will be a good one. Neglect it, a seventeenth-century Latvian informant said flatly, and there will be a poor harvest and hunger.

Her limits are the limits of her paperwork. Nobody describes her; Łasicki gives a name, a title and a cake, and stops. She has no parents, no birth, no death, no story of her own and no second witness, and everything she is rests on whether one Polish traveller’s informant could tell a noun from a name. In 2010 the town of Veliuona settled the question locally by putting up a statue of her, oak darkened almost to black, palms and face cast in bronze, standing in a small boat that hovers above the ground with iron trees growing out of it. The town says its name comes from hers. Jaskievicz argued that her name comes from the town’s. Both cannot be right, and nobody alive can say which one is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Veliona in Lithuanian mythology?

Veliona is a Lithuanian goddess of the souls of the dead, known from a single sixteenth-century source. Jan Łasicki recorded her around 1582 as Vielona Deus animarum, “Vielona, god of souls”, and said offerings were made to her whenever a household fed its dead. She has no myth cycle, no family and no narrative attached to her name.

Is Veliona a real ancient goddess?

That is genuinely disputed. Walter Jaskievicz argued in 1952 that Łasicki’s informant misheard the ordinary Lithuanian word velionis, “deceased person”, and turned a grammatical form into a deity, and that only Perkūnas and Žemyna survive from Łasicki’s whole list. Nijolė Laurinkienė argued in 2013 that the name genuinely belongs to a goddess of the vėlės, possibly a manifestation of the earth goddess Žemyna.

What offerings were made to Veliona?

Flat baked cakes called sikės were crumbled in four places on the table, each heap set opposite another, and left for the dead and for Veliona. She was also invited by name to Skerstuvės, the winter sausage-making feast, with the formula “Come, Veliona, with the dead, and eat sausages with us.” Candles were lit so that the souls could see the food, and it was left out overnight.

How is Veliona different from Giltinė?

Giltinė is the Lithuanian goddess who brings death and takes life, and her name still survives in Lithuanian as a figure of speech for dying. Veliona does not kill anyone. In the source that names her she looks after the dead once they are already dead, which is why Jaskievicz argued that Lithuanian had no need of her, since Giltinė already occupied the role.

Why is the town of Veliuona connected to Veliona?

The town of Veliuona on the Nemunas river shares the goddess’s root, and in 2010 it erected a statue of her by the sculptor Erikas Daugulis, saying its own name derives from hers. Jaskievicz argued the reverse: that Łasicki spelled the goddess’s name the way he did precisely because he knew the place name, which in Polish was written Wielona. The direction of the borrowing has never been settled.