Pirkusha

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Three silver bowls, set out as evidence in the chamber of the high god. One smith had forged them; a second child of god had wanted them, been refused, and taken them by force to his own sanctuary. So the matter went up. In the telling the Pshav highlanders keep, the quarrel between the two deities over the bowls was carried into the presence of Morige Ghmerti, God the Orderer, whose court weighed the taking and ruled against the taker: the bowls had been seized by force, and the seizer must give them back, for the Orderer of the world does not permit his children to fight one another. The judgment is exact about what it protects. Not the smith’s honor, not even the peace of the gods in the abstract — the ruling turns on three particular objects, made by particular hands, and it returns them to the hands that made them. That is where an account of Pirkusha has to begin: with the held thing on the table, because he is the one power in this world who is known by his work rather than his deeds.

The grim-faced smith

Pirkusha (Georgian პირქუში, also rendered Pirkushi) is the divine blacksmith of the northeastern Georgian highland shrine religion — the sacred world of Pshavi and Khevsureti, the high valleys of the eastern Caucasus. He is counted among the khvtishvili, the “children of god,” the deified hero-sons who stand between the remote high god and the human world, each with a name, an office, and a stretch of country to keep. Above them all sits Morige Ghmerti, God the Director, who orders the cosmos from the ninth sky and is too far above the world to be addressed except through his children. Among that host of demon-slayers, protectors of the crops, and guardians of the herds, Pirkusha holds the forge.

His name is a description, and an unusual one for a god to carry. Pirkushi is a common Georgian adjective — “gloomy, grim, morose, sullen” — built from piri, “face” or “mouth,” with the sense of a set, grim look; the dictionaries render it gloomy, grim, sombre, and the gloss “grim-faced” is exact. He is the god named for his own dark expression, the sullen face of the man who works at the fire. The reason the tradition gives for that face lies in what he handles. In the fullest modern synthesis of the highland mythology, the Georgian scholar Zurab Kiknadze reads Pirkusha’s name together with a second epithet, tsetskhlovani, “fiery,” and takes the pair as marking his tie to the powers below: the underworld fire and the ore that the devi and the demon-smith kaji command. The grimness is not a mood but a jurisdiction. He is grim-faced because he works with the fire of the lower world, and does not flinch from it.

None of this reaches us from antiquity. There is no classical notice of Pirkusha, no inscription, no medieval chronicle; the figure is drawn entirely from the living highland cult and from the Georgian folklorists who climbed the valleys to record it. He is set down in Tinatin Ochiauri’s collection of the mythological traditions of the eastern Georgian mountains (Tbilisi, 1967) and in the folklore Mikheil Chikovani’s expedition gathered in Kakheti in 1964; the fullest synthesis is Kiknadze’s Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (1996), which places the smith within the shrine world’s pantheon. The sanctuaries in which powers like him are seated are inventoried in Vera Bardavelidze’s three-volume illustrated catalog of the shrines of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti. What the record carries, it carries with unusual specificity — a named smith with an etymology, a full myth-cycle, and two attested seats — and that concreteness is itself part of the point.

Like the mace-bearer Kopala, Pirkusha is remembered as a being who began mortal. The tradition holds that he was first a Georgian smith, a man at a real forge, and was only later made a child of god — raised into the shrine pantheon after the events his myth records. Whether a smith-figure of this kind carries an archaic Caucasian stratum or took shape in later centuries is the archaism-or-innovation question that runs under the whole highland religion; it is argued fully in the account of the high god Ghmerti, and is not reopened here. What can be said plainly is that his kin are recognizable across the mountains. He belongs to the broad Caucasian family of divine metalworkers — beside the Ossetian smith Kurdalægon and the Circassian Tlepsh — the smith-gods who arm the heroes of the whole range.

The Pshavis Aragvi below the Gudamakari range near Sharakhevi — the valley country of Pshavi, in which the smith-god’s own sanctuary stands at the village of Akhadi. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The god whose work the hand can hold

The other children of god are known by their deeds — the boulder out-thrown, the demon driven under the earth, the soul wrested back from its captor. Pirkusha is known by his objects, and the tradition is unusually concrete about them. Where a war-god’s genealogy is a list of victories, the smith’s is a list of things.

