Why the Moon Is Cut in Two

The Menulis songs are, at their core, an aetiology, a story that explains a natural fact. The Moon weds the Sun but, restless, turns his love to the Morning Star Ausrine or to the Sun's own daughter; for this betrayal Perkunas strikes him with the sword and splits him, and that wound is why the moon waxes and wanes rather than shining whole. Behind the domestic drama is an old observation dressed as myth: the visible cycle of the phases given a cause in a broken marriage.

The Baltic scheme is notable for its reversed genders, a male moon and a female sun, against the more familiar arrangement of much of Europe and the Near East. In living folk practice the moon governed timing: the waxing moon was addressed with prayers for growth, health and increase, and work was begun or avoided by its phase, so that Menulis was less an object of grand cult than a presence woven into the reckoning of ordinary time.