Žydinti taurė : baltų gėrimai ir apeigos

LTŠi knyga skirta baltų apeiginiams gėrimams aptarti ir jų religiniam vaidmeniui atskleisti. Tyrimas apima du religiniuose ritualuose vartotus gėrimus - alų ir midų - bei su jais susijusius mitinius vaizdinius ir apeigines praktikas. Kadangi nedaug turime senesnių nei XVI a. šaltinių, nušviečiančių gėrimų gaminimą ir apeiginę vartoseną, knygoje daugiausia remsiuosi kalbos, etnografijos ir tautosakos šaltiniais bei XVI-XVIII a. rašytiniais dokumentais. Šitai lemia rekonstrucinį tyrimo pobūdį. Kita vertus, kadangi bendruomenės beveik iki XX a. vidurio, o kai kur ir ilgau teberengė pokylius su apeiginiais elementais, tyrimas yra ne tik rekonstrukcinis, jame apžvelgiama ir šventinių gėrimų tradicija XIX a. pabaigoje - XX a. Didžiąją dalį nagrinėjamos medžiagos sudaro lietuvių etnografijos ir tautosakos šaltiniai. Juos papildo istoriniai prūsų mitologijos ir religijos duomenys bei latvių tautosaka ir etnografija. Nors prūsų ir latvių medžiaga nėra pristatoma taip išsamiai kaip lietuvių, net ir santykinai nedidelis tyrimo šaltinių praplėtimas padidina tyrinėtojo galimybes atpažinti mitinius vaizdinius ir identifikuoti gėrimo apeigos dėmenis. Be to, latvių etnografijos duomenys pasitarnauja aiškinantis gėrimų gaminimo technologijas, inventorių bei apeiginį kontekstą. [Iš Įvado]Reikšminiai žodžiai: Lietuvos istorija; Baltai; Papročiai; Istoriniai šaltiniai; Etnografija; Gėrimai; The Lithuanian history; Balts; Customs; Historical sources; Etnography; Liquors.

ENMetaphorically, a blossoming cup represents the vital power that surges from a vessel when a ritual drink is offered to the gods. Rituals involving drinks form a part of the Balts’ key rituals of weddings, funerals, initiations, peace treaties, yearly cycles, and many others. Linked with other religious complements - a prayer, a blessing, or an offering - a beverage comprised the core of Balt rituals. Alcoholic beverages made of honey and (or) grain were used in the world 9000 years ago, and the oldest drink made of honey and rice was found in China. In Europe, the earliest traces of mead were discovered in Spain, from the fifth and the fourth millennia BCE. At the same time, people in both southern and northern Europe knew how to make beer. Due to insufficient research, Balt archaeological monuments have provided only scarce data on prehistoric drinks. In Lithuania, the traces of mead have been discovered in a single archaeological monument, the third-to-sixth-century Paprūdis burial ground in Žemaitija (Samogitia). Here, a grave of a rich man (No. 24) contained two drinking horns, and organic remains were found in the casings of their cusps. Infrared spectroscopic analysis revealed that they were the remains of an alcoholic beverage containing honey. Linguistic facts show that the Balts have been making and drinking mead since ancient times. Latvian medus ‘mead, honey’ and Lithuanian midus ‘mead’ (under Germanic influence, Lithuanians replaced the old name of mead medus into midus) indicate that the name of mead derived from the root *medhu of the Indo-European proto-language, which meant a fermented honey drink; cf. Old Irish mid ‘mead, a fermented and intoxicating drink’, Old Icelandic mjǫdr ‘mead’, Old High German metu, Old English meodu, English mead, Greek μεθυ ‘an alcoholic drink, Old Hindi mádhu ‘a sweet drink, honey’ and others.The meaning ‘bee honey’ of the Lithuanian and Latvian word medus emerged later, in designating honey as the main ingredient of mead. The earliest written information on mead in the lands of the Balts is the narrative about Aestii by the ninth-century traveller Wolfstan, which he wrote in the city of Drusuo in Prussia. He points out that here the dukes and the nobles drink mares’ milk, while the rest of the people drink mead. After that, mead is mentioned in much later sources of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Rulers, nobles, and warriors in Prussia, Livonia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania drank it at banquets. In the fifteenth century, however, amidst the nobility mead started competing with wine, which supplanted mead at banquets in the mid-sixteenth-early seventeenth century. Only in isolated cases mead was still produced in estates and survived until the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. As honey was expensive and vodka was gradually replacing mead, the tradition of mead production was dying out among the peasants as well. In the late nineteenth century, the tradition of mead production and consumption decreased markedly, which explains the scarcity of ethnographic data. Nonetheless, mead survived in folklore, while in some cases the substitutes of mead (wine, vodka) absorbed and preserved its ritual functions. The history of beer in the lands of the Balts was different. It survived much longer than mead and, judging from abundant historical references, remained not only as a popular drink but also as an element of weddings, funerals, agrarian and other rituals long after Christianisation. Archaeologists can validate the traces of beer in the Balt areas from as late as the third century.Having examined miniature clay cups from West Lithuanian burial grounds in Lazdininkai and Užpelkiai, the spectrometric analysis of their sediments revealed that most of the examined cups contained an alcoholic drink made of barley. This discovery dispels any doubts that in the first half of the first millennium the Balts made beer and used it for ritual purposes. The ancient origin of beer in Balt culture is shown by its name that has equivalents in other groups of Indo-European languages: cf. Lithuanian alus, Latvian alus, Old Icelandic ǫl ‘a beer feast’ (<*aluþ), Bulgarian ôl ‘beer’, Slovenian ôlovina ‘beer yeast’, Osetin æluton ‘beer of special make’. Unlike in Lithuanian and Latvian, in Prussian the word alu meant mead, and not beer; it is a late change in the meaning that after the spread of the Slavi borrowing piwis ‘beer’, which brought about the narrowing of the meaning of alu. The root al- is common to the whole western Indo-European world with a branching off in the group of east Iranian languages. As it is the only name of beer that has equivalents in several branches of Indo-European languages, there is no doubt regarding the ancient origins of this beverage. The monograph mostly focuses on revealing the ritual and mythological significance of beer and mead. Since the information on these drinks before the fifteenth century when they were used in public religious practices of the Balts before Christianisation (1387 in Lithuania, 1413 in Žemaitija) is very limited, the research resorts to later data. Mostly, these are sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century historical documents and nineteenth- twentieth-century linguistic, ethnographical, and folklore materials that reflect the continuity of the tradition in changing forms. [From the publication]

• Etnologija / Ethnology
• Istorija / History