Ghmerti

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In the shrine of a Khevsur or Pshav village, a worshiper does not, as a rule, pray to Ghmerti. The stone precinct on its shoulder of mountain, the banner set into the wall, the great oak standing over the enclosure — all of it belongs to a lesser power than the one who orders the sky. Ghmerti is the supreme god, the maker and ruler of everything the eye takes in, and precisely because he is supreme he is the god least often addressed. The prayers of a household, its oaths and harvests and sicknesses, are carried up to him and answered down from him through an intermediary seated in that very shrine: one of the khvtishvili, the “children of god,” each with its own name, its own office, and its own stretch of country to protect. To grasp the theology of the Georgian highlands is to begin here, with a distance that is not neglect but architecture — the high god so far above the world that the world reaches him only by stages.

The name and how it reaches the record

Ghmerti (ღმერთი; in the older orthography ɣmerti) is not a proper name at all but the ordinary Georgian word for “god,” and it carries a double weight that the whole entry turns on. In the pre-Christian pantheon it denotes the god — the supreme divinity and head of the gods, “the all-powerful Lord of the Universe and its Creator,” in the phrasing the folklore records preserve. And it is the same word a Georgian uses today, in church or in speech, for God. When the country turned Christian the vocabulary did not change: the name of the old high god became the name of the Christian one, and the sense shifted silently beneath a term that stayed put. That continuity, terminological and unbroken, is the strange fact around which everything else in his story arranges itself.

Two epithets fix his character. He is Morige Ghmerti (მორიგე ღმერთი), which the folklorists gloss as “God the Director” or “God the Orderer” — not the god who makes the world once and withdraws, but the god who keeps it, regulating the turning of the cosmos and holding each thing in its round. And he is Dambadebeli (დამბადებელი), “the Creator,” the one who brought the worlds into being. Order and origin: he is the summit of a hierarchy he both founded and continuously governs.

How this picture reaches us has to be marked plainly, because it bears on how much weight each part of it can hold. The ancient documentary layer for the religion of Iberia and Colchis is thin — a few notices in the classical geographers, above all Strabo on the peoples of the eastern Caucasus, and the archaeology of the old capital at Mtskheta and the Colchian sanctuary at Vani. None of it gives us Ghmerti by name. The fullest portrait of him as a remote high god over a graded court of lesser powers is instead a reconstruction, built by Georgian folklorists — Vera Bardavelidze, Mikheil Chikovani, and later Zurab Kiknadze, with the Canadian linguist and ethnographer Kevin Tuite in the Western literature — out of the living highland shrine religion of Khevsureti and Pshavi. That religion was still being practiced, still generating oaths and oracles and festivals, when the folklorists went up the valleys to record it. Its testimony is precious and it is also uneven: it differs from valley to valley, and how far back it reaches is exactly what scholars argue about. The high god described below is drawn from that living tradition and its interpreters, not from an ancient text that names him.

The cosmos he orders

Ghmerti lives, in the mythic geography, in the ninth and highest sky, where he rules from a golden throne. Below that summit the universe is built in three tiers, a vertical stack of worlds the Georgians call skneli. The upper world, zeskneli, is the abode of the gods, and its color is white. The middle world is the earth, the crowded ground of humans and animals and plants, and its color is red. The lower world, qveskneli, is the netherworld beneath the earth, the domain of demons, evil spirits, and dragons, and its color is black. The three are separated by expanses of air and joined, at the very edge of the universe, by a Tree of Life; in other tellings by a tower, a chain, or a pillar. It is a cosmos with a clear grain — up toward the pure and the divine, down toward the monstrous — and Ghmerti sits at the top of it, above even the white world of the gods, in the ninth heaven.

His household is written into the sky itself. In the myth the moon is his son and the sun his daughter, the two great lights of the middle world’s ceiling reckoned as his children. And below him, between the throne of heaven and the red world of people, stand the powers that give this entry its subject: the khvtishvili or ghvtis shvilni (ღვთისშვილი / ღვთის შვილნი), the “children of god.” They are demigods, not the high god himself — a numerous host of shrine-deities whose work is to stand between people and the evil pressing up from the black world below. They protect human beings, assure the crops and the yield of milk, and make war on the devi, the ogre-demons, and on the kudiani witches. Each is a distinct personality with a distinct commission. The Georgian hunting powers belong to this wider sacred world as well — the golden-haired Dali of the high cliffs who grants and withholds the game, and Ochopintre, lord of the wild herds — and among the khvtishvili proper stands a figure like Kopala, the demon-slayer whose mace cleared the land of the devi. It is one thing to name Ghmerti as maker of all this. It is another to see how the tradition arranges the traffic between him and the people who live under him, and there the highland theology becomes genuinely distinctive.

