The Shamanic Themes in Georgian Folktales

126 Pages·2008·0.816 MB·English

by  Michael Berman

The Shamanic Themes
in Georgian Folktales

The Shamanic Themes
in Georgian Folktales

By

Michael Berman

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
The Shamanic Themes in Georgian Folktales, by Michael Berman

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Michael Berman

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-586-X, ISBN (13): 9781847185860
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements....................................................................................vi

Introduction.................................................................................................1

The Prologue: The Tale of Tales...............................................................15

Chapter 1: The Earth will take its Own.....................................................17

Chapter 2: Davit........................................................................................37

Chapter 3: About the Young Man turned to Stone....................................47

Chapter 4: The Horse Lurja.......................................................................59

Chapter 5: The Daughter of the Sun..........................................................68

Chapter 6: The Pig Bride...........................................................................85

Chapter 7: Tsikara.....................................................................................90

Chapter 8: The Frog’s Skin.......................................................................99

The Epilogue: The Kinto and the King....................................................108

Bibliography............................................................................................111

Index........................................................................................................116
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“In 1795, Johann Blumenbach was trying to categorise the races of the
world and using skull types as one of the bases for his work. He came
across a particularly beautiful skull, one that he felt represented the
loveliest characteristics of the majority of European types. It had belonged
to a Georgian woman” (Anderson, 2003, p.15). And it was a Georgian
woman who first aroused my interest in the country and its traditions. This
coupled with my interest in Religious Studies and shamanism in particular,
led to the writing of this book. So my thanks go both to the woman in
question Ketevan Kalandadze, now my wife, and Jonathan Horwitz, my
teacher and founder of the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies,
without whom this study would never have materialized.
INTRODUCTION

To sum up Georgia in a single phrase would be to describe it as a
country of contrasts. In an area the size of Ireland, people can “ski in the
morning, swim a couple of hours later in a warm Black Sea, stand with
their backs to some of the world’s most awesome mountains (the Caucasus
have 12 peaks higher than Mt Blanc), yet face an arid, desert terrain,
where former inhabitants carved towns into hillsides as the only shelter”
(Naysmith, 1998, p.6). Bounded by Russia to the north and northeast,
Azerbaijan to the east, the Black Sea to the west, and Armenia and Turkey
to the south, Georgia or Sakartvelo (“the homeland of the Kartvelians”–
which is how the Georgians refer to themselves) also contains one of the
world’s most prolific, reputedly the oldest, and probably the least known
wine districts, together with tea and tobacco plantations thriving 40km
from regions too cold even to grow tomatoes in1. For these reasons and
many more, when people ask you what it can be compared to, there is
really no answer as it is a place that cannot possibly be pigeon-holed, as
any visitor to the region will unfailingly confirm.

Although the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches took
the place of the old religions in Europe and across western Eurasia,this
applied mainly to the urban centres.
Beyond the borders of Rome’s control, in the most northern and eastern
fringes and on the western isles, and in the rural environments amongst the
“country folk” or pagani, the old religions continued, perjoratively
designated after them as Paganism. Even when officially Christianized, the
religion of the Pagans remained an assimilation, merely an overlay of the
newer cults, or it passed unnoticed under other names, with its myths and
beliefs adapting and surviving primarily in less objectionable forms such as

1 “Viticulture may well have begun either near the Caspian or in a region including
Colchis, where at two sites dating to the fourth millennium BC the earliest material
evidence has been found, in the form of grape-pips in accumulations associated
with stores of chestnuts, hazlenuts and acorns, these too being for food, at the same
sites. These accumulations could indeed have been the outcome of food-gathering
rather than of harvesting of cultivated vines, but this seems rather unlikely”
(Burney & Lang, 1971, p.11).
2 Introduction
folktales and bizarre or quaint festival rites (Ruck, Staples, et al., 2007,
p.3).
This is very much what occurred in the case of Georgian paganism too.
Not only can reminders be found in the traditional dances, songs, and rites
still being performed, but also in the folktales still being told. Bilocation
(the apparent ability to be in two places at the same time), having animal
familiars and / or healing powers, undertaking spiritual journeys, carrying
out soul retrievals, and practising divination, are all elements to be found
the stories chosen for inclusion in this collection, and they are also, as we
shall see, all elements typically associated with shamanism.

