Armazi

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On the mountain above Mtskheta, where the Aragvi comes down out of the highlands to meet the wide Mtkvari, the king of the gods stood in bronze. The oldest Georgian account of him, the Life of Nino, sets down what the eye met on the acropolis: a standing man cast in metal, over his body a golden suit of chain armor, on his head a strong helmet, and for eyes two green stones, emerald and beryl, set to catch the light. In one hand he held a sabre that glittered like lightning, and the tradition adds that it turned in his hands, as if the weapon were forever being drawn. This was Armazi, the chief idol of the pantheon of Kartli, worshiped by the royal house itself, the armored sovereign of the whole eastern-Georgian sky. The same tradition that describes him with such care also tells how he ended: at a great summer feast held in his honor, while a woman newly come to the city knelt and prayed, a storm broke over the acropolis — hail like stones, thunder, a tearing wind — and the bronze man was beaten to pieces where he stood, and cast down among the rocks.

The name and how it reaches the record

Armazi (Georgian არმაზი) comes to us almost entirely through writing, and through Christian writing at that. He is named as the supreme deity and head-idol of pre-Christian Kartli in the medieval Georgian chronicles gathered under the title Kartlis Tskhovreba, the “Life of Kartli,” whose earliest surviving manuscripts date to the eleventh century, and in the hagiographic Life of Nino, which reached its extant form roughly in the ninth or tenth century. A third text, the Conversion of Kartli (Moktsevai Kartlisai), preserves a still stranger memory of him. Kartli was the kingdom of the eastern Georgian plain, capital at Mtskheta, that the classical geographers — Strabo above all — called Iberia. It is worth pausing on that name, because it has misled readers for centuries: this Caucasian Iberia, the land of the Kartvelians between the Black and Caspian seas, has nothing to do with the Iberia of Spain and the peninsular Iberians. The two share only a Greek exonym, an accident of the same word being reached for twice at opposite ends of the ancient world. Armazi belongs wholly to the eastern one, to the world of the Caucasian Iberians and their god of the throne.

The chronicles give the god a dynastic pedigree. They credit Pharnavaz I, remembered as the first king of Kartli — his reign traditionally placed around 302 to 237 BCE — with raising the idol on the mountain above his new capital and building the like-named fortress-acropolis Armaztsikhe, “the citadel of Armazi,” beneath it. And they derive the god’s very name from the king: Armazi from Pharnavaz, the god called after the sovereign who set him up. Modern scholarship reads this backward. A god does not take his name from a mortal king; more often the king’s memory gathers to itself an origin-story for a cult already ancient when he was born. The chronicles’ etymology is folk-etymology, a genealogy composed to bind the founding god to the founding dynasty. Which leaves the real question open, and here the record splits.

One derivation is Iranian. The name Armazi would appear to connect to Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Zoroastrianism — Middle Persian Ohrmazd, and in the Armenian form, closely comparable, Aramazd. The match is more than phonetic. There is genuine archaeological evidence for the penetration of Zoroastrian religion into ancient Georgia, fire-cult installations among them, and the Iberian kingdom sat for centuries within the political and religious gravity of the Iranian world; a supreme Iranian lord of wisdom and order, reworked into a Kartvelian warrior-sovereign, is exactly the kind of import that world produced. The Encyclopaedia Iranica treats Armazi under this heading, as a Georgian reflex of Ohrmazd on the royal acropolis. The other derivation, advanced by the Georgian historian Giorgi Melikishvili, looks not south to Persia but west into Anatolia. Melikishvili proposed that Armazi is a local variant of Arma, the moon-god of Hittite and Luwian tradition — a deity of the lunar cycle and of oaths, whose name sits close to Armazi’s own. Donald Rayfield has pressed a version of this Anatolian reading, connecting the Iberians to the Mushki and Meshki peoples and their gods, and setting the moon-god Arma behind the idol that the missionaries threw down. Many current scholars decline to choose. They read Armazi as a syncretic figure, an Iranian Ahura-Mazda layer and an Anatolian lunar Arma layer fused in a single crowned god — the reading the Forbes Georgia essay “The Three Faces of Armazi” takes as its title. The living tradition, characteristically, seems to have held more than one face at once, and the modern historian who reconstructs it — Rayfield, or Stephen H. Rapp Jr., who has read the Georgian sources against their Iranian background — is reassembling a god already composite when the chronicles found him.

