Adgilis Deda

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The track up from the valley floor is steep, and a good part of a day’s walking in the eastern Georgian highlands is spent looking at one’s own feet. Where the path bends past a spring — the water coming cold out of the rock a little above the trail, off to one side of the way up — a traveler stops. Before he drinks, or fills what he carries, or goes on, he greets the place. A little of what is in his flask tipped onto the stone, a coin set on the ledge, a few words said half under the breath: not to a saint, not to the great cross on its shoulder of mountain a valley away, but to the mother of this exact ground. Every spring has one. So does every standing rock, every wayside tree, every fork of two paths, every threshold of a house. She is Adgilis Deda, the mother of the place, and the place she keeps is the one under his feet.

The name, and the ground it reaches us on

Adgilis Deda (ადგილის დედა) is not a title of majesty. It is two plain Georgian words — adgili, “place” or “locality,” and deda, “mother” — set side by side, so that the name says only what she is: the mother of the locality, the place-mother. The Latin term that fits her most closely is the old Roman one, genius loci, the guardian presence of a particular spot; and like the genius loci she is not one goddess with one great sanctuary but a principle repeated without limit, a distinct mother for each distinct place. The tradition of the northeastern mountains holds it plainly: every place — mountain, hill, ravine, slope, spring, settlement — has its own mother, and every village of the highlands kept its own Adgilis Deda. She is best attested among the Khevsurs, the mountaineers of the upper Argun and Aragvi basins, and among their neighbors in Pshavi and Tusheti, the country the old sources call Pkhovi.

How she reaches the modern record has to be marked at the outset, because it sets the depth in time everything else can claim. The classical notices for pre-Christian Iberia and Colchis — Strabo above all — do not name her, and neither does any ancient text. Her portrait is a reconstruction, assembled in the twentieth century from the living highland religion that was still generating oaths and offerings and festivals when the folklorists climbed the valleys to record it: the pantheon studies of Vera Bardavelidze, the shrine-mythology of Zurab Kiknadze, the structural analysis Georges Charachidze published in Paris in 1968, and, in English, the anthology Kevin Tuite gathered as Violet on the Mountain. That is the same three-register path by which the whole of this shrine world reaches us, but weighted here toward its humblest end. The remote high god Ghmerti and his court of mediating shrine-deities have their reconstruction; the great named crosses of the mountains have theirs; the golden huntress of the western cliffs has hers. Adgilis Deda has almost none of the apparatus that lets the others be studied. She has no single great precinct, no festival calendar of her own, no cycle of deeds. What she has is ubiquity, and ubiquity leaves a faint documentary trace — a mother at every spring is hard to write a chapter about. So the record of her is thin in proportion to how thick she was on the ground, and how far back she reaches is exactly the kind of question that cannot be answered from a folklore collected in the last century. Whether her image preserves an archaic Caucasian stratum or is instead a later growth is genuinely debated, and it is a debate the reception below returns to at its proper place.

The mother of every place

The theology of Adgilis Deda is a theology of localized presence, and it rests on a single conviction: that no place is un-owned. The highland world is a country that is nothing but places, stacked steeply on one another — a country of gorges and passes and springs and slopes where a person is always in some particular spot and never simply in the open. Into that landscape the tradition sets a mother for each named thing. She is the presence that holds the ground, and because the ground is everywhere, so is she — not one power spread thin across the mountains but a numberless multitude of powers, each entire, each bound to its own small compass. The spring above the path has its mother; so does the rock, the tree, the crossing, the house. Her holy points are not the great stone precincts on the heights but the small places a person actually passes and touches on an ordinary day.

Her offices are the offices of ordinary safety and increase. She patronizes the location, and with the location the stranger who travels through it: the record makes the traveler her particular charge, the man on a hard road in hard country who commends himself to the mother of the ground he crosses and asks safe passage over it. And she is a giver of fertility — to people and to herds alike, the increase of a household in children and in the animals it lives by. In the ethnographic record she stands as a protector of women, of children, and of the livestock a family’s survival turns on. This joins her, in the fertility-and-livestock domain, to other powers of the Georgian pantheon — the folklore also knows Barbale, a distinct goddess of the sun, of cattle and poultry, of women’s fecundity and of healing, whose reach overlaps hers without being the same — but Adgilis Deda’s register is narrower and closer to home. She is the fertility not of the world but of this hearth, the safety not of the road but of this crossing.

