What I am about to write of, the numerology of a People that expresses their identity, is a story that is set in the center of folklore, and one which is critical to the understanding of any people. Numerology, a culture’s use of numbers and number patterns, is an overwhelming force in the creation of artifacts which express sacredness. To the folk artist, numerology may often be intuitive, but it is almost always a system that is marked by correctness: that which is right/wrong, rather than an aesthetic of good/ bad. To the collector numerology is one of the principal measures of determining authenticity.
“The ancient Balts were a conservative People, the Latgallians the most conservative of all. You can see it in Latgallian burials. They never took jewelry patterns from the tribes that surrounded them. Never took an innovation in an outside form, but adapted it to their numerology and world view. They were buried with the Latgallian shawl, the color of the sky in deep summer’s last light, wrapped about their shoulders, their uncovered faces gazing towards the sky.”
I was pounding bronze into the form of a 3rd century bracelet of the Latgallian People. Daumants Kalnins, the greatest of Latvia’s traditional blacksmiths, was teaching me about cosmology with little stories, as we took small breaks around the forge, and he smoked the terrible old Russian cigarettes as the great forge burned cooler and smoked as well.
“When you’ve filed the head of the grass snake into the great wards of the bracelet, into each end, you cut three lines behind its rectangular head, for the People came to the Grass Snake, the wisest of all things, seeking its help. The world of water, air and sky opposed each other. They pulled away, divided, and the world could not be whole. It was the Grass Snake that agreed to wrap itself around all three great elements and, by the union of its body, make it one.”
It was later in the day, fascinated that the World of the People, the earth, was but two small lines on the great bracelet, a single line for the world of the living and another underneath it for the burial of the dead, that I asked Daumants about the triangle I would strike in small lines and the three suns that would rise above it. Daumants sat for another cigarette and I got Ingrida to come and help translate the complexities I wouldn’t understand.
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We talked about the suns, about where the spirits go after death. Later I started to strike the small suns that go down the middle of the bracelet and the suns that would sit inside Mara’s mark, and represent night and water. It occurred to me that I was making Daumants’ story, that here with the work of my hands were the 3 great elements, earth, air, and water, held together by wisdom, cold forged, hot forged, pounded on metal and on wood. It was Daumants who taught me to count, to see meaning in pattern, and most of all to hear the stories as that pattern unfolded.
Three has always been a dominant element in Balt, that is, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian, pattern. In many ways it is the transformative number of the Balts. The even numbers hold the solidity of the four seasons and express the world of continuity in reoccurring symmetry. The great female Sun was given the number two for the holy tears she wept. If we strike 3 suns into metal or hang 3 amber tears from a necklace we are “writing” something more. Eight brothers in an ancient prayer poem will become the larger concrete world around us while nine brothers become infinite and magic. 1/3, 3/3, 9/3 are components of every Balt charm I know, from the ancient amber brooches to the consistent use of the triangle. The same numerical progression forms the basis for magic words, whether to protect your field or stop the flow of blood.
I once asked my students to tell me how the “world” of the ancient Egyptians would change if their sacred symbol was a sphere and not a pyramid. The ancient world of the Balts was one of union with their environment, yet all culture must create distinctions within that union, hence the duality and consistency of the even numbers. But the even numbers did not raise the ancient Balts to the sky… that became the function of the triangle. With a single great Sky God and the Dievadeli (the sons of God), Thunder, Sun, the Morning Star, etc, Balt cosmology reached up to the dome of the heavens from the real foundation of the earth. The divine sign of Dievs, God, became the triangle with a circle above it, the mark of Mara, the Earth Mother, made into the sand hill, the mythological world mountain, with the female Sun above. With the understanding that Dievs was beyond the Sun, beyond the symbol, in the empty space, the farther space, in the mystery.
Within most of Balt culture the idea of a priest who would be an intermediary between the People and the sacred was foreign. Holy people, healers, elders, would rise as leaders of song, tenders of groves, diviners, but the ability to join the sacred, participate in it and carry its symbols, was individual and encompassed in the larger whole of the tribe.
Thus we have the triangle that represents birth, prime, and death (the 3 of beginning, middle, and end) as a symbol for the individual as well. To the foot of the world mountain one is born, through strength, energy, and work one ascends to its highest point under the Sun. There one receives knowledge, a dream, a vision, which they will carry in their descent, their eventual decline to death, and where, with their burial, they will again join the foundation of the People.
The triangle thrusts one out from the mundane world of time, and 3 transforms it, making it more. Out of 2, in a union of opposites, comes 3. Out of the union of the male horse and female horse, comes the foal. Out of the rooster and the hen, out of the man and the woman, comes abundance and the life of the tribe.
3 elements: earth, air, water
3 times: past, present, and future
3 processes: beginning, middle, and end
These attempt to express in language that which is not really orderable and definitely not simple. Daylight waking dreams, the dew which rises from the earth as silver tears, knowing the end in the beginning…those liminal shifts in individual experience bring the wonderful human soul to a place where it must create a construct for the mysterious. In ancient times it may have taken one to magic, to blessing, to faith and union, but always, even now, three takes one into the “other.”
Copyright, Baltic Imports, 2008.
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