Ochopintre

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High on a face of bare rock a West Caucasian tur stands where nothing else could — a heavy, scimitar-horned wild goat on a ledge above the treeline, cropping the thin grass of a place no herder ever drove a flock. To the hunter climbing after it the animal looks like fortune waiting to be taken: quarry, ownerless, there for whoever can reach it. Inside the sacred world of the Georgian mountains the picture is exactly reversed. The tur is not ownerless and it is not waiting. It is livestock. It has been pastured onto that ledge by a keeper who counts it among his own, and the man climbing toward it is walking into another god’s fold. To fell that beast without the keeper’s leave is not to hunt. It is to steal — to lift an animal from the master of the wild flocks, who alone can grant it, and who has other ways of settling the account.

The keeper of the high herds is Ochopintre. Where the golden-haired goddess of the crags decides which men eat, he is the male herdsman who walks the wild animals through the cliffs and drives them home, a shepherd whose sheep are the ibex, the chamois, the red deer and the wild goats of the Caucasus. Everything the tradition asks of a hunter follows from the single fact that the game already belongs to someone.

The name, and how he reaches the record

Ochopintre (Georgian ოჭოპინტრე; sometimes written Ocho-pintre) does not come down from an ancient stone. No inscription names him, no classical author records him, no temple has been dug from the ground with his name on it. He reaches the modern record the way most of the highland powers do — through the oral religion of the mountain communities, chiefly of Khevsureti, Pshavi and Svaneti, gathered from the memories of hunters and herders by Georgian folklorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is known of him is therefore a thing assembled out of hunting-songs, prayers and field-notes, and it is region-variable to the core: the valleys did not agree on him, and told him differently from ridge to ridge.

Within that world he is inseparable from Dali, the radiant mistress of the game. She is the divine owner of the wild beasts, the young woman of terrible beauty who lives in a cavern above the pastures; he is her companion and fellow-herdsman, the one who works the flocks beside her. Where she is the sovereign, he is the keeper. And where she is imagined as a woman, he is marked as something half-animal: like the Greek Pan, Ochopintre is said to have been born with the legs and horns of a goat. The goat-shape is not incidental. It places him on the wild side of the line that the highland world drew between the settled valley and the untouched country above it — a power of the crags and the woods rather than of the hearth and the field.

His name is where the deepest claim about him is lodged, and it is also where the record is least secure. Scholars read Ochopintre as a compound of two elements, and the reading is a reconstruction rather than anything the tradition itself explains. The first element, ocho- (ოჭო), has been connected to an older horned god given as Bochi or Botsi — a figure of fertility and the increase of the flocks whose name is glossed as “male goat.” The second element, -pintre (პინტრე), has been connected to Pan, the goat-god of the Greek wild wood. On this analysis the name yokes a native Caucasian horned-god root to a Hellenic one, and the yoke is itself an argument: that a Colchian–Iberian sacred figure of the herds met, at some point, the Greek world of the Black-Sea littoral, and carried the meeting in his own name. It is a striking proposal and it should be held loosely. This etymology is a scholarly hypothesis, not a native gloss offered by the tradition; the derivation of -pintre from Pan, in particular, belongs among the contested things — a suggestive resemblance, not a demonstrated descent. What is not in doubt is the type he embodies, and to that the goat-god comparison points true whether the philology holds or not.

He must be kept apart from a figure who is often confused with him because the names rhyme and the shapes are close. In the western Georgian lowlands — the country of the Mingrelians, the old land of Colchis — the tradition tells of Ochokochi, whose name means “goat-man”: a shaggy forest being, sometimes a protector and often a menace, said to carry in place of chest-hair a pointed bone or a stone axe with which he crushes those he seizes, and to chase after Tqashi-Mapa, the queen of the forest, through her own woods. Ochokochi is a creature of the lowland forest; Ochopintre is a god of the highland hunt. They are kin the way neighboring valleys are kin — related regional expressions of a single South-Caucasian idea about the owner of the wild — and the tradition of the Colchians and that of the eastern mountains should not be melted together into one figure. Regional variation is the rule here, not the exception, and the two names mark two different points on the map.

The lord of the wild herds

The theology of the Georgian hunt begins from a premise and reasons the whole ethic out of it. The premise is ownership. The ibex and chamois of the high cliffs, the deer of the forests, the wild goats of the crags — these are not ownerless quarry scattered across an indifferent wilderness. They are herds, and they have a master. Ochopintre pastures them on the mountain as a shepherd pastures sheep on a hillside: driving them, guarding them, keeping their count. Dali owns the game and he herds it beside her, so that between them the wild is not a wilderness at all but a managed flock, released to men or held back at the owners’ pleasure.

From that single premise the entire hunting code unfolds. If the animal belongs to the god, then to take it is not to seize but to receive — the beast must be granted, handed over, given. A hunter who kills without the master’s leave has not been skillful; he has been a thief, and the theft is against the powers of the forest themselves. So the tradition holds that no one could take the wild game without Ochopintre’s help and favor, and that before the hunt offerings and prayer were made in his name — described here at the folklorist’s distance, as a matter of public record rather than as any working instruction. The hunter did not go up the mountain to conquer it. He went up to ask.

A West Caucasian tur (Capra caucasica) on the rock — the kind of wild goat reckoned, in the highland hunting religion, as part of the herds pastured by Ochopintre and Dali. Jaan Künnap, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

And because the hunter went up to ask, the master’s answer could take any form. The fate of a person entering his forest was believed to rest wholly in his hands. He could deliver a beast to a reverent, sparing hunter who took no more than he needed; he could withhold every animal and send a man home empty; or he could turn the mountain itself against the trespasser. In the shared lore of this hunting complex — the same code that runs through the Dali tradition — the punishment for greed, for taking more than one’s due, for broken faith with the powers of the wild, is the fatal fall from a cliff. The country that gives the game is the same country that, offended, opens under a man’s feet. This is not cruelty but accounting: the wild is abundant precisely because it is owned and rationed, and a man lives inside that ownership, permitted to take but never to plunder.

