Zurab Kiknadze: the Explorer of Georgian Mythic-Religious Ideas

Abstract

This review of Georgian Mythology in two volumes (“Cross and Its Community” and “Parnavaz’s Dream”), issued by Ilia State University in 2016, presents one of the most significant scholarly projects of Zurab Kiknadze, a prominent Georgian thinker and intellectual. Reflections on these books reveal the leitmotif and the essence of the researcher’s entire intellectual heritage: the archetype of irreconcilable oppositions - the two (the real and the beyond) worlds, the visible and the invisible, the spatial and the temporal, the highland and the lowland, the dream and the reality, the sacred and the profane, the intransient and the transient. Z. Kiknadze’s highly influential work: Georgian Mythology (“Cross and Its Сommunity” and “Parnavaz’s Dream”) not only provides diverse interpretations of symbols, myths and patterns of religious behaviors but also elucidates the dichotomy of the two worlds, the structures of the sacred center and religious models that change in time and space.