The armored king of the gods

Within the sacred world of pre-Christian Kartli, Armazi is the god of sovereignty. He is not a spirit of the wild woods like Dali on her high cliffs or Ochopintre among the wild herds, and not a highland demon-slaying khati like Kopala with his mace; he is not even the remote sky-father Ghmerti, enthroned above the whole order of powers and rarely approached. Armazi is the state-god, the deity of the throne and the acropolis, bound to the royal city of Mtskheta and worshiped by the king in person. His image says as much. The Life of Nino’s bronze man is a warrior first: the golden chain armor, the strong helmet, the drawn sabre flashing and turning — this is not a god of harvest or hearth but of war and rule, the divine counterpart of the armored king who set him up. The jeweled eyes, emerald and beryl, give the metal a watching life; the description reads less like a statue than like a sentinel over the kingdom.

Two lesser idols stood with him, and the chronicles are careful to distinguish them. On the right of Armazi stood Gatsi, an image with a human face made of gold; on the left stood Gaim, sometimes given simply as Ga, an image of silver. Where the great idol is credited to Pharnavaz, these two are attributed to the earlier, half-legendary ruler Azon — Azoy in some manuscripts — who is said to have brought them from his original homeland, Arian-Kartli, out of the Iranian east. The tradition assigns to Gatsi and Gaim a governance over hidden things, “all of mysteries,” and some scholars have wondered whether an Anatolian pair such as Attis and Cybele stands somewhere behind them, though, as the record itself admits, contemporary evidence for these lesser cults is thin to the point of silence. What matters for Armazi is the shape of the whole: a supreme armored sovereign flanked by a gold god and a silver god — a triad on the acropolis, with the warrior-king in the center.

It is that silver companion, and the metal-and-moon symbolism around the whole group, that gives the lunar reading its foothold. If Melikishvili is right and Armazi carries the Anatolian moon-god Arma inside him, then the tradition-internal accounts of his cult take on a further color. The Georgian folklorists describe his great festival falling at the height of summer, the king and the court in attendance, processions climbing to the acropolis, and animal sacrifice — bulls above all, the horned beast that in more than one Near Eastern imagination answers to the horned moon. These things are set down here at the record’s distance, as the chronicles and the folklorists preserve them, not as any living rite to be repeated; the operative detail of how the offering was made has not come down, and would not belong here if it had. What has come down is the meaning: a god of sovereignty who was also, in the reading many Georgian scholars favor, a god of the moon, so that the crown he wears is a warrior’s helmet and a lunar disk at once.

The Conversion of Kartli preserves the most vivid tradition-internal glimpse of what such a god was thought to do. It stages Armazi in open cosmic conflict — strife between Armazi and “the god of the Chaldeans, Itrushana” — and it makes Armaz wield the sea itself as his weapon against his rival. Whatever lost myth lies behind that line, it frames the god exactly as his image does: a storm-and-war sovereign contending with other divine powers on a cosmic scale, master enough of the elements to lift the sea and throw it. It is a striking thing to find in a Christian chronicle, this flash of the old god at full stature, remembered by the very tradition that would record his fall.

The shattering, and what survived it

Armazi’s afterlife in the record is defined by his destruction, and the destruction is the founding scene of Georgian Christianity’s memory of itself. The hagiographic tradition tells that Nino — the woman, remembered as an apostle, who evangelized the Georgians in the early fourth century — came to Mtskheta and was present at the great dedication-feast of the idol, held at the height of summer with the whole city and the king assembled. As she prayed, the sky turned against the acropolis. The Life of Nino describes it without restraint: hail fell in stones “the size of two hands,” hard and piercing, on the house of the idols and broke them to pieces; a terrible wind tore down the walls and cast the fragments among the rocks. Armazi was pulverized where he stood, and Gatsi and Gaim with him — the gold god and the silver god shattered beside the bronze king. The tradition sets this at the reign of Mirian III, the king who would make Christianity the religion of Kartli, and dates the conversion of the kingdom to around 337 CE (the sources vary, and some place the official turn a decade earlier, near 326).