Her sacred points are small and made of what is already there. The record describes them as crossroads, sacred groves, single trees, standing rocks, springs, and simple structures of unworked stone — and, alongside the shrines the highlanders call salotsavi and the icon-crosses they call khati and jvari, the wishing-trees hung with strips of cloth that mark a place as holy. At such points a passer-by left small offerings: a little food, a splash of wine, a coin set on the stone. Nothing about the observance was grand, and that was the point of it. Where a great cross demanded a festival, an animal, a priest, and a gathered commune, the mother of the place asked only what a single traveler carried and could spare, given in passing, on the way to somewhere else.

Set against the wider order of the highland religion, she is the intimate and low-lying counterpart to the mediating shrine-deities. That order runs from the remote Morige Ghmerti in the ninth sky, down through the intermediary the folklorists call Kviria, to the khvtishvili, the “children of god,” who hold whole districts and clans from their precincts on the mountain shoulders — the graded system of crosses and icons treated in full under jvari-khati. Adgilis Deda sits beneath all of it, at the bottom and the nearest. Where the great khvtishvili hold a district, she holds a single spring; where they hold a clan, she holds a single hearth. The divinity a highlander meets at the summer festival of a great cross is not the one he greets, half under the breath, at the water on the way up. The theology has room for both, and needs both: the far power that orders the whole, and the near mother who keeps the exact ground.

Silver, not gold

One detail in the record does a great deal of quiet work. Adgilis Deda is imagined as a beautiful woman adorned with silver — silver jewelry, the pale metal, the ornament of the settled and the domestic. It is a small note, and it sorts her cleanly from the other beautiful women of this sacred world. The wild goddesses are creatures of gold: Dali, the radiant huntress of the Svan cliffs, whose hair is gold or gold-colored and whose favor is a lover’s dangerous bond, and Samdzimari of the Khakhmati shrine, the bride won out of the demon country, both belong to the register of the untamed — the high crags, the hunt, the perilous beauty that can unmake a man. Adgilis Deda’s silver marks the opposite register. She is the mother of the settled place, of the threshold and the herd and the spring by the path; her domain is not the wild above the last village but the inhabited ground a family walks every day, and her beauty is not the terrible kind. Gold for the wilderness and its perilous mistresses; silver for the mother of the tended place. The metal is the whole distinction in a single word.

That distinction runs down through everything she is. The wild goddesses grant and withhold, seduce and destroy, and a man deals with them at his peril; the place-mother asks a coin and a word and gives safe passage and increase. Where Dali’s covenant is a knife’s edge, Adgilis Deda’s is the easiest bargain in the highlands — the small courtesy a traveler pays to the ground, and the ordinary protection the ground returns. She is the least dramatic of the powers, and, precisely for that, among the most constant. A goddess who needs no festival, no precinct, and no priest is a goddess who is hard to lose. She survives wherever there is a spring and someone to greet it.

The Mother of God of the place

Adgilis Deda is not a figure of the past tense. She belongs to living Georgian Orthodox communities of the highlands and the lowlands, and her afterlife is bound up with the church rather than set against it. The turn that shaped that afterlife came in the fourth century. The kingdom of Kartli — the Caucasian Iberia of the eastern Georgian plain, which shares nothing with the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula but a Greek geographer’s name — adopted Christianity as its state religion about 337, under King Mirian III and through the preaching of the Cappadocian missionary Nino, whose mission the tradition remembers carrying up into the highlands of Pkhovi themselves. In the mountains the new faith did not replace what it found so much as settle over it: the jvari-khati shrine religion, the crosses and icons and their elders, ran on alongside the church and syncretized with it, and the old powers took Christian names without dissolving.

