Albasty is the female demon of childbirth, shared by the Tsezic peoples with the wider Caucasus and Central Asia, who preys on women in labour and their newborns. She may smother mother or child, or substitute a changeling for the infant, and in the fuller tale carries off the mother's lungs or liver toward running water, so that the woman dies if the organs touch the stream. Her name and the analogues that surround it, from the al of the Lezgins and the ali of the Georgians to the almasty of the Chechens and Ingush, reach back to deep antiquity. Scholars note that her magical attributes and surviving hints of a kindly role suggest that she was once a beneficent goddess of fertility, of the hearth and of the wild animals of the hunt, later blackened into a demon of the birth-chamber.