This scene has to be read for what it is: hagiography, and theology, not a datable meteorological event. It is the Christian tradition’s account of its own beginning, and its logic is the logic of a founding miracle — the storm that answers the saint’s prayer, the idols that cannot stand before the true God. To render it soberly is not to endorse its verdict on the old gods, nor to dismiss the god it throws down. Armazi within his own world really was the armored sovereign of the acropolis; the chronicle that records his shattering is telling us how the memory of that world was reorganized around a new center, not delivering a weather report. The Georgians would become, and remain, an Orthodox Christian people from the fourth century onward — and it is precisely their Christian writers who preserved, in order to overcome it, the fullest portrait of the god they had left.

Yet the god did not simply vanish, and the most interesting part of his reception is the claim that he did not. Ivane Javakhishvili, the founder of modern Georgian historiography, argued that a pre-Christian Georgian moon-cult — the very lunar layer some scholars find in Armazi — fused after the conversion with the Christian cult of Saint George, and specifically with the intensely popular highland figure of Tetri Giorgi, “White George,” whose name and whiteness carry the moon in them. On this reading the sovereignty of the old sky-and-moon warrior did not die on the acropolis; it changed clothes. It slipped into the living folk Christianity of the Georgian mountains, where an ancient armored power went on being venerated under a saint’s name, in the shrine-religion of a people who were Orthodox and yet kept deep pre-Christian layers into the modern era. This is a contested thesis, not a settled fact — it reconstructs the old god from later folklore, and reasonable scholars doubt how much of Armazi genuinely rides inside Tetri Giorgi. But it is the reason the god is more than a museum piece: if Javakhishvili is right, the warrior-moon of Mtskheta is still, in a manner, abroad in the Georgian highlands.

He also survived in stone and in a name. The acropolis where he stood is a real place with a real afterlife — Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, on Mount Bagineti at the confluence of the Mtkvari and the Aragvi, a few kilometers southwest of Mtskheta, now an excavated archaeological reserve. The spade has recovered the setting of his cult: beneath the later Roman-era and medieval strata lie the pre-Christian layers, a great columned hall and a temple with an apse of roughly the fourth to first centuries BCE, the architecture of a state sanctuary — the physical frame the chronicles’ god once filled. The site still bears his name to this day, and its own long history belongs to its own account. What belongs to the god is the double way he now returns: through the Chronicles and the Lives read critically, against their Iranian and Anatolian backgrounds, by historians such as Rayfield and Rapp; and through the earth of the acropolis itself, where the Zoroastrian-tinged, moon-shadowed world of Armazi’s Iberia comes up again in fragments. The bronze man was broken, the tradition insists, in a single summer storm. The recovery of him has taken rather longer, and it is not the storm’s work but the historian’s and the archaeologist’s.

The archaeological site of Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, the citadel above Mtskheta that carried the god’s name and framed his cult. Alexxx1979, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mount Bagineti, at the meeting of the Mtkvari and the Aragvi, where the chronicles set the idol of Armazi on the acropolis above the royal city. Kober, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The Georgian chronicles, then, hand down a paradox they did not intend. They set out to record the fall of a false idol and instead preserved, in loving and exact detail, one of the fullest portraits of a pre-Christian sovereign god anywhere in the Caucasus — the bronze king in golden mail, the turning sabre, the jeweled eyes, the gold and silver gods at his shoulders, the summer feast, the sea lifted as a weapon against a rival divinity. The Christian storm was meant to end him. What the record actually shows is a god too large to be entirely thrown down: contested at his origin between Persia and Anatolia, suspected of surviving under a saint’s white name in the mountains, and dug back into daylight, stone by stone, on the mountain that still answers to Armazi. For a full account of the god as the chronicles name him, the Wikipedia entry Armazi (god) gathers the textual and scholarly threads; the acropolis itself is treated under Armaztsikhe-Bagineti.

→ Related: Ghmerti · Dali · Ochopintre · Kopala · Armaztsikhe Bagineti · Vani Sanctuary · The Lashari Shrine · Khakhmati · The Colchians · The Iberians Caucasus · The Svans