A Word That Never Stopped Being Used

Most pre-Christian gods leave the historical record the moment their worshippers convert: their names survive, if at all, in a chronicle written by someone who no longer believes in them. Ghmerti took the opposite path. The word did not fall out of use at Georgia's conversion in the early fourth century, it simply kept being used, carried straight across into Christian Georgian as the ordinary word for God, spoken today by every Georgian-speaking Christian without any sense of reaching back to a pre-Christian term. That continuity is exactly what makes the god behind the word so hard to see clearly. Every medieval Georgian chronicle that describes the pre-Christian pantheon headed by Armazi was itself written down by Christian monks already using ghmerti in its later, monotheistic sense, so a modern reader cannot simply take the word at face value in an old text and know whether it names one specific sky power standing apart from Armazi, an older and more diffuse Kartvelian sense of the divine, or was already sliding toward its later generic meaning even before Christianity arrived. Linguists can trace the word's Kartvelian root with some confidence; what they cannot do is reconstruct, from inside a vocabulary that survived its own religion, exactly how sharply that vocabulary once pointed at one god rather than at godhood in general. Armazi at least has an idol, a mountain and a destruction scene. Ghmerti has only the word itself, worn smooth by fifteen centuries of continuous use.