Umbrarium

In Lithuanian sakmės the aitvaras is a homestead spirit of fire and air, not an earth-bound kaukas. Indoors it may look like a black or white rooster, a cat, a toad, or some small beast kept in the granary, on the millstones, or on the windowsill and fed with omelette, dumplings, or cockscombs. Outdoors, flying, it is a ball of fire, a long poker, a hay-rake, or a comet-tailed dragon. The Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija records regional names including pūkis in the north, damavykas and koklikas in the southeast, and notes the Latvian pūķis as a close counterpart.

People said an aitvaras could be hatched from the egg of a nine- or twelve-year-old rooster, bought in Riga or Königsberg as a coal, a stick, or a beetle, or found as a thong and carried home. Once lodged it prefers not to leave. It skalsina, multiplies, the household goods — grain, milk, gold — yet many tellings insist the plenty is stolen from other farms. A family that kept one might be envied and condemned; a farmhand might eat the omelette meant for it and then burn the angry spirits. Those who found one by accident often tried to be rid of it. The master's death was said to be hard.

The tradition is double-voiced. Some stories praise the being that loves horses and feeds them oats, or the toad that runs over new loaves and makes the bread last. Others treat the keeper as a friend of the devil after Christianisation, when Perkūnas was said to chase the fiery flyer with thunderbolts. Folklorists group the aitvaras with a wider Baltic and Slavic family of flying treasure-bringers: the Estonian kratt and puuk, the Polish latawiec, the German Drack, the Slavic fiery serpent. The Lithuanian distinction remains useful: kaukai belong to earth and modest honest increase; an aitvaras belongs to sky, theft, and flame.

Read from within Lithuanian homestead life, the aitvaras is a story about sudden plenty in a landscape of thin margins. It asks who really paid for the full barn, and what a household owes a guest that will burn the roof if slighted. It is not a generic dragon for a bestiary. It is a neighbour's explanation of why one farm fattens while another starves, and a warning that forbidden knowledge of how to hatch luck may cost the hatcher more than grain.