The ethnologist told the myth where the tradition of daisies came from: we repeat it at every table

She emphasized on the air of Žiniai Radio that she had done so before marguerite was the main symbol of Easter.

“The main highlight was, of course, the marguerite. The only difference is that we are now used to thinking that if there is a holiday, if there is Easter, then that Sunday, Monday and that’s it. In the past, people understood time a little differently. Not like some tear-off calendar page, where each day means something exactly, and the cycle was cyclical.

This whole cycle up to and after Easter was general, flexible and connected. Every day was some sort of preparation for Easter, which is also a very big holiday. Then the culminating day, which could have been more than one, even several, then leaving this holiday and going to the next one,” entomologist A. Valiukevičienė said on the air of Žiniai radio.

According to her, the essential things of Easter have remained to this day – waking the earth, beating the margutis, and printing it.

“Margutis is very old (tradition, author’s p.). It comes from really, really archaic times. It is very difficult to tell how old a marguus is, since the shell itself, the whole egg is organic and disappears quickly, so it cannot be dug up.

But on the territory of Gediminas castle, bone and stone margučias, fragments of clay margučias have been unearthed and dated around the 11th-13th century. This means that if we unearthed a souvenir or ceremonial egg, it means that such a process as the printing of marguti means that it was there,” said the ethnologist.

Texts also mention margučiai printing in the times of Martynas Mažvydas and Mikalojus Daukša.

“There are notes that there were celebrations in Margučiai. But we are not writing down the tradition that just appeared, but the one that is firmly rooted. We are talking about the 13th century, at that time margutis was already fully known and popular, it was not an isolated case,” A. Valiukevičienė, an ethnologist and folk art specialist of the Lithuanian National Cultural Center, testified.

An old myth we keep repeating

She said on the News Radio show “Expertai pataria” that when you hold an egg in your hands, it is clear that you are holding life in your hand.

“And that hatching from the egg also has some symbolism. I don’t even know how to dig up where it all started. Because that daisy is very old. But there are myths and stories that when a daisy is broken, life is released into the world. When the egg itself breaks with the chicken inside, a new life begins.

One old myth is about a bird goddess who laid a cosmic egg while flying somewhere in space when nothing was there. When it broke, water appeared from the protein, earth from the yolk, and everything else from the shell: people, animals, that life was sown”, – the ethnologist named one of the myths in the “Expertai pataria” program.

A. Valiukevičienė said that the statuettes of the goddess bird are excavated and they date back to 5 thousand years before Christ.

“These are the times here, when there was no Lithuania yet. This myth is very old, it is characteristic of the whole of Europe. And all over Europe we would find marguerites. This is not our only uniqueness,” said the interviewer of Žiniai Radio.

Even now, this old myth is repeated when beating margulys at the table, said the entomologist.

“We break the egg and release a new life into nature. Which is very symbolic, because in the spring that life wakes up and we see it. (…) It is through the repetition of the myth that we remember how our world is reborn,” said the folk art specialist of the Lithuanian National Cultural Center.

She said that it is extremely difficult to say how the process of printing polka dots came about.

“No written sources even survive from those times. But there are assumptions as to how this daisy itself appeared, it is the first gift of nature given to man after winter, the eggs of wild birds.

And what do they all look like? They are either bluish, greenish, brown, dotted, colored. This is the understanding of what the first egg should be, and we also brought wild bird eggs from nature”, ethnologist A. Valiukevičienė said on the air of Žiniai radio.

In the program “Expertai pataria”, the ethnologist reminded us of the most common method of printing margulets with wax – the bird’s foot pattern.

“It also reminds us of the myth of the bird goddess. (…) The whole cosmos fits into that little egg. Therefore, I think that this myth is true,” said the interviewer of the show.

Two more important attributes of Easter, according to enthologist A. Valiukevičienė, are a green branch on the table and a swing.

“Why do you need to swing as high as possible?” There are many different stories. They used to say that the higher you spin, the taller the flax will be, and whoever brews what kind of beer, it is important to them that the barley grows tall. When the children turned around, they said that the children will grow up big. They also said that if you swing high, you will live a long life,” she said.