Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

§ 2. The Composition of the Superstition. Slavonic, Ecclesiastical, and Hellenic Contributions.

Vrykolakes are not ghosts. Such is the first observation which I am compelled to make and which the reader of the last chapter might well consider superfluous. But so many Greek writers, and with them even Bernhard Schmidt[996], have fallen into the error of comparing ancient ghost-stories with modern tales about vrykolakes, without apparently recognising the essential and fundamental difference between them, that some insistence upon the point is necessary. That a definite and close relation does indeed subsist between the ancient belief in wandering spirits and the modern belief in wandering corpses, I readily admit, and with that relation I shall deal later; but the issue before us can only be kept clear by remembering that vrykolakes are not ghosts. There is absolute unanimity among the Greek peasants in their belief that the corpse itself is the vrykolakas, and even the work of re-animating the corpse is generally credited not to the soul which formerly inhabited it, but to the Devil. Thus it appears that whereas most peoples believe to some extent in the return of the ghosts or spirits of the dead, the Greeks fear rather the return of their bodies. If then we can determine what part, if any, of this superstition is genuinely Hellenic, we shall have gained a step in our knowledge of the ideas popularly held in ancient Greece concerning the condition and the relations of soul and body after death.

The view which I take is briefly this, that though Slavonic influence is very conspicuous in the modern superstition as I have described it, yet the whole superstition has not been transplanted root and branch from Slavonic to Greek soil, but the growth, as we now see it and as the writers of the seventeenth century saw it, is the result of the grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock; and further, that before that process began the old pagan Greek element in the superstition had been modified in certain respects by ecclesiastical influence. This is the view which I propose to develop in this section; and my method will be to work back from the modern superstition, removing first the Slavonic and then the ecclesiastical elements in it, and so leaving a residue of purely Hellenic belief.

To Slavonic influence is due first of all the actual word vrykolakas, the derivation of which need not long detain us. Patriotic attempts have indeed been made by Greeks to deny its Slavonic origin, the most plausible being that of Coraës[997], who selecting the local form βορβόλακας sought to identify it with a supposed ancient form μορμόλυξ (= μορμολύκη, μορμολυκεῖον), a ‘bugbear’ or ‘hobgoblin’ of some kind. But there need be no hesitation in pronouncing this suggestion wrong and in asserting the identity of the modern Greek word with a word which runs through all the Slavonic languages. This word is in form a compound of which the first half means ‘wolf’ and the second has been less certainly identified with dlaka, the ‘hair’ of a cow or horse. But, however the meaning of the compound has been obtained, it is, in the actual usage of all Slavonic languages save one, the exact equivalent of our ‘were-wolf[998].’ That one exception is the Serbian language in which it is said to bear rather the sense of ‘vampire[999].’ If this is true, the reason for the transition of meaning lies probably in the belief current among the Slavonic peoples in general that a man who has been a were-wolf in his lifetime becomes a vampire after death[1000]. Yet in general there is no confusion of nomenclature. Although the depredations of the were-wolf and of the vampire are similar in character, the line of demarcation between the living and the dead is kept clear, and the great mass of the Slavonic peoples apply only to the living that word from which the Greek vrykolakas comes, and to the dead the word which we have borrowed in the form ‘vampire[1001].’

Now among the Greeks the latter word is almost unknown; in parts of Macedonia indeed where the Greek population lives in constant touch with Slavonic peoples, a form βάμπυρας or βόμπυρας has been adopted and is used as a synonym of vrykolakas in its ordinary Greek sense[1002]; but in Greece proper and in the Greek islands the word ‘vampire’ is, so far as I can discover, absolutely non-existent, and it is vrykolakas which ordinarily denotes the resuscitated corpse. In discriminating therefore between the Slavonic and the Greek elements in the modern Greek superstition it is of some importance to determine in which sense the Greeks originally borrowed the word vrykolakas which at the present day they in general employ in a different sense from that which both etymology and general Slavonic usage accord to it. Was it originally borrowed in the sense of ‘were-wolf’ or in the sense of ‘vampire’?

Among Slavonic peoples the only one said to have transferred the word vrykolakas from its original meaning to that of ‘vampire’ is the Serbian; and the Greeks therefore, in order to have borrowed the word in that sense, would have had to borrow direct from the Serbian language. But linguistic evidence renders that hypothesis untenable. All the many Greek dialectic forms of the word vrykolakas concur in showing a liquid (ρ or λ) in the first syllable; while Serbian is among the two or three Slavonic languages which have discarded that liquid. It follows therefore that the Greeks borrowed the word from some Slavonic language other than Serbian, and consequently from some language which used and still uses that word in the sense of ‘were-wolf.’

