Velnias

Also Known As: Latvian Velns; also Velinas, Velas, Vels; from the same root as Latvian velis and Lithuanian vėlė, “the soul of a dead person”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Latvian Mythology, Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He owns the cattle, the hidden money and the standing water, shifts his shape at will, and holds whatever the sun does not reach.
Role in Mythos: He is the counterweight to Dievs, a co-maker of the world who botches or is robbed of everything he builds, and the keeper of the dead.
Relation to Humans: Farmers dealt with him constantly and cautiously, avoided saying his name aloud, and named several hundred things after him instead. He was bargained with rather than worshipped, and the bargain went badly for whoever struck it, on either side.

White bread on the labourers’ table, and white porridge steaming in their bowls. That was the detail that gave the Devil away.

In one Latvian telling collected into the archive at Riga, Dievs pays a call on Velns back at the beginning, when the two of them had only just started keeping house, and finds his neighbour comfortably richer than himself. Velns receives him like a landlord receiving a guest, showing off the property. Dievs eats, looks around, and cannot work out why the porridge is white. He puzzles at it the whole way home before the answer lands: Velns has animals, and the animals give milk. God, in this story, has never seen a cow.

What he does about it is not admirable. He gathers mud and mixes dyes out of it, cuts a bundle of juniper pegs and hammers them into the wall of a shed. He props the door wide, lays scythe blades flat across the threshold, and goes out to the fields. There he calls up a cloud of flies and mosquitoes, pours hot sand down their throats, and turns them into gadflies, which he releases into Velns’s pasture. The cattle go mad under the biting and bolt. Velns’s two herdsmen, a pair of woodpeckers, are left standing. Three calves stay behind. Everything else pours across the boundary into Dievs’s meadow, and Dievs drives the whole stampede in over his own threshold, where the scythes split their hooves and change them into something else entirely. He drives the juniper pegs into their skulls for horns. The only thing still marking them as stolen goods is that they are black all over, so he daubs one white and another red with his dyes, and that is where the colours of cattle come from. That evening the surviving woodpecker brings the three calves home. Velns beats her until she is spattered with blood, and she flees into the forest, which is why the woodpecker is speckled red to this day and still runs through the undergrowth calling cattle in a hoarse voice that nobody answers.

Velns searched everywhere. He even searched God’s farm. The cattle were standing right there, and he did not recognise them.

That is the shape of almost every story he is in. The name is the ordinary Latvian and Lithuanian word for the devil, and a Latvian saying it today means nothing more than a person in England means by it. Underneath the word, though, is something much older and much stranger, because the root is the same as Latvian velis and Lithuanian vėlė, the soul of somebody who has died. Behind the swearword is a god of the dead.

The Baltic dead did not go down. They went sideways, over the horizon, into the place the folk songs call viņa saule, “the other sun”, as against šī saule, “this sun”, which is the ordinary daylight world where people live and work. The sun sets into it every evening and comes back out the far side in the morning, and the dead live there in the same way. Velnias holds that country. He is one-eyed and prophetic, he raises whirlwinds, and the host of the dead rides the sky behind him.

Janīna Kursīte, writing on the Baltic twin deities, sets him beside Dievs as a literal twin, the dark half of a demiurge pair, and puts the making of the world in a fight between them on a stone in the middle of the sea, vidū jūras uz akmeņa, or on an island in the middle of the sea, vidū jūras saliņā. That stone became the axis of everything afterwards. The two of them argue the world into existence and neither one finishes anything cleanly.

His powers follow from all this and they are real enough. He shapeshifts. He owns cattle, buried money and whatever grows without being planted. He keeps the still water, and the Vilnius linguist Birutė Jasiūnaitė, working through over four hundred separate Lithuanian names for him, found that the largest single group of them describe not what he looks like but where he lives: pools, bogs, ravines, hollows, the dark part of a wood. So many rivers and lakes carry his name that the naming pattern is visible in the hydronyms themselves. Her conclusion is worth repeating exactly: the devil of Lithuanian folklore looks like something that started as the guardian spirit of a particular place, and his eventual address in hell, or in the foundations of a farmhouse, arrived later, with Christianity.

His weakness is that he is stupid. Not evil in any grand sense, just greedy and slow and constitutionally unable to spot a swindle, which is why the tales put him on the losing end of every bargain, contest and land deal in the corpus. Thunder finishes what stupidity starts. Pērkons, the Baltic thunder god, hunts him across the sky, and Velns spends the storm season hiding under stones, in water and behind trees, which is why lightning strikes them. Haralds Biezais, who spent a career on Latvian religion, thought that particular chase was mostly a Christian import laid over an older figure, and said so plainly against a long line of scholars who read it as an inherited Indo-European myth of the storm god and the serpent. It is not a settled question and should not be presented as one.

Biezais did record one thing about him that has no parallel anywhere else in Europe. Across a large body of Latvian folklore, the Devil is a German landlord. The Balts were the colonised people of the eastern Baltic for seven centuries, and their devil wears the coat of the man who owned the estate, keeps labourers, serves white bread, and gets robbed by God in a story a serf could tell out loud with a straight face.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Velnias in Baltic mythology?

Velnias, called Velns in Latvian, is the Baltic god of the dead and the counterpart of the sky god Dievs. His name comes from the same root as Lithuanian vėlė and Latvian velis, the soul of a dead person. In folklore he rules the underworld country the Latvian songs call viņa saule, owns cattle and hidden treasure, and shifts his shape freely.

Is Velnias the same as the Christian Devil?

Not originally. Velnias is the ordinary modern Lithuanian and Latvian word for the devil, and after conversion the two figures merged, but the being underneath is older and different. He is not an embodiment of evil so much as a greedy, gullible rival to Dievs who loses almost every contest, and in a great many Latvian tales the pair of them make the world together.

What is the difference between Velns and Velnias?

They are one being under two national forms of one name. Velnias, also spelled Velinas or Velas, is the Lithuanian form; Velns, also Vels, is the Latvian. The character is shared across both traditions, though the two literatures later developed him differently, the Lithuanian devil as a fool and the Latvian one as a genuine threat.

Why does Pērkons chase Velns?

The thunder god Pērkons, Lithuanian Perkūnas, hunts Velns across the sky, which is why Velns shelters under stones, in water and behind trees during a storm and why lightning strikes those places. How old that chase is remains disputed. Haralds Biezais argued it was largely formed under Christian influence, while other scholars read it as an inherited Indo-European myth of the storm god and his adversary.

What did Velns create?

In Latvian etiological tales Velns owns the first cattle, which Dievs then stampedes with gadflies and steals, splitting their hooves on scythe blades and hammering juniper pegs into their heads for horns. Similar tales credit Velns with the making of wolves, snakes and other awkward creatures. He is a maker who never gets to keep what he makes.