[A]lthough Georgia has been a nominally Orthodox Christian country
since the 4th century, an indigenous pre-Christian religion was actively
practiced in many parts of Georgia up to the beginning of this century and
even more recently in some areas, where, with the restriction of official
Georgian Orthodox activities under the Soviet regime, syncretistic
Christian-pagan rites conducted by the village elders had become the sole
forms of worship (Tuite, 1995, p.13).

Even after so many centuries of Christianity in Georgia, many
elements of paganism live on in the country to this day:

Hellenism and Zoroastrianism are long forgotten, but the people have gone
back to far older traditions. The cult of the Moon God lives on in the
veneration of St George, who is also known as Tetri Georgi, or “White
George”. The Georgian Shrovetide festival of fertitlity and rebirth is
entirely pagan in inspiration. It is called Berikaoba, and involves
processions and orgiastic carnivals in which the act of sexual intercourse is
mimed, and ancient phallic rites are perpetuated from year to year (Burney
& Lang, 1971, p.224).

The custom of spending Easter Monday eating and drinking in
cemeteries, by the tombs of one’s ancestors, clearly has pagan origins too.

The Georgian-French scholar G. Charachidzé describes and analyses
Georgian “paganism” in Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne
(1968), though it has to be said that not all specialists in the field share his
view. The Georgian ethnographer Zurab K’ik’nadze, for example, regards
the religious system described by Charachidzé “as an innovation cobbled
together out of Christian elements in the late middle ages, after Mongol
and Persian invasions had cut off the mountains and other peripheral areas
The Shamanic Themes in Georgian Folktales 3
from the cultural hegemony of the orthodox Orthodox center” (Tuite,
1995, p.13).

Yet another possibility exists however, which is that the origins of
Georgian paganism date back even further into the distant past, when
shamanism was practised in the land.

Let us consider Georgian cosmology, for example. As is frequently the
case among indigenous peoples who practise shamanism, the universe is
believed to consist of three superimposed worlds. They are: “(1) the space
above the earth (the celestial world); (2) the earthly space (the surface of
the earth); (3) the space below the earth (the netherworld). On the highest
level are the gods; on the lowest, the demons and dragons; between the
two, in the middle world, men, animals, plants, etc” (Bonnefoy, 1993,
p.255).

As for Georgian paganism, it is perhaps best described as a revealed
religion, not one that was revealed at the beginning of historical time by
means of speech that has been preserved orally or in writing, as is the case
with Judaism or Islam, but one that is made manifest each time the soul of
a human being is possessed by a Hat´i (a divinity). That person, who is
then regarded as being officially possessed, becomes a sort of shaman and
is known as a Kadag. “When the Kadag goes into trance, on the occasion
of a religious ritual or an event marking individual or collective life, he
speaks, and it is then the god who is speaking through his mouth”
(Bonnefoy, 1993, p.255). The priest-sacrificer is similarly chosen by what
can be termed divine election made manifest through possession. His
function however is multi-purpose, not only to perform rites but also to act
as the political and military chief of the community.

While the more accessible central lowlands of Georgia have served as
a virtual crossroads between the East and the West,

the inhabitants of the northern Georgian mountain districts, both east and
west of the Likhi range—some of which had never yielded to a foreign
army until the tsarist period—have held on to their ancient folkways and
pre-Christian religious systems to a degree unparalleled in modern Europe.
Until very recently, [for example] oracles (kadagebi) practiced their trade
within a few dozen kilometers of Tbilisi; [and] animal sacrifices and the
pouring of libations, traditions reminiscent of Homeric Greece, are still
commonly observed in many parts of Georgia today (Tuite, 1995, p.11).