Æfsati

Æfsati is the master-of-game god of the Caucasian Nart Sagas. He owns the deer the way Tutyr owns the wolves. The hunter who wants meat prays at his shrine, takes what he is given, leaves a portion of the kill on the mountain, and observes the taboos. The hunter who takes more than was given is punished in his next hunt with a missed shot or a gored thigh.

The same name, Apsat, travels across the central Caucasus in four unrelated language families. The Iranian-speaking Ossetians say Æfsati. The Kartvelian-speaking Svans say Apsat. The Turkic-speaking Karachay-Balkars say Apsatı. The Northwest Caucasian Adyghe call the same role Mezithe; the Abkhaz call it Azhveipshaa; the Vainakh of Chechnya and Ingushetia call it Yelta. The cross-family spread is the strongest single argument that the figure is older than any of the languages now spoken in the mountains.

The four-family puzzle

Iranian, Kartvelian, Turkic, Northwest Caucasian. The four language families spoken in a forty-mile band around the Caucasus main range belong to four different deep stocks of the Eurasian linguistic map. They share little vocabulary and almost no grammar. They share a god of game.

The simplest explanation is that the role is older than the languages. When the Iranian-speaking ancestors of the Ossetians moved south from the Pontic steppe in the first millennium BCE they did not invent a master-of-game god from scratch. They learned the local one and translated his name into Iranian-mouth shape. The Karachay-Balkar Turkic-speakers who arrived later did the same. The Svans, who have lived in upper Svaneti since at least the Bronze Age, may have given the name to all of them. Or the name may have come up the trade routes from somewhere south of the mountains and spread by contact across all four communities. The mechanics are debated; the cross-family spread itself is settled.

This is the kind of comparative result that the standard scholarship on the Caucasus makes harder to wave away than the Indo-European parallels alone would. Cernunnos and Artemis sit thousands of miles from each other and may share a common Mesolithic substrate that is by now untestable. Æfsati and Apsat and Mezithe sit ten valleys from each other and trade hunters and shrines on a regular basis. The areal-Caucasian master-of-game figure is one of the cleanest live ethnographic survivals of the type anywhere in Eurasia.

What he looks like

The Ossetian Æfsati is a white-bearded old man, often blind in one eye, who lives in a forest hut with his wife and daughters. The hut sits in a clearing on a high pasture in the central Caucasus. His herds of deer move past the hut at night. In some saga episodes he gives one of his daughters in marriage to a hunter who has earned his favour, and the resulting line carries the wild blood of the master-of-game’s house.

The Karachay-Balkar Apsatı looks different. Sources cited in the Sipos ZTI Karachay ethnographic study describe him as originally a white mountain goat venerated by the people, later turned into a deity with a human face and a long white beard. He has a daughter, Baydimat-Fatimat, whom hunters fear to offend.

The Adyghe Mezithe looks different again. Circassian sources give him a ginger-red moustache, two great antlers, a golden-red topknot, and two sparrows perched on his shoulders. He rides a golden-bristled boar through the forests of the western Caucasus. The visual surface changes from culture to culture while the structural role stays.

This is one of the things to notice about areal religion as opposed to genealogical religion. The same job in the cosmos can be staffed by very different-looking persons. What survives across the language barrier is the role and the rules around it; the face stays local.

The hunter’s rules

The taboos around a Caucasian hunting party are stricter than the taboos around almost any other ritual context in the region.

The hunter prays at a sacred stone before he sets out. The Karachay-Balkar tradition concentrates these prayers at specific named stones, including Astotur’s stone in the Chegem valley and the Apsati stones higher up the range. He leaves an arrow and bread at the stone before the hunt. After the hunt he leaves part of the kill, often the heart and the liver, on the mountain. Roasting the heart and liver as offering is the Ossetian form. Hanging the antlers in the trees is another.

He avoids contact with menstruating women, foul language, and sexual activity in the days before the hunt. The Svan ethnography that Kevin Tuite worked through in his 2005 paper on Dali, the Svan goddess of horned mountain game, gives the most extensive published list of these taboos. The same general pattern holds for Æfsati’s Ossetian observance.

He does not take more than he is given. The Karachay-Balkar songs Biynöger and Jantugan narrate the deaths of two hunters who broke this rule. Apsatı punished one with a fall from a cliff and the other with a fatal wound from his own bow. The songs are still sung in the central Caucasus.

He does not kill a pregnant doe, hunt on certain days, or eat the kill in a manner that violates the taboo. He brings home what is given and divides it according to the customary rules of the hunting party.

The mood of the rite is negotiation. The hunter is asking for a gift. The deity is allowed to refuse. When the deity gives, he gives on terms, and the terms must be honoured.

Saint Eustace and the stag

Æfsati did not survive untouched by the Christian period. He was assimilated to Saint Eustace (Eustathios in Greek, Eustachius in Latin), the Roman general who, according to his hagiography, converted to Christianity around 118 CE near Tivoli when a stag he was hunting turned and showed him a glowing crucifix between its antlers. He was later martyred under Hadrian. The Eastern church kept him as the patron of hunters. The Latin church included him in the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

Saint Eustace fitted Æfsati the way a glove fits a hand. The saint was a hunter who had encountered the holy in a stag and who already stood between the hunter and the deer. The Caucasian assimilation, when it came, was a recognition rather than a substitution. The Christian story did not have to overwrite the older one. The two stories were close enough that a Caucasian hunter on the right mountain could keep doing what he had always done while telling himself the patron’s name was now Eustace.

