Saule

The richest body of Saule material is the cycle of dainos about a celestial family and its marriages. In these songs the Sun and the Moon are a married pair whose union fails; the divine twins, sons of Dievas, court the daughters of the Sun; the Morning Star Ausrine and the Evening Star lay Saule's path and light her fire. This is one of the fuller survivals anywhere of an Indo-European "sun-maiden" mythology, comparable to the Vedic Surya and the Greek Helios traditions, and it is unusual in making the sun feminine and the moon masculine. Saule is bound up with amber, the fossil resin of the Baltic coast: her tears are amber, and the material that made the region famous in antiquity is folded into her myth. Her turning points, the solstices, were marked by the great fire-festivals that survive as the Latvian Ligo and Lithuanian Rasa of midsummer.

A related strand of the daina cycle turns the wedding itself toward grief: when the thunder-god Perkunas splits a golden oak grown for her daughter's wedding procession, Saule spends years gathering the shattered pieces and trying, in vain, to make them grow again, weeping as they fail to take root. She weeps too for the zaltys, the grass snake once kept as a household guardian in Baltic farmsteads, and one telling makes this very grief the origin of amber, so that the region's characteristic stone becomes, in the songs, the visible trace of the goddess's own sorrow.

The dainas describing Saule's celestial household are not confined to archival collections; they remain part of a living, internationally recognized performance tradition. The Latvian Song and Dance Festival, Dziesmu un deju svetki, held regularly since the nineteenth century and drawing tens of thousands of amateur singers into massed choral performances, together with its Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts, was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2003 as the Baltic Song and Dance Celebrations, in recognition of a continuous, community-sustained choral tradition considered one of the largest amateur choral movements in the world. Dainas concerning Saule and the wider solar and celestial mythology of the Baltic folk-song corpus are among the traditional material regularly performed within this festival tradition, carrying the goddess's mythic household of sun-maidens, quarreling moon and courting star-sons from the nineteenth century folklore collections directly into contemporary public performance before large audiences.

This atlas describes the festival's existence, its UNESCO recognition and its inclusion of solar daina material as facts about a living, actively maintained cultural institution, not as an invitation to reproduce specific performance material belonging to the communities that maintain it. The continuity is nonetheless striking: a mythology first systematically collected from rural singers in the nineteenth century now reaches its audience chiefly through a large-scale, internationally recognized public choral tradition rather than through private household observance, a considerably more public and institutional afterlife than most reconstructed Indo-European sky mythologies receive.