Devi

The arrow came down and stuck upright in the fire, and not one of them could pull it out. Five brothers took turns at it. The two-headed one tried, then the three-headed, then the five-headed, the nine-headed and the ten-headed, and their mother, who had only the one head, watched them all fail. Somewhere out past the mountains was the archer. He was already on his way.

That is how a devi arrives in a Georgian story. Not as a description but as a house full of heads with a hero walking towards it.

The word came from abroad. Georgian *dev-i*, “evil spirit,” was borrowed from Middle Persian *dēw*, and behind that stand Old Persian *daiva-* and Avestan *daēva-*, the root that names the demons of the Zoroastrian world. It arrived in company. The same long centuries of Sasanian contact gave Georgian *eshmak-i* for a devil, *jojokhet-i* for hell, and *veshap-i* for a dragon. So the devi crossed the Caucasus with a bad reputation already attached. What Georgian tellers did with him afterwards was their own work entirely, and it was stranger and funnier than anything the loanword promised.

They made him enormous, hungry, and plural. Devis are almost never encountered singly. They come in families, brothers under one roof with a mother somewhere in the back, and the family is counted the way a treasury is counted: by heads. Nine brothers around a fire on the far side of the ninth mountain. Five brothers of two, three, five, nine and ten heads. The heads are the whole of the physical record. No source in the older collections bothers to say what colour a devi is, how his skin feels, or whether he has a tail, and the silence is not laziness. The head-count *is* the description, because the head-count is what a hero has to get through.

Beyond the ninth mountain there is a house with a fire burning in the middle of the room, and devis sitting round it warming their hands. That is the ordinary life of the species. They own a wishing-stone: they take it out when they are together, ask it for dinner, and dinner comes; ask it for supper, and there is supper. They live without care and without sorrow, which is a startling thing to read about a family of man-eaters. In another house nine brothers sleep around a kettle of arrack hung over the fire while a lame one keeps watch, and when a stray boy lifts the pot off the flames, eats his fill, puts it back and lies down snoring, it is the lame sentinel who talks the others out of eating him. He has done alone what is difficult for us ten, the lame devi says, and the arithmetic in that sentence has troubled nobody in a hundred and thirty years.

Their weaknesses grow straight out of that domestic ease. Devis sleep hard. They are vain, and they announce themselves: from fear of me the bird in heaven dare not fly, on earth the ant dare not crawl. They are hospitable to anyone who addresses them civilly, which is a fatal quality in a monster, and a guest who eats with them, drinks with them and sleeps with them becomes like their youngest brother in a matter of days. The boy who stole the wishing-stone got it by walking to the door four separate times, being caught by a door that shouted, putting the stone back, and going to bed. They burned the door. Then he took the stone and left. In a different tale, ten of them are locked up one after another by a town merchant in an argument over a golden slipper. An entire family of giants, undone by a shopkeeper.

The great exception is the tale of Ghvthisavari, whose arrow that was in the fire. He killed the devis’ mother, cut her to a hundred pieces and gave her to his dogs to throw in the sea, then lay down in their house and rested. The brothers came home one at a time to see what had happened to the last one, each boasting from the doorway, each dying on the same arrow. Only the ten-headed one gave trouble, and only because of a miscount. Ghvthisavari struck off his heads in a hurry and left the tenth on, and the soul was in the tenth. The devi came staggering out of the sea, hid under a tree in the garden, and did something no giant in these stories does. He waited. He talked the hero’s mother into carrying food out to him in secret, and then into loving him, and then into sending her son after stag’s horns, a wild boar’s bristle, and the flesh of a griffin’s young, each errand meant to kill him. The boy came back alive from all three. So the devi had him sealed in a bathtub with the lid nailed down and rolled into the sea, and the dogs went to the water’s edge and barked until the stones might have answered.

The other great devi belongs to the Amiran cycle. In the longest and most elaborate of the popular tales, an antelope with golden horns leads Amiran and his brothers Badri and Usib to a tower, where a document sends them out to find and kill the Devi Baqbaq. Amiran kills him, and three worms wriggle out of the three severed heads and confront the companions later as dragons, one white, one red, one black. Amiran takes the black one for himself and is swallowed for his trouble. The twelfth-century romance *Amiran-Darejaniani* knows Baqbaq too, but there the killing goes to Nosar instead, in an entirely different context, one of the seams where the written work and the oral cycle plainly refuse to line up.

What a devi can do is simple and physical. He is large, he is strong, he is many, he eats people, and at least one of him keeps his soul in a spare head. What he cannot do is think faster than a determined young man. Everything that beats a devi in these stories is small: an arrow, a politely worded greeting, a merchant’s suspicion, a pot of food taken off a fire without asking. The one time a devi survives the hero, it is not by cunning. It is because a tired boy with a sword lost count.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a devi in Georgian mythology?

A devi is a giant, man-eating ogre of Georgian folklore, usually many-headed and usually one of a family of brothers. Devis are the standard antagonists of the Georgian hero-tale, living in houses in remote mountain country and preying on anyone who passes. The Georgian plural is devebi.

How many heads does a devi have?

It varies by brother, and the tales count precisely. One Georgian folk tale gives a family of five devis with two, three, five, nine and ten heads, plus a mother who has only one. The number of heads matters because killing a devi means taking every one of them.

Who is Baqbaq Devi?

Baqbaq Devi is the best known named devi, the one killed in the tales of the hero Amiran after a document found in a tower sends Amiran and his brothers to hunt him. When his three heads come off, three worms crawl out of them and grow into dragons, one white, one red and one black. In the twelfth-century romance Amiran-Darejaniani he is killed by Nosar instead, in a completely different setting.

How do you kill a devi?

You take off every head, and you count them. In the tale of Ghvthisavari the hero cuts the heads from a ten-headed devi but leaves the tenth on in his haste, and because the devi’s soul was kept in that head, the monster survives and comes back for revenge. Devis are also beaten by trickery far more often than by strength, since they sleep heavily and are easily flattered.

Where does the word “devi” come from?

Georgian devi is an Iranian loanword, taken from Middle Persian dēw and ultimately from Old Persian daiva- and Avestan daēva-, the name of the Zoroastrian demons. It entered Georgian alongside a cluster of other borrowed religious terms including eshmak-i for devil and jojokhet-i for hell. The being the Georgian tales built around the borrowed name is their own invention.

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Amirani, Paskunji, Dali, Kudiani, Ochopintre, Adgilis Deda, Armazi, Div, Zahhak, Vishap, Tepegoz, Zmey Gorynych, Hydra, Jötunn