Adgilis Deda’s convergence was with the greatest of those names. Her cult came to be closely associated with the veneration of the Mother of God — the Virgin Mary, whom Georgian calls Ghvtismshobeli (ღვთისმშობელი), “God-bearer,” the exact Georgian rendering of the Greek Theotokos. That Greek title carries its own precise history: it was fixed for Mary at the Council of Ephesus in 431, against Nestorius of Constantinople, who had urged the narrower Christotokos, “bearer of Christ,” and lost — the council affirming that the one born of Mary was, in a single person, both fully divine and fully human. What the eastern-Georgian highlands did with that dogmatic word was to lower it onto the ground. The place-mother became Adgilis Ghvtismshobeli, “the Mother of God of the Place,” and in that compound the two figures meet: the theological Mother of God, and the local mother of the exact spot. Together, Adgilis Deda and Ghvtismshobeli are reckoned across Georgia as patrons of the hearth and the family, sharing common features of observance — the near, domestic, protecting mother, under whichever of her names a household calls her.

How to read that convergence is genuinely debated, and the readings can be set out without any of them being pronounced correct. One takes Adgilis Deda as a personal tutelary divinity in her own right, older than the identification, a real power of place who was only later folded toward Mary as the church’s vocabulary spread up the valleys. A second sees her, at bottom, as localized Marian devotion — the Mother of God herself settled onto each particular place, the universal Virgin made local at every spring, so that the “place-mother” was Christian from the start rather than a survivor absorbed. A third rereads her as an archaic place-goddess whom the church renamed, a deep native stratum that kept its function and its ground while exchanging its name for a saint’s. This third reading is the classic comparative-religion problem in miniature — whether a persisting figure under a shifted name marks an ancient layer preserved or a later growth read back into antiquity — and it is the same fault line, on a smaller scale, as the archaism-versus-innovation debate carried in full at Ghmerti. It is not settled here, and it is not re-argued here. The three readings are what the record supports; which is right depends on how much weight a twentieth-century folklore can bear about a first-millennium past, and that weight is exactly what scholars disagree about.

The scholarship that carries her is the ethnographic one. Bardavelidze and the folklore collectors reconstructed the pantheon she belongs to; Charachidze gave the pre-Christian system its structural analysis; Kiknadze set the shrine-mythology in order; and Tuite, in Violet on the Mountain and his Caucasus essays, put her before English readers. What that literature makes of her, soberly and at the public-record distance, is that she is among the most durable of all the highland powers — and durable for the humblest of reasons. She needed no great shrine to survive, because she never had one. A power lodged in every spring and every threshold cannot be pulled down the way an idol on a citadel can, or forgotten the way a festival can lapse. She is kept wherever the places are kept, by the families who still keep them. The traveler on the steep track is still there, and so is the spring above the path; and the greeting he leaves on the stone, in the Pshav and Khevsur highlands where the shrine religion runs on beside the church, goes to the mother of the exact ground under his feet, by whatever name he gives her.

Sources and scholarship

The living highland tradition and the Georgian ethnographers who recorded it are the authority for Adgilis Deda, since no ancient text names her. The English-language source is Kevin Tuite, Violet on the Mountain: An Anthology of Georgian Folk Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), on which the cross-checking overviews of her rest; the foundational structural study of the pre-Christian eastern-Georgian religious system is Georges Charachidze, Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne: analyse structurale d’une civilisation (Maspéro, Paris, 1968), and the fuller pantheon and shrine-mythology are the work of Vera Bardavelidze and of Zurab Kiknadze.

The place-mother’s core traits — the meaning of the name, her standing as genius loci, her association with the Khevsurs, the silver-adorned lady, her patronage of the location and of travelers, her gift of fertility to people and livestock, and her later convergence with the Virgin Mary as Adgilis Ghvtismshobeli — are set out, with Tuite as the underlying source, in the cross-checked overview Adgilis Deda and in the wider survey of Georgian mythology, which also records the distinct fertility-and-solar goddess Barbale. For the small local shrines — the crossroads, groves, springs, trees, and simple stone structures, and the offerings of food, wine, and coins left at them — and for the jvari, khati, and salotsavi sanctuaries and the khevisberi who serve them within the living syncretic religion of the Khevsurs, see the account of Khevsureti. The Christian title she was drawn toward has its own documented history: Ghvtismshobeli renders the Greek Theotokos, “God-bearer,” decreed for Mary at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The conversion of Kartli around 337, under Mirian III and the missionary Nino, is the historical turn under which her cult and the Mother of God’s grew together, and the fuller theological and archaeological account of that conversion belongs elsewhere; here it is enough to mark that the place-mother came through it not abolished but renamed, and that she is honored still.

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