Dali

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Near the top of the cliff the rock gave way. The hunter Betkil, who had climbed all morning after a white chamois that stayed always a little ahead of him, stood suddenly on nothing: the ground crumbled from beneath him, and he was left hanging against the face of the mountain by one hand and one foot, unable to climb and unable to let go. In the house far below, the token a goddess had given him — a small bright thing he was sworn to keep hidden — had already been taken from its place by a mortal woman. Above him the ledge was empty. The chamois that had drawn him up was gone, and with it the golden-haired mistress of the game, who had been his lover and his luck and was now neither. He hangs there while the day passes. In the round-dance songs the Svans still sing, he calls out to his mother, his sister, his wife, and when at the end no one has come, he jumps.

The goddess who leaves Betkil on the cliff is Dali, and the fall is not cruelty but accounting. He had been given the game itself — success in the hunt that never failed — on terms he agreed to and then broke. To understand why the ground opens under a man’s feet, one has to climb back down from the summit into the world that made the hunt a covenant: a world in which the wild is owned, the ibex on the high crags belong to someone, and that someone is a young woman of unbearable beauty who lives in a cavern above the treeline and decides, each day, who eats.

The name, and how she reaches us

Dali (Georgian დალი; in Svan Dæl, sometimes rendered Daal) belongs above all to the Svans, the highland people of the upper Enguri and Tskhenistsqali gorges in the northwest of Georgia, whose tower-villages stand under some of the highest peaks of the Caucasus. She is the divine mistress of the hoofed wild beasts of those mountains — ibex, aurochs, wild sheep, deer, the chamois of the cliffs — and she reaches the modern record almost entirely through their oral tradition: hunting-songs, ballads, and hearth-tales, most of them collected only in the twentieth century. Cognate figures are known across western Georgia. The Mingrelians of the lowlands recognized an equivalent lady of the game called Tkashi-Mapa, “queen of the forest,” and neighboring groups had their own versions, so that Dali is less a single Svan invention than the sharpest surviving face of a wider South-Caucasian idea: that the wild has an owner.

She is, among the Georgian folk powers, unusually free of the church. Much of the surviving highland pantheon is thickly Christianized, its old gods folded into saints and its shrines dated by the Orthodox calendar; Dali is not. The folklorists treat her as a pre-Christian survival, a figure whose logic runs on the hunt rather than on the liturgy, and who was pushed toward the margins precisely because she would not convert. What we know of her is therefore a reconstruction, assembled from fragments. The great Georgian ethnographers built it: Vera Bardavelidze, whose Svaneti fieldwork in the 1930s documented the ritual of the hunt down to the lamsir, the ceremonial bread offered before setting out; Elene Virsaladze, who recorded and studied the hunting poetry across the middle decades of the century; the folklorist Mikheil Chikovani; and later the comparative work of the linguistic anthropologist Kevin Tuite. The surviving texts are only a small remainder of what once circulated in Svaneti, and they are strongly region-variable — the details shift from valley to valley, so that almost nothing about Dali can be stated without the qualification that somewhere it was told otherwise.

Even her name is unsettled. Its etymology has no agreed source. Tuite, in his study The Meaning of Dæl, proposed that it may be linked to the Northeast-Caucasian (Nakh) words for “god” — Chechen dēla, Ingush dǣlə, Bats dalě — words that can name a pre-Islamic deity in general; on this reading “Dali” would be a feminine reflex of a very old Caucasian word for divinity, an original Svan name overwritten by a borrowed term for godhood. This is a reconstruction, offered as a hypothesis rather than a documented derivation, and it belongs among the contested things about her — as does an older guess that ties her to the Georgian dila, “morning,” and so to the dawn. What is not contested is that by the time the folklorists arrived, the Svans were not speculating about her name. They were telling what she did.

Mount Ushba, the double-peaked mountain of Svaneti; in some tellings Dali’s cavern lies here, and the ice-clad south face is called Dalis panjara, ‘the Window of Dali.’ Vadim Tolbatov (Odessicus), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The owner of the wild

Within the Svan sacred world Dali is the radiant divine owner and shepherd of the game. The ibex and aurochs of the high cliffs are her herds, and she watches over them by day as a human herder watches sheep — driving them, protecting them, counting them as her own. This is the theology beneath the whole hunt: the animals a man kills are not ownerless things taken from an indifferent forest but livestock belonging to a goddess, released to him or withheld at her pleasure. She grants the hunt or she refuses it. The man who returns heavy-laden has been favored; the man who comes home empty has not. In this she stands beside the other powers of the wild in the Georgian highlands — Ochopintre, the lord of the forest herds, works the same ground — but Dali is the one who is also a lover, and whose favor is a bond.