At the head of the list stand the weapons of the demon-war. He forged the mace — the kopi that gives Kopala his name — and the iron bow, the arms with which the mightiest of the khvtishvili broke the many-headed devi and hunted the survivors down. The overview of the highland mythology names him in exactly this office: the blacksmith god who made Kopala’s mace and iron bow, and whom the record sets beside the Ossetian Kurdalægon and the Circassian Tlepsh. To know how Kopala became the strongest of the children of god is in part to know his implements, and the implements are Pirkusha’s work. The heroes carry his weapons; he is the hand behind the arm.

But the demon-war is only half of what he makes, and arguably the lesser half. He is credited equally with the vessels of ordinary and sacred life, and the highland tradition names them with a craftsman’s precision: phials and shallow bowls (fiala), drinking cups (tasi), cauldrons (kvabi), silver goblets for the shrines, and — standing above them all in his own myth — the bell, the zari, whose casting becomes the price of his freedom. The Georgian record of him lists the phials, the cups, the cauldrons, and “other objects” as his handiwork. These are not the trophies of a warrior but the furniture of a settled and a worshiping people: the vessel that holds the blessed beer, the cauldron over the fire, the goblet on the shrine-stone, the bell that calls a temi — a highland commune — to its sanctuary.

In Pirkusha the highland world thinks through metallurgy. Iron and fire are the materials of below: the province of the devi and of the kaji, the demon-smiths of the underworld. The man who masters those materials is, by that very mastery, a being who handles the chthonic and is marked by it — grim-faced and fiery, at ease with the fire that would unmake a lesser worker. Yet the whole meaning of his craft is that it turns that lower fire to the order above. The ore-fire of the powers below becomes, in his hands, the weapon that clears the middle world for people, the bell that gathers a community to its shrine, the cup that carries the sacred drink. That is the smith’s mediation, and it is a mediation of substance rather than of message: he stands at the seam where the fire of the underworld meets the life of the settled village, and converts the one into the other. The demon-slayers mediate by force, driving the powers of below back down. The smith mediates by transformation, taking what belongs to below and remaking it as something the world above can hold.

His comparative kin sharpen the office. The Ossetian heavenly smith Kurdalægon shoes the horse of a dead man so that the animal can carry its rider on the long road to the other side — the smith as the outfitter of the passage between worlds. The Circassian Tlepsh, in the Nart sagas, forged the first sickle, giving it an edge that never grows dull no matter how often it is used — the smith as the giver of the tool that feeds a people. Pirkusha belongs to this company, but his particular commission in Pshav-Khevsureti is precise and narrower than either. He is the armourer of the demon-slayers and the outfitter of their shrines: the one child of god whose gift to the human world is not a victory over the powers but a tool with which to live under them.

Objects from the hand of a Georgian smith — the craft through which the highland tradition imagines Pirkusha’s work, the vessels and implements that are the smith-god’s gift rather than any victory. Eka Samkharadze, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Captivity and the bell

The story the tradition keeps of him is a captivity and a rescue, and it is preserved most fully in the highland cycle of Iakhsar, the demon-slaying child of god who is Kopala’s companion in the war on the ogres. In the folklore text of that cult, Pirkushi the smith was seized by the devi — the ogre-house named Verkhvela — and held prisoner, forced to forge for them: hammering out tools and weapons and objects of gold and silver in the service of the underworld, unable to get free. The maker of arms had become the arms-maker of the monsters, his craft turned to the ends of the very powers it was meant to master.

It was Iakhsar who brought him out. Learning of the captivity, the demon-slayer came secretly to the smith and struck a bargain: he would free him if Pirkushi would cast a good silver bell. The smith promised the bell, and other things besides, and on that promise Iakhsar fell on the devi — killing Verkhvela first, with his scourge, and then the rest of the ogre-house — and carried Pirkushi out of their hold. It is a rescue with a price written into it, and the price is an object. The demon-slayer does not free the smith for nothing, nor for gratitude; he frees him for a bell, a made thing not yet in existence, promised out of the fire the smith has not yet lit. Even his liberation is transacted in the currency of his craft.

Freed, Pirkushi went and settled at the village of Akhadi in Pshavi, and there he kept his word. He cast the bell and the other things he had promised, and — the tradition holds — was himself raised into the pantheon, made a khvtishvili in his own right, the mortal smith become a child of god. His deification is of a piece with his rescue: he enters the sacred order not by conquering anything but by paying a debt in metal, discharging the promise that bought him back from the devi. The bell that summons a highland commune to its shrine is, in the myth’s own logic, the same bell that ransomed the smith from the underworld — the sound of the sanctuary and the sound of a debt paid, cast in one act.