The high valleys of Khevsureti in northeastern Georgia, where the jvari-khati shrine religion over which Morige Ghmerti presides was still living when the folklorists came to record it. Paata Vardanashvili, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The theology of mediation

The organizing insight of the Khevsur-Pshav system is that the supreme god governs at a remove. Morige Ghmerti orders the whole, but he is rarely approached directly; the everyday religious life of a community is conducted with the khvtishvili, and it is they who carry a person’s need up to the high god and bring his favor back down. This is not a cosmos run as a monarchy of one. It is an ordered court, the Director at the summit and a host of children-of-god administering the valleys below, each within the bounds of a fixed office.

Those offices are specific. In the reading that Kevin Tuite draws from Kiknadze’s Kartuli Mitologia, the khvtishvili are subordinate deities with defined functions — some make war on the ogres and dragons of the netherworld, some see to the good of the crops and the milk-yield — and each is assigned to watch over a social unit of a particular size. One khvtishvili may hold all of Khevsureti; another a single district; another a single clan, or the sworn brotherhoods of one village. The map of the shrines is thus also a map of the society, the sacred jurisdictions nested inside one another the way the human ones are, and the whole apparatus is what Tuite, following his source, treats as a kind of divine feudalism — a graded hierarchy of powers holding their territories under the high god at its head. Between Morige Ghmerti and this host the folklorists set an intermediary figure, Kviria, whom Tuite characterizes as a kind of divine prime minister mediating between the supreme god and the khvtishvili. The distance from the summit to the ground is bridged not once but twice: the high god, his steward, and then the children-of-god in their shrines.

Each khvtishvili is made present to its people in a place. The highlanders call these sacred precincts by three interchangeable words — khati (“icon” or “image”), jvari (“cross”), and salotsavi (“place of prayer”) — small stone structures on a height above a village, the earthly seat of a particular deity. The Khevsur shrine at Khakhmati, sacred to Kopala, and the Pshavi cross of Lashari are among the chief of them. And each shrine is served not by the deity in the abstract but by human functionaries who make its will operative in the community. The khevisberi (also khucesi) is the shrine-elder or priest, who pronounces the invocations and blessings at the festivals. The kadagi is the oracle — a shaman-like figure who, in a state of possession, speaks the khati’s own words, its demands and its warnings; the office can be held by women as well as men. The dasturi and the medroshe are the attendants and the flag-bearer, who carry the shrine’s banners in procession and keep the order of its gatherings. Around the chief shrines stand sacred trees — the great oaks whose felling, in one Pshav tradition, no feudal lord could accomplish because the wood belonged to the khati and not to him. These oaks and precincts are the footings, on the actual ground of the middle world, of the vertical order Ghmerti presides over from the ninth sky.

What the whole system says about the high god is that his transcendence is not indifference. He is remote because he is supreme, and the intermediaries exist because he is remote; the graded distance is the mechanism by which a god too great to be addressed is nonetheless served and petitioned by ordinary people in ordinary trouble. The genius of the theology is to have made the high god’s very remoteness the reason for a densely peopled, locally answerable religion beneath him. (What is described here is the shape of that world as the folklorists recorded it, at their reporting distance; the operative detail of the shrine observances, the oaths, and the hunting-taboos is not the matter of this account.) The contrast with the other great figure of pre-Christian Georgia is instructive. Armazi, the armored idol on the acropolis of the royal city, was the chief god of the Iberian state — a dynastic power set up and thrown down by kings. Ghmerti is a different figure in a different register: the folk and highland high god of the sky, reached through the shrines of the valleys, never an idol on a citadel.

The word that outlived the pantheon

The turn that decides Ghmerti’s afterlife came in the fourth century. The kingdom of Kartli — the Caucasian Iberia, the eastern Georgian realm whose capital was Mtskheta, and which shares nothing with the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula but a Greek geographer’s name — adopted Christianity as its state religion around 337 CE, under King Mirian III and through the preaching of the Cappadocian missionary St Nino. The full account of that conversion, and of the shattering of the Armazi idol that the chronicles set at its center, belongs to the story of the Caucasian Iberians and of Armazi himself. What belongs to Ghmerti is a single, quiet consequence: the word came through intact. Where the older highlander had said ghmerti of the sky-god above the khvtishvili, the Christian Georgian now said ghmerti of God and of God the Father. The name did not fall with the idols. It was lifted whole into the new faith, so that the modern Orthodox believer and the pre-Christian mountaineer name the divine with one and the same word — the continuity terminological, the meaning re-poured into the old vessel.