This is the cleanest available example of a pagan-Christian fit in the Caucasus. Tutyr got Saint Theodore, Donbettyr got Saint Peter, Uastyrdzhi got Saint George, but those assimilations had to bend the saint somewhat to fit the role. Eustace and Æfsati were already shaped for each other before they met.

In the Nart cycle

Both Colarusso volumes preserve hunter-meets-master-of-game episodes in which the deity grants or denies game to a Nart hunter and the consequences of the grant or the denial drive the rest of the story. The Adyghe Mezithe appears in the Circassian volume; the Ossetian Æfsati in the 2016 Tales of the Narts. The pattern is the same in both.

The hunter goes into the forest. He prays. He kills, or he fails to kill. If he killed without permission he meets a stranger on the way back, often an old man with a long white beard, who asks for a portion of the meat and is refused or insulted. The old man reveals himself as the master of game. The hunter’s next hunt fails or his line of sons withers. If the hunter shared the meat properly the old man blesses him, and the next hunt is a triumph.

The narrative pattern is one of the most-told in Caucasian oral tradition and is the structural analogue of the Greek xenia scene where a stranger turns out to be a god in disguise. The shared deep type is what comparative folklorists call the disguised tester. The Caucasian version places the test in the forest and centres it on the meat.

The Indo-European master-of-animals type

The master or mistress of animals is one of the deepest comparative figures in the Eurasian religious record.

Artemis in her epithet Potnia Theron (“Mistress of Beasts,” Iliad XXI.470) is the Greek face of the type. The phrase is older than Homer; Mycenaean Linear B tablets mention a po-ti-ni-ja of unspecified domain that scholars have plausibly linked to the same role. The Roman Diana is Artemis’s interpretatio.

Cernunnos, the Celtic antlered god named on the Pillar of the Boatmen in Paris (1st century CE) and depicted in the cross-legged stag-and-serpent pose on the Gundestrup cauldron (1st-2nd century BCE, found in Denmark, of Gallic workmanship), is the Celtic face. He sits surrounded by his animals, antlered like the deer he owns, holding a torc and a ram-horned serpent. The structural identity with Æfsati is one of the strongest single comparative parallels in the bestiary.

Skaði the huntress and Ullr the hunter-archer split the role in Norse mythology. Veles in his forest aspect plays it in Slavic tradition. Pashupati, “Lord of Beasts,” is one of Shiva’s epithets, and the famous Mohenjo-daro seal (c. 2350-2000 BCE) is contested but at least possibly an Indus Valley precursor.

The honest scholarly position is that this is a structural parallel rather than a demonstrable genealogical descent. Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) treated the Eurasian hunter-religion as a deep substrate. Karl Meuli in his 1946 paper on Greek sacrificial practice argued that Greek sacrifice carries Mesolithic hunter-religion bones underneath the polis-classical surface. The line of argument is that the master-of-animals role goes back to the long Stone Age period when Eurasian humans were primarily hunters and the relation to the prey animal was the central religious problem of life. Cernunnos and Æfsati are the same answer to the same question, given by two cultures separated by three thousand miles, drawn from a substrate that may be older than any of the daughter cultures that preserve it.

The figure today

The Svan hunting cult continued into the 20th century. Vera Bardavelidze in her 1957 book on ancient Georgian religion and ritual graphic art documented surviving songs and shrines in the upper Inguri valley. The Svan high-pasture shrines were still in use when she did her fieldwork.

The Karachay-Balkar Apsatı continued to receive offerings at his stones into the early 20th century, documented in the ZTI Karachay ethnographic project.

In North Ossetia the Assianism (Уацдин) revival movement, which has been formalising the Ossetian pre-Christian religion since the 1990s, has reincorporated Æfsati as one of the zædtæ, the deities of the Ossetian pantheon. He receives prayers from contemporary Ossetian hunters. The shrines in the high pastures are honoured again.

When an old hunter in the Svan or Ossetian or Karachay-Balkar high pastures kills a stag and hangs the antlers in a tree, he is performing a rite that the central Caucasus has been performing since before the first Indo-European speaker walked into the Daryal Pass. The role outlasted the languages that named it.

For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. For the wolf-side counterpart of Æfsati’s prey-side domain, see Tutyr. For the river god whose Christianised name follows the same assimilation pattern, see Donbettyr. For the smith of the cycle, see Tlepsh / Kurdalægon.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Colarusso, J. Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs. Princeton University Press, 2002 (paperback reissue 2016, ISBN 9780691169149)
• Colarusso, J., and Salbiev, T. (eds.), Walter May (trans.). Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians. Princeton University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780691170404
• Abaev, V. I. Историко-этимологический словарь осетинского языка / Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language, Vol. I (A-K’), Moscow-Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1958
• Bardavelidze, V. Древнейшие религиозные верования и обрядовое графическое искусство грузинских племён / Ancient Religious Beliefs and Ritual Graphic Art of the Georgian Tribes. Tbilisi: Mecniereba, 1957
• Charachidzé, G. Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne. Paris: Maspero, 1968
• Tuite, K. ‘The Meaning of Dæl: Symbolic and Spatial Associations of the South Caucasian Goddess of Game Animals,’ Université de Montréal, 2005
• Virsaladze, E. Georgian Hunting Myth and Poetry. (multiple editions)
• Dumézil, G. Romans de Scythie et d’alentour. Paris: Payot, 1978
• Eliade, M. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen Series LXXVI, Princeton University Press, 1964
• Meuli, K. ‘Griechische Opferbräuche,’ in Phyllobolia für Peter Von der Mühll, Basel: Schwabe, 1946