Ochopintre

Wet shale, the smell of cold stone, and a man lying flat against the slope with his breath held so the steam will not carry. Somewhere above him a tur works along a ledge, hooves ticking on rock. Before he can lift the rifle he has to ask, and he asks under his breath, into the ground: shepherd of the beasts, Ochopinte, I beg you, give me the head of the tur, let me kill it. The souls of the beasts are yours, are they not?

That last line carries the whole arrangement. The animals moving along the cliffs do not belong to the mountain and they certainly do not belong to the man watching them. They belong to Ochopintre, who pastures them the way a herdsman keeps stock, and who knows what he has. A hunter who forgets this is not a poacher. He is a thief working someone else’s field with the owner standing beside him.

The fullest account of him comes out of Khevsureti, in the eastern highlands, where the collectors of Khevsurian material wrote down what the hunters actually said. There he is Ochopinte, the shepherd of the beasts, and the souls of the animals have been placed in his keeping, so that without him no man kills anything. He is an unseen being. A Khevsur going up after tur made his plea every time, because the alternative was known and it was humiliating rather than dramatic.

Here is what happens to a man who does not ask. He climbs, he closes the distance, he gets to the edge of range, and Ochopinte speaks to the turs. Run, he tells them. A hunter is stalking you. The herd goes across ground no human can follow, and the man walks home with cold hands, beaten by a conversation he was never part of.

His name is a compound and half of it is much older than he is. The first element, ocho, is shared with the Mingrelian wild man Ochokochi and with the obscure Ochidali, and Ivane Javakhishvili tied it to bochi, a form of ochi or vochi, which in Mingrelian is the word for a male goat. Klaproth had recorded the same shape further north, where Chechen bodj meant a wild goat, though by Uslar’s time the word was being said as buozh. Vera Bardavelidze read ochi and bochi as the name of a protector of livestock rather than of game, which pulls the whole family toward the byre and away from the cliffs. The second element, pinte or pintre, has long been heard as the name of Pan. Bochi himself surfaces in writing early, in the Georgian translation of the church canons made by Euthymius the Athonite, where he stands in a list of idols to be destroyed alongside Gatsi, Badagon and Armazi. That list names Bochi. Nothing anywhere near that old carries the name Ochopintre.

The goat legs come from the same scholarly thread. Once the first half of the name is a male goat and the second half is Pan, a horned figure with a man’s chest and an animal’s legs practically assembles itself, and that is the picture that circulates. It is worth setting beside what the hunters said, which was nothing at all about his body. They knew where he stood on a question and they knew he was listening. They did not claim to have looked at him.

The eastern highlands gave the relationship a particular shape. Where the Svans of the western mountains told of Dali, golden haired and said to glow in the dark, who kept her herds from a cave and took favoured hunters to bed, the beast-patron of the east made a hunter his sworn brother instead. The exchange is concrete rather than romantic. A hunter gives Ochopintre an axe, and Ochopintre gives him a beast. Vazha-Pshavela built a new myth on that old bargain in his poem about a wounded tiger, where the patron of the animals comes to the hunter Tvareli in a tiger’s shape and the two of them end the poem as equals, with the man’s claim on the beast quietly taken away from him.

Vazha did something else with the name, and it is the strangest thing that ever happened to this god. By the late nineteenth century ochopintre had slid into common speech as an insult. In one of his sketches a peasant gets to his feet, unwashed for months on end, and Vazha calls him some ochopintre or other. The dictionary of Vazha’s vocabulary compiled by Aleksi Chincharauli, published in Tbilisi in 1969 under Arnold Chikobava’s editorship, gives both senses in one entry: under superstition, the protector deity of the beasts, the master of the beasts, and then, in this passage, a boor, a lout, an unfinished man. A shepherd of souls had become a word for somebody who does not wash.

What he can do follows from ownership rather than from strength. He does not fight hunters or throw them off ledges. He holds the souls of the animals, and so he settles which beast stands still and which one is warned, which is the only lever any owner needs. He can hand over a tur for the price of an axe, and he can withhold everything without ever being seen doing it.

What he cannot do follows from the same place. He is bound to the wild ground and the animals on it, and the old ochi and bochi material that would have given him barns and cattle belongs to a figure who is no longer quite him. He is not moved by a man’s character, only by the correct approach, so the arrangement works for anybody who learns it. And a brotherhood between near-equals can be broken from the human side, which is a risk no decree ever runs. Then the word itself came loose from him and turned into an insult, which is a kind of ending too.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ochopintre in Georgian mythology?

Ochopintre is the leader and protector of wild animals in Georgian mythology, best recorded in the eastern highland region of Khevsureti, where his name takes the form Ochopinte. Georgian tradition holds that he owns the soul of every wild animal, so a hunter cannot make a kill without his permission. Hunters prayed to him for luck and for consent both before setting out and during the hunt itself.

What did Khevsur hunters say to Ochopintre before a hunt?

A Khevsur stalking tur addressed him as the shepherd of the beasts, begged him for the head of the animal and for leave to kill it, and reminded him that the souls of the beasts were his. Only after that plea was the kill thought to be permitted. According to the Khevsurian material, a hunter who skipped it would find that Ochopinte had already told the turs to scatter.

Does Ochopintre have goat legs?

The goat-legged image comes from the reading of his name rather than from the hunters who prayed to him. Ivane Javakhishvili connected the first element of the name to bochi, a word for a male goat, and the second element has long been heard as the Greek Pan, so the literature pictures Ochopintre with a goat’s legs and a human body. The Khevsur record itself makes him invisible and describes no body at all.

What does the name Ochopintre mean?

The name splits in two. The first part, ocho, belongs to a small family of Georgian names that also includes Ochokochi and Ochidali, and Javakhishvili linked it to bochi, ochi or vochi, the Mingrelian word for a male goat; Vera Bardavelidze treated the same element as the name of a protector of livestock. The second part, pinte or pintre, is usually explained as the name of Pan.

How is Ochopintre different from Dali?

Dali is the Svan goddess of the western high mountains, golden haired and said to glow, who guards her herds from a cave and takes hunters she favours as lovers. Ochopintre belongs to the eastern side of the same mountain economy, and the bond he offers a hunter is sworn brotherhood rather than love, confirmed by a plain exchange in which the hunter gives an axe and receives a beast. Both of them punish a man who takes game without leave.

Related Entries

Dali, Amirani, Adgilis Deda, Devi (Georgian Giant), Kudiani, Paskunji, Armazi, Pan, Faunus, Silvanus, Cernunnos, Leshy, Curupira, Mielikki, Artemis