That double life is the real subject of this entry, and the high valleys are where it stays visible. Christianity reached the Georgian mountains but did not, for many centuries, replace what it found there. In Khevsureti, Pshavi, and Tusheti the jvari-khati shrine religion — the khvtishvili in their precincts, the khevisberi and the kadagi, the oaths and the sacred oaks — survived alongside the Cross and syncretized with it, so that the name of St George stands over many a khati as Tetri-Giorgi, “White George,” and Christian feasts fell into step with the older festivals without dissolving them. The architecture underneath held: a remote high god above a court of mediating shrine-deities, now wearing Christian names. The fuller account of that living survival is the story of the Svans and the other highland peoples who kept it; here it is enough to mark that the structure over which Ghmerti presides did not simply vanish beneath Christianization, and persists, in places, still.

Archaism or innovation: the debate

Because so much of the Ghmerti described above is a reconstruction from later folklore, the deepest question about him is a scholarly one, and it is not settled. Vera Bardavelidze, in the mid-twentieth century, worked out ambitious reconstructions of the pre-Christian pantheon from the surviving highland material, reading the shrine religion as a window onto a genuinely ancient stratum. Zurab Kiknadze’s Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (“Georgian Mythology I: The Shrine and Its People,” 1996) gave the highland theology its most sustained modern analysis — the fruit, as Tuite notes, of more than a decade spent rethinking the assumptions that had guided the study of Caucasian paganism through the late Tsarist and Soviet years. And Kevin Tuite’s pointed review of that book, “Highland Georgian paganism — archaism or innovation?” (1996), put the live question in its title: does the Khevsur-Pshav system preserve an archaic, pre-Christian layer of Georgian religion, or is it substantially a medieval-and-later development — a “feudal” theology of graded deities that took its shape long after Christianization, and reads back into deep antiquity only because its interpreters wished it there? The debate turns on how much the living shrine religion can be trusted as a fossil of the ancient one, and reasonable scholars have come down on both sides.

The twentieth century pressed on the whole tradition from another direction. Soviet hostility to religion thinned the shrine practice and pushed much of it into the dark, so that some of what the folklorists preserved on the page was already fading from the ground as they wrote. The sober summary is that what we have of Ghmerti is at once a living inheritance and a partly recovered one — documented from a tradition still breathing, interpreted through a debate still running, its details region-variable and its origins genuinely argued over. He is best understood not as a fact retrieved whole from antiquity but as the summit of a sacred order the Georgian highlands maintained, and to a degree maintain, under a name their whole nation still speaks. The most powerful god in that order is the one a worshiper in the shrine will almost never name aloud, and the reason is the same reason he sits in the ninth sky: everything beneath him is arranged so that he need not be.

Sources and scholarship

The living highland tradition and the Georgian folklorists who recorded it are the primary authority for Ghmerti as a remote high god, and they must be privileged over the thin ancient record, which does not name him. The foundational reconstructions are those of Vera Bardavelidze and Mikheil Chikovani in the twentieth century and, most fully, Zurab Kiknadze, Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (Kutaisi: Gelati Academy of Sciences, 1996). The single most useful English-language assessment — and the source for the “divine prime minister” Kviria, for the khvtishvili as deities each holding a social unit, and for the whole archaism-or-innovation question — is Kevin Tuite’s review Highland Georgian paganism — archaism or innovation? (1996), with his related essay on “real and imagined feudalism in highland Georgia.”

The mythic cosmology — Ghmerti’s titles Morige Ghmerti and Dambadebeli, the ninth sky and golden throne, the three-tiered skneli with its white, red, and black worlds joined by the Tree of Life, and the khvtishvili and Kviria — is summarized, with the underlying folklore, in the cross-checked “Georgian mythology” overview and in the survey “Georgian Mythology — Key Characters and Concepts”. For the historical turn under which the word ghmerti passed into Christian Georgian — the conversion of Kartli/Iberia around 337 CE under Mirian III and St Nino — see the account of the Christianization of Iberia; the fuller theological and archaeological story of that conversion is carried in the entries on the Caucasian Iberians and on Armazi. The classical background for the pre-Christian Caucasus rests on Strabo’s Geography and on the archaeology of Mtskheta and Vani, which frame the ancient religion without naming its high god.

The fortified stone village of Shatili in the Argun valley of Khevsureti, the highland world whose shrine-deities carry a community’s prayers to the high god above them. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

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