She is imagined as a young woman of overpowering beauty, most often nude, sometimes wearing gold. Her hair is gold-colored or literally of gold, long and shining like the sun; her skin is so white that it is said to be radiant, luminous enough that merely to speak with her could drive a man to madness. The beauty is not soft. It is described as both irresistible and terrible, the two halves inseparable — the same face that grants the game can unmake the mind of the man who sees it. She dwells far from human settlement, in a cavern high in the cliffs above the pastures; in some traditions her home is set on Ushba, the great double-peaked mountain of Svaneti, whose ice-covered south face carries her name, Dalis panjara, “the Window of Dali.” Where exactly her cavern lies is one of the region-variable things: the valleys did not agree, and did not need to. What mattered was that it was up — higher than the herds, higher than the last shrine, in the country that belongs to no one but her.

To hunt in that country is to enter an economy of purity. A man who would take Dali’s animals had to come to the mountain clean. The observances the folklorists recorded — described here at the ethnographer’s distance, as public record rather than as any instruction — required a hunter to keep himself apart from what would pollute him: contact with women and with blood, with the dead, with foul language, with adultery. He was not to kill more than he could carry home, one beast to a man being the remembered rule, so that the taking never became slaughter. And above all he was not to fire on the specially-marked animal that moved among the herds, because that animal was the goddess herself, walking her flocks in the shape of a beast. To shoot her was the unforgivable thing. The restraint was total and it was theological: the wild was abundant because it was owned and rationed, and a man lived inside the ownership, permitted to take but never to seize.

The covenant

The bond at the center of the tradition is more intimate than favor. Dali takes a chosen hunter as her lover, and to her lover she gives the hunt without fail — an unfailing run of success for as long as the bond holds. In return she binds him. She gives him a token of the tie — beads, a piece of jewelry, in some tellings a small object such as a pair of scissors — which he must keep hidden, and she requires that for the duration he touch no mortal woman, not even his own wife. The Svan word for the condition of a man so claimed was said to be dalelukdune, “Dali-possessed”: a state of fortune and of danger at once, since everything he now had came from the goddess and would leave with her.

The covenant is the reason the hunt is a moral drama rather than a mere skill. A man inside it lives by promise and prohibition, and the abundance he enjoys is conditional on his keeping faith. Break the secrecy, let the token be seen or taken, go to a mortal woman while the bond holds — and the same goddess who fed him becomes the one who destroys him. This is a sophisticated theology of restraint dressed as a love story: the wild is gifted, and the gift is revocable, and the price of greed or faithlessness is not a bad season but death. It is worth marking how far this is from a simple fertility cult. Dali guarantees that there will always be game, and in the same breath she guarantees that the game cannot be had cheaply.

Out of the covenant comes a hero. In the Svan tellings Dali is the mother, by a mortal hunter, of Amirani — the Georgian counterpart of Prometheus, the defiant culture-bringer chained in the end to a peak of the Caucasus for setting himself against heaven. His father is the hunter Darjelani, who finds the goddess on an inaccessible cliff and lies with her; the child, though, is not born in the ordinary way. In the best-known version a mortal wife discovers the affair and attacks the sleeping goddess through the seat of her power, her golden hair — cutting it, or binding Dali with it — and the loss of the hair is the loss of her life. Dying, Dali has the infant cut from her womb before he can die with her, and because he comes prematurely, unfinished, he is sewn into the belly of an ox (in other tellings a cow, or both) to complete the gestation the goddess could not give him. He is born, in the end, twice: once from the goddess and once from the beast, marked from the start as something between the human and the divine. The antiquity claimed for the Amirani epic — some scholars have pushed its roots deep into the second or third millennium BCE — is itself contested, but the Svan variant with its cut hair and its animal womb is old and distinctively theirs.

