Saulė (Latvian Saule) is the Baltic sun and a goddess, not a metaphor: in the Lithuanian and Latvian dainos she is a mother with daughters (Saulės dukros, Saules meitas) who bathes, weeps, warms the orphan and rides across the sky. She is married to Mėnuo (Mēness, the moon) in the celestial-wedding cycle, and when he betrays her with the morning star Perkūnas cuts him - the waning moon is the wound. The material is overwhelmingly the daina corpus plus the 16th-17th century reports; no Baltic sun temple survives, and her cult image later merged with the Virgin Mary in Lithuanian folk Catholicism.
Modern Practice
Saulė is greeted at sunrise and thanked at harvest: bread, honey, beer and amber, with the sun faced and named as mother. The practice is daily and domestic - the first light on the threshold, the last of the harvest set aside - and it is the warmest and least formal of the Baltic cults.