page_title: Dali (goddess)
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Dali (goddess) / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Trialeti silver cup, with thanks to the Georgian National Museum for allowing photography
context_page_description: Dali is a goddess who appears in the mythology of the Georgian people of the Caucasus region. She is most prominently attested in the stories of the Svan ethnic subgroup in northwestern Georgia. Other groups in western Georgia had similar figures considered equivalent to Dali, such as the Mingrelian goddess Tkashi-Mapa. She is a hunting goddess who serves as the patron of wild mountain animals such as ibex and deer. Hunters who obeyed her numerous taboos would be assured of success in the hunt; conversely, she would harshly punish any who violated them.
  She was usually described as a beautiful nude woman with golden hair and glowing skin, although she sometimes took on the form of her favored animals, usually with some marking to differentiate her from the herd. She was said to reside in a cavern high in the mountains, where she kept watch over the hoofed game animals who live on the cliffs. Dali was styled with a variety of regional epithets reflecting her different roles and associations.
context_section_description: Dali is attested primarily in surviving pieces of Svan folklore: myths, ballads, and round-dance songs. Linguistic anthropologist Kevin Tuite regards the surviving texts as fragmentary, representing "but a tiny fraction of the texts that would have been in circulation in the Svaneti of a few centuries ago". He also noted that most of these pieces would have been performed and likely composed by men, leaving any female perspective of Dali unclear.
  Dali is also attested in oral traditions recorded in modern academic fieldwork by Georgian academics such as Vera Bardavelidze in the 1930s and Elene Virsaladze in the 1950s–1970s. According to Virsaladze, Georgian culture exhibits an extraordinary degree of live retention of ancient folklore and traditions, possibly from as far back as 3300 years ago.
  It has been suggested that Dali, along with numerous other deities of Georgian mythology, had her origins in a now-lost common religion of the Kartvelian peoples. Variations on this idea were supported by the Georgian historians Nikolai Marr and Ivane Javakhishvili, both of whom independently theorized that the similarities in folklore between the various Georgian ethnic groups indicated a common religious origin. Dating the origin of this religion, and therefore of Dali in particular, may be impossible due to the lack of surviving written sources. The only thing that can be stated definitively is that these beliefs predate the arrival of Christianity in Georgia, which began in approximately the 3rd century.
  Folklorist Mikheil Chikovani considered the Trialeti Chalice, a Georgian artifact from approximately the 2nd millennium BCE, to depict a round dance or ritual dedicated to a goddess of the hunt comparable to Dali. He connected the motif of the animals on the lower portion of the chalice to the hoofed animals which Dali served as the protector of. Folklorist David Hunt also suggested the Chalice could be a depiction of a female mistress of beasts.
caption: Seated figure and procession on the front of the Trialeti Chalice
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