Ochopintre belongs, in the comparative language of the study of religion, to the widespread mythic type of the “master of the animals” — the lord of the beasts, the divine gamekeeper who both gives the wild and guards it. The type is found across the northern hunting world, and in the Caucasus it wears many local faces: among the neighboring Ossetians the master of game is Æfsati; among the Svan forest-powers the folklorist and structural analyst Georges Charachidzé counted, beside Dali herself, such figures as Apsat, the lord of the small game and the birds. Ochopintre is the eastern-highland face of the same idea, and the goat-god comparison sets him beside Pan not as an identity but as a member of one family — the horned keeper who stands at the edge of the tame world with the untamed one at his back. He is, in this sense, the male counterpart to Dali’s female sovereignty over the beasts: she the owner on her cliff, he the herdsman walking the flock; and both of them far below the remote sky-father Ghmerti, who governs the ordered cosmos from above but does not himself pasture the tur on the ledge. The demon-slayer Kopala, who cleared the crags of monsters with his iron mace, keeps the high country habitable; Ochopintre keeps it stocked.

His goat-horns and goat-legs, then, are a statement of position. They mark him as of the wild rather than of the village — a threshold power standing in the gap between the human hunter and the untouched high wilderness, neither wholly beast nor wholly god. To meet him is to have reached the edge of the human country and stepped, hat in hand, into his. Whether a man comes back down that edge with a carcass over his shoulder or does not come back at all is, in this world, a question of whether the keeper of the herds chose to open his hand.

The Christian centuries and the folklorists’ recovery

Georgia became a Christian kingdom early. In the fourth century the eastern realm of Kartli was converted under King Mirian III, the turn traditionally dated around 337 and tied to the preaching of a woman remembered as the enlightener of the Georgians; the fuller story of that conversion, and of the old high gods it displaced in the lowland capitals, belongs to the account of the eastern kingdom and its people. In the high valleys, though, the turn did not simply erase what came before. The mountain hunting religion to which Ochopintre belongs — the lore of Dali, of the master of the wild herds, of the hunter’s obligations to the powers of the forest — was never fully swept away. In Svaneti, in Khevsureti, in Pshavi it went on for centuries beside the Orthodox faith and, in fragments, into the modern era, which is a large part of why the figure is known at all. The people who kept it are living peoples still: the Svans of the northwestern gorges above all, whose hunting-lore preserved the mistress of the game and her fellow keeper into the era of the folklorists and beyond.

That the record exists is chiefly the work of collectors. The hunting myths, songs and ballads of the Georgian highlands were gathered in the field and studied comparatively across the twentieth century, and the reconstruction of a figure like Ochopintre is built from what they brought back. The folklorist Elene Virsaladze, whose fieldwork on the Georgian hunting oral tradition ran through the 1950s to the 1970s, is central to it — and it is to her that one owes the single most telling piece of evidence for how region-variable this world is. Among the Khevsur highlanders of the eastern mountains, Virsaladze reported, it was the male Ochopintre, and not Dali, who was reckoned the foremost hunting-god; the female mistress of the deer figured there as a lesser presence beside him. Elsewhere in the Georgian mountains the weight sits the other way, with the goddess at the center and the herdsman beside her. Neither picture is the “real” one that the other distorts. The tradition simply distributed its powers differently from valley to valley, and the same complex could be told with the woman foremost in Svaneti and the goat-legged man foremost in Khevsureti.

Shatili in Khevsureti, one of the fortified tower-villages of the eastern Georgian highlands — the country in which, Virsaladze found, the male Ochopintre outranked Dali as the foremost god of the hunt. Paata Sh, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Around Virsaladze stand others who set the Georgian hunting powers in wider frames. The French-Georgian scholar Charachidzé, a student of Georges Dumézil, published in 1968 his Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne — a rigorous structural reading that placed the forest and hunting deities within the architecture of Caucasian religion as a whole rather than treating them as a bag of curiosities. The Svanologist and linguistic anthropologist Kevin Tuite carried the analysis of Svan hunting folklore forward into the 2000s, his 2006 study of the goddess Dæl (the Svan name of Dali) reading the mistress of the game and her attendant powers against a broad South-Caucasian and comparative background. It is largely through this chain of scholarship — collection, then comparison — that a god who left no inscription can be described at all.

The twentieth century was not only a century of recovery. Soviet rule suppressed the open practice of the highland shrine-and-hunting religion, so that much of what survives does so as narrated tradition — a thing remembered and told rather than performed. The figure that reaches the present therefore comes doubly mediated: preserved because the folklorists wrote it down, thinned because the living practice around it was broken.

In the present, Ochopintre has slipped well past the folklorist’s page. He turns up in popular retellings of “Georgian mythology,” in tourism and travel writing, and in online mythology encyclopedias as the country’s goat-legged, Pan-like forest spirit — a tidy, portable portrait, and a flattened one. The field record shows a region-variable power lodged in a whole hunting cosmology, foremost in one valley and secondary in the next, whose etymology is a debated reconstruction and whose meaning lies in the covenant between a hunter and the owner of the game. The popular figure is a single silhouette with goat’s legs. The silhouette is not false, but it is a small part of him, and it is best read beside the collected sources rather than in their place. The keeper of the wild herds is larger than his outline: on the high crags where the tur stands on rock that will hold nothing else, he is still the one whose hand must open before the mountain gives anything up.

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