Schools and Practitioners

Lore of the Craft: six schools, six tiers, and the last žyniai

“In my grandmother’s day there were forty hands in Lithuania that could speak to the earth. In my mother’s, perhaps twenty. I have counted six, and I am one of them.”

[The saga’s invention] An old beekeeper to a boy with a lantern, paraphrased from the oral record of the last žyniai.

The six schools of asked power

Asked power has six schools. Granted power (claims, the Wolf-Change, the Iron Saint’s gift) and bought power (bargains) stand outside them (Power systems, §1–3).

School	What it is	Medium	Typical practitioner
Senovės Kalba	The five-element craft	Amber, fire, water, earth, wind, stars	Žynys, vaidilutė, Krivis
Užkalbėjimai	Spoken charms	Water, bread, salt, thread	Village healer
Ženklai	Carved, fed signs	Wood, iron, thread	Sign-carver, mason, smith
Žolės	Herb-lore	Herbs, smoke, poison	Herb-woman, midwife
Gintarystė	Amber craft	Amber	Palanga priestess
Priesaika	Oath-binding	Blood, earth, an axe	Žynys, the oath-takers

[Historical record] Four of the six are real folk practice taken literally: charms, signs, herbs and oaths. Amber is attested as a medium and a grave good. The five-element Kalba is a saga system, built on real god-names of uneven reliability.

The tiers

Most people with any power stop at tier 2.

Tier	Title	Can do	Number in 1382
0	Paprastas, ordinary	Use a fed sign, carry charged amber, keep custom	n/a
1	Žiniuonis, žolininkė	Charms, herbs, feeding signs	Thousands
2	Burtininkas, ragana	Enchant warded objects, read lots, minor Kalba in one element	Hundreds
3	Žynys, vaidilutė	Full Kalba in one or two elements, the Five-Voice, charge amber, conduct oaths	Dozens, fewer each year after 1387
4	Krivis, Gintaro šventikė	All five elements; the Sutartis; anchored amber; speech with Forces	A handful, perhaps three to five
5	Indas, vessel	A Force acts through them in full	One per Force per age

Advancement comes only through teaching (a living lineage), sacrifice (an element notices you) or binding (someone else’s Sutartis). After 1387 the temples are gone, lineages break, and the tiers collapse downward.

Who stands where, book by book

Placements follow the character pages. Where the books show a practitioner without naming a tier, the placement is marked as a reading.*

Book	Tier 1-2	Tier 3	Tier 4-5
VI (1341-77)	Trakai smith (signs, tier 2)	Palanga vaidilutės, the old matron	The Krivis; Birutė (4)
I	Ona (herb-lore, 1); Elena (charms, 1); Vytautas (bound tier 2)	Eglė (before she is taken); Jonas (Wolf-Change, granted)	The Krivis (to 1387); Birutė (4, then vessel); Galminas (5)
II	Lagoon witch (Water; a reading: tier 2); Vytautas (bound 2)	Kantaudas (Earth, Book II ch. 19); Pelkių Eglė (granted)	One tier-4 remains until 1410
III	Flame-Keeper (signs, 2, from 1410)	Flame-Keeper (Wolf-Change, 3); the oath-žynys (Book III ch. 17)	Galminas (5); Jadvyga (5, to 1399)
IV	Vytautas (bound 2)	Flame-Keeper; the Wolf-Change elders	None
V	Pilkoji and the surviving wolves	The beekeeper-žynys (d. 1448)	None

Left open: exactly one tier-4 practitioner lives between 1387 and 1410, the “Medvėgalis žynys” who dies at Grunwald, and it is not said whether he is the old žynys who conducts the oath of Book III ch. 17.

The roster by era

The counts of living practitioners show the collapse across a century.

Year	Tier 4	Tier 3	Tier 2
1345	6	60	600
1382	4	40	400
1387	1	25	300
1399	1	18	220
1411	0	14	160
1430	0	9	90
1450	0	5	50

The last žyniai

Kantaudas in Book II ch. 19 is “one of seventeen or eighteen remaining hands that can still speak with the earth”, and when he stands petrified Gedgaudas knows “now there will be fewer”. Galminas becomes a grove at Grunwald (1410). The last žynys of Book V is his pupil, the beekeeper (d. 1448), who tells the Flame-Keeper in Book V ch. 27: “There were eight when you came. Now with me there are six. After me five will remain. None will look for another.” Once he has given his words away, he says, “a žynys dies with his words; a singer can die without them.” See also Birutė, the Krivis, Eglė and Galminas.