The Balts and the nature

The Baltic peoples have extremely intimate relations with these trees. The oak and the linden are basic trees in folklore. At the time of one’s birth, a specific tree is assigned to one, and it grows imbued with the same life forces as its human counterpart. If the tree is cut down, the person dies. Trees growing in the old cemeteries of Lithuania are never touched by a pruner’s hand, for there is an adage saying that to cut a cemetery tree is to do evil to the deceased. Neither is it permissible to mow the grass: “From cemetery grass our blood flows,” runs the old proverb. Next after the plants, spirits were most likely to pass into birds — women into a cuckoo or a duck, men into a falcon, a pigeon, a raven, or a cock. Some would also be reincarnated in wolves, bears, dogs, horses and cats. In the Protestant cemeteries of the mid-nineteenth century in Prussian Lithuania (the area of Klaipėda), wooden tomb-stones were found resembling the shapes of toads or other reptiles, combined with motifs of flowers and birds, and other tomb monuments were capped with horses’ heads.

Earth is the Great Mother. All life comes from her: humans, plants, animals. In Lettish she is called Zemes māte, “mother earth,” in Lithuanian Žemyna, from žemė, “earth.” Her anthropomorphic image is vague; she is the Earth holding the mystery of eternal life. She is called by such picturesque names as “the blossomer,” “the bud raiser.” Her functions are distributed among the separate minor deities of forest, field, stones, water and animals, who in Latvian folklore acquired the names “mother of forests,” “mother of fields,” “mother of springs,” “mother of domestic animals,” etc. Cardinal Oliver Scholasticus, Bishop of Paderborn, in his description of the Holy Land written about 1220, refers to Baltic heathens as follows: “They honour forest nymphs, forest goddesses, mountain spirits, low-lands, waters, field spirits and forest spirits. They expected divine assistance from virgin forests, wherein they worshipped springs and trees, mounds and hills, steep stones and mountains slopes — all of which presumably endowed mankind with strength and power.”