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Baltic deity
Alternative Title: Laima-Dalia

Laima, also called Laima-dalia, (from Lithuanian laimė, “happiness,” “luck”), in Baltic religion, the goddess of fate, generally associated with the linden tree. Together with Dievs, the sky, and Saule, the sun, Laima determines the length and fortune of human life. In the course of each life she helps arrange marriages, oversees weddings, protects pregnant women, and appears at childbirth to pronounce each infant’s destiny.


Three other demigoddesses with analogous functions are preserved in Latvian mythology—Dēkla, protector of babies, Kārta, spinner of the thread of life, and Māra, goddess of fertility.

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Because of peculiarities of the source materials, it is difficult to determine whether the goddess of destiny, Laima (from the root word laime, meaning “happiness” and “luck”), originally had the same importance in Baltic religion as later, or whether her eminence is due to the specific historical circumstances of each of the Baltic peoples. In any case, a wide...
in Baltic religion, the sky god. Dievs and Laima, the goddess of human fate, determine human destiny and world order. Dievs is a wooer of Saule, the sun. As pictured by the pre-Christian Balts, he is an Iron Age Baltic king who lives on a farmstead in the sky. Wearing a silver gown, pendants, and a sword, he occasionally rides down to earth, on horseback or in a horse-drawn chariot, to watch...
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