The concept of the Life after Death
It is the horizon of death that makes the cuts the figures of the most important gods in Lithuania in the myth of Sovijus (Sovijus with his veneration of the dead foresters veneration of the main gods of the Lithuanian tradition). On the background of death the cult is being codified. It seems that death was not seen as the catastrophic end of life, it most probably was a natural exhaustion of life and its continuation in another form. As it is possible to decide in the case of the warriors and the nobility the journey of the dead would start from the incineration fire, yet some believes still observed till not long ago, prove that between the death and the moment of the other world there appears a certain gap in time which makes the dead linger in this world. It was believed, that Dievas allows the human beings to live a certain score of years and if the person cannot live fully the whole stint, e.g. perishes, commits suicide, dies a premature death he has to live on this earth till the designated date if death entering the shapes of plants, most often the trees, into the animals, or birds. There was also a believe that the dead can leave this earth only once per year on the All souls Easter, i.e. Shrove Thursday or the other version says that this was All souls day and before this date the dead has to linger on earth. Therefore there is a certain part of people who live on earth. Because of the influence of the Christianity these souls became identified with the repenting sinners the purgatory, thus purgatory, in practice was gravitated to the Earth. Certainly, to take faith in these images was assisted by archaic metempsychosis system, whose relics in the Lithuanian vision of the after life are plenty. Let us say that the dead in the hell are turned in to working horses and oxen, they carrier heavy burdens, another instances the soul of the dead make appearance as a flock of sheep. In the paradise the dead can be turned in to birds.
The central image of after world is the mountain, on top of which is inhabited by the God or Perkūnas. Behind it or else from the top of it there starts the residence of the dead, it is light and warm, with beautiful garden, with a lot of singing birds. Sometimes it is conceived that the dead has to climb the hill after death with the help of personal or animals_ nails. At the bottom of the hill there lives a serpent here a devil’s space stretches out and it seems that the hell is right under the mountain, i.e. under the heavenly residence of the dead. It seems that the dead live in the parts where the birds fly to stay over for the winter and the birds know their rout e by Milky Way. Possibly the Milky Way was seen as the mythical mountain cosmic or as its slope, which had to be conquered by the humans, and the birds could fly to it.