ZIGMAS ZINKEVIČIUS
Emeritus Academician
Research areas: Baltic studies, the history of the Lithuanian language, dialectology, onomastics.
ANCIENT LITHUANIAN BELIEF AND IDOLATRY
In ancient times, Lithuanians were not idolaters like the Greeks and Romans, who erected and worshipped idols, such as those of Apollo, Aphrodite, and others. The Balts had no actual or similar idols. They were not idolaters but worshippers of nature. They worshipped the forces of nature and prayed in sacred groves (alkos—“sacrificial” hills, alka hills). They had sacred bodies of water (rivers, lakes, etc.) and other sacred natural objects, which they worshipped,
They had inherited from the earliest times a primordial monotheistic faith. Their supreme deity deivas was understood as a personification of the sky. This can be inferred, among other things, from the word taivas borrowed by the Finns (with t in place of the Balts’ voiced consonant d, cf. deivas), meaning ‘sky’.
Elements of polytheism appeared in Baltic belief later. Among other things, this was related to the tendency to refer to the old god ‘god’ by certain epithets (such as visagalis), which were pronounced differently in different languages and now give the impression that they were distinct gods.
In addition, the worshipped natural objects had different names in various Baltic languages, which researchers later took to denote separate deities. Their inaccurate transcription in sources (the people who recorded them did not know Lithuanian) only increased the confusion and misled earlier researchers; it continues to mislead researchers today. A mistaken understanding of early Baltic belief as polytheistic became established in scholarly literature. This is the second myth, alongside the view that the ancient Lithuanians were idolaters.
Received on May 18, 2015.
ZIGMAS ZINKEVIČIUS
Justiniškių 41–24, LT-05127 Vilnius, Lithuania
252
Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXII