“The Piper,” by Monika Janulevičiūtė, originally appeared on July 23, 2025, as part of the fifth instalment (“Exilic Politics”) of the “Letters” series on dabartis.com, accompanied by texts by Abdaljawad Omar, Carsten Juhl, and Peter Weiss, prefaced by Anacharisis Kloots. It is republished on Communis with the kind permission of Dabartis’ editorial collective and Monika Janulevičiūtė. The Spanish translation of this same text can be read here.
“Hannah Arendt writes that ‘Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; they both are articles of superstition, not of faith.’ In other words, only by dispelling the superstitions and myths of secularized political economy might we discover a faith that goes beyond it. And only through active struggle with our own complicity in its forms can we retain this faith that goes beyond its central superstition that the world offers little but scarcity and misery.”
— Monika Janulevičiūtė
This text is my attempt at understanding how vagrants—those without place—were incorporated and entrenched as characters in European folklore. Here I’m interested in how the inclusion of these figures of otherness in the European mental landscape served the project of establishing western man as the ‘universal’ norm and arbitrator of inclusion and exclusion. Western man, by contrast to this landscape of abjection, is no longer fallen, but is revalorized—he sees himself as one who defines. Through the figure of the other he solidifies control of the institutions of accumulation and profit, that parasitize on all that is outside: abundance, incommensurability and indefinability.
The City Digests Its Debts
First, we will set the pace with a story popularized and canonized by Brothers Grimm, named Children of Hamelin.
In June 1284 The Mayor of Hamelin held a meeting with the city elite. They were racking their brains to find an end for the onslaught of rodents in their warehouses and granaries. An oddly dressed stranger walks into the meeting, and proclaims themselves capable of handling the city’s rat problem. This vagrant agrees to the Mayor’s offer of 1000 guilders, takes out their flute, and while walking in the streets, calls every single rat and mouse out of their hiding. To the tune of the flute, the Piper leads the rodents out of the city and drowns them in the Weser River.
The Mayor and elders, holding true to their gluttonous appetite and their wanton greed, that brought about the ‘rat problem’ in the first place, withhold the Piper’s reward. The betrayed stranger leaves furious, in itself a foreboding that the most precious things will soon be taken away from the city of Hamelin.
The story’s brisk exposition of the era is surely a skewed glimpse into emerging capitalist urban life in the medieval period. The mythologist Norbertas Vėlius has observed that fairytales structurally simplify the historical events, legends, or regional epics they borrow from. Yet, the most archaic elements, the minor motifs and their surroundings, stay intact1.
In the period under question 950–1250 CE, Europe was exceptionally warm. This was due to a combination of factors, such as decreased volcanic activities, changes in oceanic patterns, and intensified solar activity. Throughout the Medieval Warm Period, the growing seasons were longer, the seed-to-yield ratio higher, the ice caps were shrinking on the northern seas and the higher-altitude mountain passages.
The strangers sudden appearance in Europe is more than a formulaic fairytale solution for a deadlock problem. Piper is a figure unbound by civic life and its loyalty to authority. Through the Piper, let us consider the rudiments of western man: the metabolism of his community, the logic of cities with their perceived sacredness and settledness; the emergence of what we know as value, labor and exchange.
The Piper gives testament to the collective psyche, rooted in the storytelling practices of the Hanseatic League’s merchant guilds—the looming political divisions, the angst, the accumulation of wealth, and the professionalization of particular crafts.
On the facade of a building in Hamelin, we read from the inscription, and there is a stained-glass work in the Church too, that on June 26th, our stranger, playing a flute, led 130 children through the East gate directly into a hill formation outside the city, called Bergkuppe. The children were never to be seen again. The origin of the city itself came to begin exactly with this event. The reasons of his appearance/return in these early tales is masked. The previously mentioned episode with the rodents gets added in versions only after 1559. The Piper was an evocative figure for a feudal landscape—scarred by dispossession and exploitation—that desired to impart evilness to those outside of legally and religiously sanctioned community.
***
I want to return to the point where we lose all traces of the children and Piper: the Bergkuppe. In low German and late Latin cuppa means round object, head or hill, and Persian kaupha means hill. Lithuanian, Prussian, and Latvian languages also use kopa, and variations of kauk—meaning hillock, head, lump. A mound, a heap, is a dwelling space and a category of chthonic Baltic spirits: the Kaukas. They are peculiarly dressed demonic creatures, handlers of provisions, such as yields of grain, hay, or sometimes linen. Kaukai (plr.) emerge from lumps of raw earth, and dedicate themselves to managing the earth’s mythic, abundant, property. This abundance, or skalsa in Lithuanian, is the essence of unbound wealth, a fraction of which is enough to satiate the whole lot.
Lithuanian-French linguist and semiotician A. J. Greimas turns toward Kaukai as “mediators, acting within the structural frames of mutual exchange between the earth and the people” 2. As untiring and inexhaustible as the Earth out of which the Kaukai have emerged, they dispense her abundant resources. The Kaukas are believed to show up and introduce themselves for a task that presents difficulties for the human. Upon arrival on the scene of hardship the Kaukas will test the moral integrity not only of the human who gets to interact with them, but of the whole household and even community. This chthonic creature would either effortlessly provide something incredibly scarce but necessary, or tease by bringing something completely unrelated and meager, like a handful of sawdust. If they feel mistrust or thievery, Kaukas will take anything (or everything) precious away.
The Kaukas operates in an economy of abundance, they provide what is unattended, forgotten, and overlooked—their provisions have nothing to do with the concept of private property and therefore theft. As offsprings and messengers of the underworld, they represent sacral sovereignty and a deep sense of social justice. If the moral test is passed, abundance will be delivered. On the other hand, Kaukas trade against the interests of the greedy. For example, they bring what appears as rolls of fine wool broadcloth, but a moment after the deal, the desired object will transform into a hoard of toads and leap away. They are equipped with some sort of what Roman Jakobson describes as “all-seeing eye’s embrace of the world”3, and refuse to corroborate and become absorbed into the logic of accumulation and control. Kaukai expose the divisions that people themselves declare, present, and enforce as natural.
I feel that the Piper and Kaukas pair up, and mirror the unaccountable and unaccounted constancy of the earth’s dynamic force. They have agency and power to threaten greed, adjust, and break the blind accumulation of wealth. They are completely alien to the peculiarities of the group, the elite, the city, and enact solutions that are non-normalizing and subversive. For Kaukas and Piper their environment and reality is finite but sufficient. This finitude is neither modern nor divine, but cyclical, containing fugitivity and fecundity. Everything unattended blooms and decays in defiance of value and entropy; obstinately uncountable, unproductive and immobile to the whims of a man.
Hannah Arendt writes that “Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; they both are articles of superstition, not of faith.” In other words, only by dispelling the superstitions and myths of secularized political economy might we discover a faith that goes beyond it. And only through active struggle with our own complicity in its forms can we retain this faith that goes beyond its central superstition that the world offers little but scarcity and misery4.
Fugitivity
To live fugitively is to reject the bio-economic optics of scarcity: the lie that survival requires complicity5. The Piper and the Kaukas remind us that the earth is abundant—but only if we refuse to hoard, to enclose, and to settle. The Piper operates outside the sanctioned professionalism of the state, embodies what Sylvia Wynter might call the ceremony found: the moment when the constructed order of Man is exposed as arbitrary.5 The Piper’s disappearance of the children mirrors the Kaukas’ withdrawing of hoarded wealth when mistrusted. Both acts reveal the violence of settlement: the demand that everything—land, labor, life—be rendered legible, taxable, and controllable. To seek solutions beyond these confines is not an admission of failure, but an acknowledgment that true resolution often lies in being what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describes as “separate from settling.”
Notes
- See Norbertas Vėlius, Chtoniškoji lietuvių mitologija, Aitvarai ir Kaukai, Echoes, 2011, p. 178.
- A. J. Greimas, Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology, trans. Milda Newman, Indiana University Press, Chicago, 1992, p. 21.
- Roman Jakobson, Roman Jakobson Selected Writings. Volume VII: Contributions to comparative mythology. Studies in Linguistics and Philology, 1972-82, Mouton Publishers Berlin / New York / Amsterdam, 1985, p. 25.
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Random House, London and New York, 2017 p. X.
- See, on fugitivity, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson, 2013.
- Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Eds.), Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2015, pp.184-252.
Featured image: Monika Janulevičiūtė. Courtesy of Jaunojo Dizaneiro Prizas.
