Žemyna

Also Known As: also Žemynėlė, Žemelė, Žemynylena; from Lithuanian žemė, “earth”; cognate with Latvian Zemes māte and, at a greater distance, with Thracian Zemele and Greek Semele
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She makes things increase, raising blossom in rye, wheat and barley and quickening every living thing that grows out of the ground.
Role in Mythos: She is the tilled earth itself as a deity, patron of crops and livestock and keeper of the dead who are buried in her.
Relation to Humans: Every household dealt with her directly, pouring beer on the floor before drinking, burying bread in the furrow before sowing and laying a newborn on the ground before laying it in a cradle. She asked for no temple and no priest, only that a family remember her at the start of anything that mattered.

Before anyone drank, the beer went onto the floor. The head of the household filled a scoop cut from cow horn or hollowed out of wood, tipped a little onto the packed clay at his feet where it soaked in and went dark, and said a few lines asking that the rye and the wheat and the barley come into flower and that bad men be steered around the farm. Then everyone in the room greeted everyone else by the hand. Only then did the drinking start. The floor was the altar, and the goddess was underneath it.

Her name is just the word for the ground. Žemė is earth in Lithuanian, and žemyna is earth too: soil, ploughland, the dirt that goes back over a coffin. Villagers used it for the thing under their boots and for the thing that finally takes them, and they used it, in certain sentences, for someone who could be spoken to. The great dictionary of the Lithuanian language records only the dirt. Every serious researcher of Baltic religion has recorded the goddess.

The earliest written trace of her is one Latin sentence. Jan Łasicki, describing Samogitia around 1582, noted that there were goddesses as well: Žemyna of the earth, Austėja of the bees, and both were believed to make things increase. Daniel Klein’s Lithuanian grammar of 1653 glossed her more briskly still, as the earth goddess, the Ceres of these people. Later lexicographers kept repeating the same short entry, one line at a time, as though there were nothing further to say.

Nobody ever drew her. There are no idols, no shrines, no carved posts, no priesthood, nothing that could be knocked down by a bishop and recorded in a chronicle as having been knocked down. When Matthäus Prätorius asked the descendants of the old Prussians in the seventeenth century what exactly they thought they were addressing, the answer he got back was that there is something divine in the earth. That is as close to a portrait as the record comes. She has no body anywhere in the sources.

What she does have is a genealogy running back further than any Lithuanian document. The name belongs to the same ancient family as the Latvian Zemes māte, the Thracian Zemele and the Greek Semele, all of them descended from a Proto-Indo-European earth goddess whose name meant nothing more elaborate than “the ground”. Her husband is given as Perkūnas the thunderer in some tellings and as Praamžius, a face of the high sky god, in others, which is the usual arrangement of father above and mother below. Rain and lightning were how the marriage was consummated, and the rule that followed was practical: no ploughing and no sowing before the first thunder of the year, because until then the ground had not been quickened and the seed would come to nothing.

So the year was a long conversation with her. Before the first furrow a loaf was buried in the soil, sometimes with salt, sometimes with an egg, on the understanding that the gift would strengthen whatever it was in her that made things swell. Afterwards the family ate pork, and specifically a pig’s head with its feet and its snout laid out in a bowl, so that the ploughmen might turn the ground as easily as a pig turns it with its nose. A record from 1588 has a sow killed outright for the Earth Goddess.

Harvest kept the same rhythm. Where the first ears of rye were cut, bread and salt were left lying on the ground. Where the last ones still stood, they were braided or knotted into a tuft the reapers called the beard, wound about another offering of bread and salt, and asked in plain words to do it all again next year. In early December, when the threshing began in Lithuania Minor, came the feast of Sambariai: the grain poured into a heap, bread and beer made from several kinds of it, three separate libations poured out with the same flowering prayer, and a hen and a rooster taken from a back room and killed.

Her hold on a life ran from the first hour of it. A newborn was set down on the bare earth before it went anywhere else, so that she could take it as her own and give it the same vegetative push she gave everything else. Among the Nadrovians, Sudovians and Scalovians a birth was marked by pouring vodka for her, with the midwife, the mother and the father all asking her to keep the child. Beer was poured for her twice in the course of a betrothal. And at the funeral meal the family put three bites of bread on the ground, three bites of meat and three spoonfuls of drink, and asked her to be glad, to take this soul in and to keep it well.

That last request was not a courtesy. The dead were hers once they were in her, and the same belief held that a soul could come back up as a plant, which is why a tree or a bush went in beside a grave. The old laments ask a dead daughter what leaves she will put out, what flowers she will bloom in. The stories also give her a harder office. When lightning killed the cruel lord Čičinskas and they tried to bury him, the ground would not keep him: it threw him back to the surface, and it went on throwing him back, a hand or a foot always working its way clear of the soil.

Her powers all follow from that one fact of being the ground. She raises the crop, thickens the herd, brings the first calf and the first foal, and, in the words Prätorius wrote down, gives life to everyone and maintains it. Half the standing prayer to her is protective rather than agricultural, a request to have malice turned aside from the fields. She can also, in effect, refuse.

Her limits follow just as plainly. She cannot make anything grow without the rain and the thunder that belong to her husband, so half the calendar is spent waiting on somebody else’s weather. Because she had no temple, no image and no clergy, the whole cult lived inside a farmhouse and depended on people who ploughed; when that way of farming went, the goddess had nowhere left to stand. After Lithuania was baptised, much of what she had done was quietly transferred to the Virgin Mary, and the word settled back down into meaning ordinary dirt.

Not entirely, though. In 2011, folklorists working around Onuškis were told by a woman born in 1921 that the earth is holy, that people had always said so, and that the earth was like God. At Pelesa another woman gave them a scrap of prayer for a good rye crop, addressed to Žemyna, best of mothers. A third remembered her grandmother turning to the icon corner, pressing her hands together and starting the sentence the way you start a sentence you intend to be true: oh Žemyna, my mother.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Žemyna in Lithuanian mythology?

Žemyna is the Lithuanian goddess of the earth, first recorded by Jan Łasicki around 1582 as the goddess who makes things increase. Her name is simply the Lithuanian word for earth, and she was understood as the tilled ground itself rather than as a figure living somewhere above it. She governed the growth of crops and livestock and received the dead who were buried in her.

What rituals were performed for Žemyna?

The central rite was a libation of beer poured onto the ground before anyone drank, accompanied by a prayer asking her to bring the rye, wheat and barley into flower. It had its own verb in Lithuania Minor, žemynėliauti. Bread, salt and eggs were buried in fields before sowing, pigs and poultry were sacrificed to her, and people kissed the ground as a greeting to her.

Who was Žemyna married to?

The sources give her husband as either Perkūnas, the thunder god, or Praamžius, a manifestation of the high sky god Dievas. Either pairing makes the standard arrangement of a sky father and an earth mother, with rain and thunder understood as what fertilises the ground. This is why Lithuanians would not plough or sow before the first thunder of the year.

Is Žemyna connected with death?

Yes. Žemyna received the dead as well as feeding the living, and prayers at Lithuanian funeral meals asked her to accept the soul and keep it well. Offerings of bread, meat and drink were dropped on the ground for her and for the dead at the same time. Souls in her keeping were also thought able to return as plants, which is why trees and bushes were planted on graves.

Was Žemyna worshipped in temples?

No. There is no record of any temple, idol or priesthood belonging to Žemyna. Her cult was domestic, performed on the floor of a farmhouse or out in a field by the family itself, which is one reason it survived so long after Lithuania was Christianised and why so little physical trace of it remains.