A Goddess Still Given Her Own Day

Zemyna did not stay confined to the church visitation records that preserve her earliest documented cult. Romuva, the modern reconstructed Baltic pagan religion practiced chiefly in Lithuania and formally recognized there as a traditional religious community, gives Zemyna a central and continuing place in its calendar and practice, honoring her as the great mother of the living earth in seasonal observances tied to sowing and harvest that consciously echo the offerings of bread and drink the sixteenth century clergy once condemned. Contemporary practitioners describe these observances as a revival and reconstruction rather than an unbroken survival, since the intervening centuries of Christianization and later Soviet-era suppression of religious practice in Lithuania left no continuous, unbroken chain of worship connecting the peasants Lasicki and the Jesuits described to today's Romuva communities.

This atlas records Romuva's veneration of Zemyna as a fact about a living, legally recognized religious community in present day Lithuania, not as an invitation to reconstruct or perform its specific rites, which belong to the practitioners who maintain them. The continuity worth noting is thematic rather than unbroken: the same insistence that the earth is a living power to be thanked rather than simply exploited, which the hostile clerical record of the 1500s and 1600s preserved almost by accident, is the same idea contemporary Romuva communities now state openly and by their own choice, four centuries after it was first written down in order to be condemned.