Žemyna (Latvian Zemes māte) is the Baltic earth goddess, the fertile earth itself, who nourishes every living thing and receives the dead back; the early modern reports of Baltic religion describe bread and beer offered to the earth, and the dainos call her mother. Her cult was among the most persistent after Christianisation and merged with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and she is the female counterpart of Žemėpatis, the earth-lord of the old sources. She is earth rather than a queen of the earth: the goddess and the ground are one thing, and that is why the offering goes into the ground.
Modern Practice
Žemyna is honoured at the harvest and at the sowing: bread, beer, honey and the first fruits given back to the ground, salt and grain at the field's edge, and no taking without a return. The practice is the oldest agriculture-as-religion in the Baltic record, and it survives in ordinary gestures - the first slice of bread, the last sheaf.