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Date: Среда, 2007-10-24, 9:42 PM | Message # 1 |
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Highland Georgian paganism — archaism or innovation?
Review of Zurab K’IK’NADZE. 1996. kartuli mitologia, I. !vari da saq’mo. (Georgian
mythology, I. The cross and his people [sic].) Kutaisi: Gelati Academy of Sciences]; xii +
284 pp. + 2-page English summary.
Kevin Tuite, Universitй de Montrйal
for: Annual of the Society for the Study of the Caucasus.
As the hot lamb’s blood congealed on her hands, a young woman responsed to the questions
of a curious visitor. We were standing on the banks of the St’ekura, in the northeast Georgian
province of Xevsureti, in the one part of the territory of Xaxmat’i’s Jvari not off-limits to
females. Not even a hundred kilometres as the crow flies from Tbilisi, we were in a part of
Georgia very few Georgians, even now, ever visit; without electricity or all-season roads, it
remains an eerily archaic outpost on the remote periphery of Europe. On a chilly July morning,
the woman had come to Xevsureti’s most sacred shrine, lamb in tow, to undergo the cleansing
ritual known as ganatvla. She knelt before the priest (xucesi) as he intoned a prayer of
benediction and healing, invoking St. George, his female partner Samdzimari, and a host of
saints, angels and “children of God” (xvtisЈvilni). He extracted his dagger, and slit the lamb’s
throat. Its blood spilled forth onto the woman’s arms, coating them up to the elbow. Following
the ancient principle that the good blood of a slaughtered animal drives out the bad blood of
female impurity, she hoped that the sacrifice would free her of certain “impediments”
(dabrk’olebebi) in her life’s course. She saw no contradiction between this ritual and the canons
of the Orthodox church; both were integral parts of her Christian faith, both marked her as a
Georgian and as a believer (morc’mune).
The remarkable religious system of the northeast Georgian (henceforth NEG) mountaineers,
with its imbedding of Christian symbols and saints in a distinctly non-Christian matrix, has
attracted the attention of ethnologists and folklorists since the mid-19th century. A number of
scholars — and talented amateurs native to the region, such as the poet Vazha-Pshavela — have
collected oral literature, ritual texts and ethnographic descriptions. Most of these materials
predate World War II, used as a convenient dividing point between what is considered to have
been an essentially intact mountain “paganism” and the congeries of beliefs and practices
observed today. (According to Charachidzй, the traditional NEG religious system “a sombrй
toute entiиre voici bientфt trente ans, ne laissant derriиre elle que de faibles remous vite disparus”
[1968: 717]. This would now appear to be an overly gloomy assessment, one that my Xevsurian
friend and her unfortunate lamb — if it could be revived and made to speak — would no doubt
http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj....dze.pdf
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