Menulis

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.

Menulis's own name, meaning both moon and month in the Baltic languages, preserves directly a linguistic pattern found across a wide span of the Indo-European family: a single inherited root doing double duty for the visible lunar body and the unit of time its cycle defines. Comparative linguists trace this pattern back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root, conventionally written *mens-, that underlies Latin mensis, month, Greek mene, moon, and men, month, English moon and month themselves, and Sanskrit masa, month, among many other cognates scattered across the family's daughter languages, evidence that the practical link between watching the moon's phases and counting time by them is old enough to predate the split of Indo-European into its separate branches by many centuries. The Baltic languages preserve this ancient double meaning with unusual transparency, since Lithuanian and Latvian speakers still use essentially the same word, in only slightly different forms, for the object in the sky and the calendrical period it once defined, a fusion many other Indo-European languages have since split into two distinct, no longer obviously related words.

This linguistic fact gives Menulis's mythology, focused as it is on an aetiology for the visible phases of the moon, a genuinely deep root, since the very word the myth explains was already, at a level far below conscious mythmaking, a fossil of the practical lunar calendar every Indo-European speaking community once relied on before more precise solar or lunisolar systems supplemented or replaced simple moon counting for everyday timekeeping.