The bowls at law

The tradition then does something remarkable: it tells of the two gods at law. Pirkushi owned three fine silver bowls. Iakhsar coveted them and asked for them; the smith refused; and Iakhsar took them by force and carried them off to his own sanctuary. So the matter was carried up. Even after both were counted children of god — the rescuer and the rescued alike seated in the pantheon — the quarrel over the bowls went into the chamber of the high god, and there it was judged. In the folklore text the judgment falls to the God-creator together with Kviria, the mediating power who stands between Morige Ghmerti and the host of the khvtishvili as the steward of the divine assembly. Their court ruled against Iakhsar: he must return the bowls to Pirkushi, because he had taken them by force, and the Orderer of the world does not allow his children to make war on one another.

The episode is worth dwelling on for what it assumes. The divine assembly convenes — the high god’s court, its steward Kviria presiding — not over the fate of the middle world or the war under the earth, but over three silver bowls and the question of who rightfully holds them. The demon-slayer who cleared the ogres from the land is found in the wrong and made to give back what he seized. And the thing the whole apparatus of heaven is mobilized to protect is a smith’s title to his own work: the maker’s claim on the made object, upheld against the stronger god who wanted it. In a pantheon of warriors, the tradition stops to insist that force does not confer ownership, and it makes the point through the least martial of the children of god — the one whose only property is what he has forged. The bowls come back to the hands that shaped them because, in the order Morige Ghmerti keeps, that is where they belong.

The forge and the living shrine

Pirkusha’s own seats are established, and they are not the great demon-slayers’ shrines. His sanctuary — his salotsavi, “place of prayer” — stands at Akhadi in Pshavi, the village where he settled after his rescue, and a second at Batsaligo in Khevsureti; the Georgian record fixes the two. Further listings of the highland sacred places name a shrine of Pirkushi paired with the Adgilis Deda, the “mother of the place,” in the Aragvi country — the smith seated beside the tutelary who keeps the ground itself. His shrines belong to the same order as the great houses of the highlands, the jvari-khati system in which each sanctuary is the earthly seat of a child of god, tended by the community’s own shrine-elders rather than by a priest of the diocese. What that order is, and how it works, belongs to its own account; here it is enough that Pirkusha holds his place within it, and that his particular patronage is the one his myth would predict. He is the patron of the forge — the child of god to whom the smiths of the highland communities belong.

Those communities are living Georgian Orthodox people, and their shrine practice runs alongside the church rather than against it or behind it. The people of Pshavi and Khevsureti keep their sanctuaries into the present — the smith’s included — while worshiping as Orthodox Christians, the two orders held together in one religious life rather than set at odds. To speak of Pirkusha in the present tense is not to imagine a survival awaiting extinction but to describe a cult that is still the smiths’ own, in valleys where the shrines are still served.

One body of smith-lore is kept carefully apart from his. The underworld fortress of Kajeti — the realm of the kaji, the demon-smiths of matchless skill, and the tale of the anvil, hammer, sieve, bell, panduri, and scales raided from below and shared out among the gods — belongs to the cycle of the great Khevsur sanctuary at Khakhmati, and stays there. That is a story about taking the tools of civilization back from the demons who hoarded them. Pirkusha’s own myth is the other thing: not a raid on the smiths of the underworld but the captivity of a smith by the devi, and his ransom for a bell. The two belong to one highland preoccupation — iron, fire, and the powers below who command them — but they are distinct, and the tradition keeps them so.

What the record carries of him it carries with a specificity rare in this material. It rests on the folklore collections of Ochiauri and Chikovani, on Kiknadze’s synthesis, on Bardavelidze’s inventory of the shrines, and on the comparative Caucasian frame in which the divine smiths of the Ossetians and the Circassians stand beside the Georgian one. And what it carries is not a haze of attributes but a set of things a person could pick up and turn over: a mace and an iron bow, phials and cups and cauldrons, silver goblets for the altar, three silver bowls that went to law, and the bell that bought a smith his freedom and now calls a mountain commune to prayer. The grim-faced child of god is the one whose gift can be held in the hand — and the tradition, remembering him, holds onto the objects.

→ Related: Kviria · Iakhsari · Adgilis Deda · Shatili · Mutso · Anatori · Gudanis Jvari · The Khevsurs · The Pshavs · Kadagi · Jvari Khati