The Zemyna material is unusually well anchored in recorded practice, because the very church visitations and Jesuit reports that set out to stamp it out described it in detail. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clergy noted Lithuanian peasants pouring the first of the beer to the ground, setting out bread, and speaking words of thanks to the earth before ploughing and after harvest; the ground was not to be struck or broken carelessly, and a grave or a furrow asked her leave.
Read against the grain, these hostile documents are among the best ethnographic evidence for any Baltic deity. Zemyna sits within an Indo-European constellation of earth-mother figures, the earth as consort of the sky, source of the living and receiver of the dead, and her cult, being agricultural and domestic rather than official, survived longest, which is exactly why the reformers kept finding it to condemn. Her name is transparent in the language itself, an extension of zeme, the ordinary Lithuanian word for earth, so that goddess and ground were never fully prised apart in speech, as with Dievas and the sky. The written record reaches back further than the Jesuit visitations: the Polish chronicler Jan Lasicki, describing the pagan remnants of Samogitia and Lithuania in a text usually dated to 1582, already lists "Zemyna" among the powers the peasantry still invoked, showing her cult already old by the time the church campaigns against it intensified a generation later.