The fall, and the long afterward

The covenant’s most famous breach is Betkil’s, the hunter left hanging on the crumbling summit. He wins Dali’s love and, for a while, keeps faith and hunts without fail; then he goes to a mortal woman — most often his wife, though in some valleys it is his sister-in-law, one of the region-variable seams in the story — and that woman finds and takes the hidden token. Robbed of her due and betrayed, Dali takes the shape of a white deer or chamois, shows herself to Betkil, and leads him climbing after her up onto her own mountain. At the top the ground fails, and he is left hanging by one hand and one foot with the goddess gone from the ledge above. In some versions his supernatural hound Q’ursha climbs with him to the end. There is no rescue. Abandoned, he must jump or fall, and he dies at the foot of the cliff.

The story did not stay a story. In the Racha region of western Georgia the round-dance songs of Betkil — Bail Betkil, Betkan Kutsa, Betkani — were performed every year on the third Sunday after Easter, at the foot of the cliff where he was believed to have fallen, the dancers gathering at the very place of the death to sing the hunter down. It is a striking thing to find in the Orthodox calendar: a pre-Christian hunting myth kept alive as annual ritual, tied to a movable feast of the church, danced at a real rock. The myth of the owned wild survived by lodging inside the year the church had organized.

Elsewhere the church displaced her. After Georgia’s conversion in the fourth century, Dali’s office as mistress of the hunt was, over time, handed to Saint George — the great martial saint of Georgian devotion, who takes on here the granting and withholding of game. In one late Svan song the hunter Chorla is trapped by Dali on a crag, and it is George who forces her to release him, threatening the mountains with storm and landslide until she yields; in places a hunter could dismiss her simply by speaking the saint’s name. As her function drained toward George, her figure darkened. Virsaladze traced how Dali slid toward the demonic, merging in some regions with the ali, a malignant spirit that kept her old haunts — the high crags, the hunters — while inverting her beauty into horror, her golden hair into filthy, blood-matted locks, her radiance into a backward-limbed monstrosity fit for a protective charm. The goddess became, in the folk imagination of the converted valleys, something to ward off. This is the Christianization read as a documented turn and a shift of devotion, not as a verdict on who the old power really was; and it did not, in fact, finish her. A survey conducted in 2013 found that while the young and the educated had filed Dali under mythology, many elderly Svan hunters still spoke of her as real — none claiming to have met her, but all knowing the men who had, and been maimed or driven mad for it.

Scholars have set her in a much wider frame, though how deep the resemblances run is itself contested. As a South-Caucasian mistress of animals she has been compared to Artemis; more ambitiously, Tuite gathered her gold, her seductions of mortal men on the mountain, her jealousy and her possible tie to the morning star into what he called a “dawn-goddess complex” — a family of luminous, gold-loving, dangerous female powers that includes the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European dawn-goddess and her Greek descendants Eos and Aphrodite, and, by parallel rather than descent, the Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar, who is likewise nude, gold-decked, tied to the morning star, and lethal to the men she desires. Chikovani, for his part, reached back into the Georgian ground itself, connecting her cult to the imagery of the Trialeti Chalice, a worked silver-and-gold vessel of the second millennium BCE. These are arguments about depth and origin, and they remain arguments. Nearer to hand, her name has quietly spread outward: it marks the landform Dali Chasma on Venus, and the fossil goat Capra dalii, whose fragments were recovered in Georgia — the mistress of the wild goats lending her name to an extinct one. She walks, too, through twentieth-century Georgian letters, in the novels of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and the German-language work of Grigol Robakidze, and elegies for a Svan mountaineer killed in 1969 imagined Dali mourning one of her own.

She keeps company, in the highland world, with powers of a different temper — the remote sky-father Ghmerti far above the hunt, the demon-slayer Kopala who cleared the crags of monsters with his mace — but none of them is quite what she is. Dali is the one whose gift the hunter carries home over his shoulder and whose price he pays with his life. The Svans remain a living people, and the lore of the high hunt is theirs; the goddess on the cliff, radiant and exacting, still owns the game in the country above the last village, and still, in the songs, lets a man hang until he falls.

Ushguli in Upper Svaneti, at the head of the Enguri gorge — the tower-villages of the people who kept the hunting-lore of Dali. Paata Vardanashvili, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

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