From God of the Dead to the Devil

Velnias is the clearest Baltic case of interpretatio christiana, the reshaping of a pagan god into a Christian demon. His name is tied to the veles, the shades of the dead, and in the oldest recoverable layer he is a chthonic sovereign: lord of the underworld, master of cattle, keeper of a dangerous wisdom and of magic, standing below as Perkunas stands above.

The folk songs preserve his role as the hunted enemy the thunderer strikes. But once "Velnias" was the natural Lithuanian word to translate the Christian Devil, the figure was flattened into the stupid, cheatable demon of later fairy tale, outwitted by clever peasants. Recovering the ambivalent god beneath the buffoon is a task of stratigraphy: scholars such as Greimas and Gimbutas reconstruct an archaic wel- deity of the dead and of livestock, though how much of that reconstruction is secure, and how much is read into the Christian-era material, remains debated.