Barbal, in Svan Barbal or Barbol, took her name from Saint Barbara but carries a far older office as a goddess of the sun and of fertility. In the reconstruction of Georgian scholars she was in remote antiquity a solar deity of the proto-Georgian farming peoples, whose warmth ripened first the soil and then the womb of woman and beast; from this she became a goddess of the harvest, of childbearing, of poultry and cattle, and of healing. Her cult clusters about the winter feasts of fire and light, when torches and bonfires marked the sun's rebirth. She overlaps closely with the hearth-goddess Lamaria, and the two goddesses of the domestic and feminine sphere are at times treated as one.