Further, there is evidence that in the Greek language itself the word vrykolakas does even now locally and occasionally bear its original significance. This usage indeed is flatly denied by Bernhard Schmidt, who, having accurately distinguished the were-wolf and the vampire, states that ‘the modern Greek vrykolakas answers only to the latter[1003].’ This pronouncement however was made in the face of two strong pieces of independent evidence to the contrary, which Schmidt notices and dismisses in a footnote[1004]. The first witness is Hanush[1005], who was plainly told by a Greek of Mytilene that there were two kinds of vrykolakes, the one kind being men already dead, and the other still living men who were subject to a kind of somnambulism and were seen abroad particularly on moonlight nights. The other authority is Cyprien Robert[1006], who describes the vrykolakes of Thessaly and Epirus thus: ‘These are living men mastered by a kind of somnambulism, who seized by a thirst for blood go forth at night from their shepherd’s-huts, and scour the country biting and tearing all that they meet both man and beast.’

To these two pieces of testimony—strong enough, it might be thought, in their mutual agreement to merit more than passing notice and arbitrary rejection—I can add confirmation of more recent date. In Cyprus, during excavations carried out in the spring of 1899 under the auspices of the British Museum, the directors of the enterprise heard from their workmen several stories dealing with the detection of a vrykolakas. The outline of these stories (to which Tenos furnishes many parallels[1007], though in these latter I have not found the word vrykolakas employed) is as follows. The inhabitants of a particular village, having suffered from various nocturnal depredations, determine to keep watch at night for the marauder. Having duly armed themselves they maintain a strict vigil, and are rewarded by seeing a vrykolakas. Thereupon one of them with gun or sword succeeds in inflicting a wound upon the monster, which however for the nonce escapes. But the next day a man of the village, who had not been among the watchers of the night, is observed to bear a wound exactly corresponding with that which the assailant of the vrykolakas had dealt; and being taxed with it the man confesses himself to be a vrykolakas.

Similarly on the borders of Aetolia and Acarnania, in the neighbourhood of Agrinion, I myself ascertained that the word vrykolakas was occasionally applied to living persons in the sense of were-wolf, although there as elsewhere it more commonly denotes a resuscitated corpse. Lycanthropy, as has been observed in a previous chapter[1008], is in Greece often imputed to children. In the district mentioned this is conspicuously the case. If one or more children in a family die without evident cause, the mother will often regard the smallest or weakliest of the survivors—more especially one in any way deformed or demented—as guilty of the brothers’ or sisters’ deaths, and the suspect is called a vrykolakas. Εἶσαι βρυκόλακας καὶ ’φάγες τὸν ἀδερφό σου, ‘you are a vrykolakas and have devoured your brother,’ is the charge hurled at the helpless infant, and ill-treatment to match is meted out in the hope of deterring it from its bloodthirsty ways.

In effect from four widely separated parts of the Greek world—Mytilene, Cyprus, the neighbourhood of Agrinion, and the district of Thessaly and Epirus—comes one and the same statement, that to the word vrykolakas is still, or has recently been, attached its etymologically correct meaning ‘were-wolf’; and, since these isolated local usages cannot be explained otherwise than as survivals of an usage which was once general, they constitute a second proof that the Greeks originally adopted the word in the sense in which the vast majority of the Slavonic races continue down to this day to employ it.

But while it is thus certain that the Greeks first learnt and acquired the word vrykolakas in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ it is equally certain that the main characteristics of the monster to which that name is now applied are those of the Slavonic ‘vampire.’ The appearance and the habits of the re-animated corpse according to Slavonic superstition differ hardly at all from those described in the last chapter. Indeed the question is not so much whether the Greeks are indebted to the Slavs in respect of this belief, as what is the extent of their indebtedness. Is the whole superstition a foreign importation, or is it only partly alien and partly native?

The former alternative is rendered improbable in the first place by the fact that the Greeks have not adopted the word ‘vampire.’ If the whole idea of dead men remaining under certain conditions incorrupt and emerging from their graves to work havoc among living men had been first communicated to them by the Slavs, they must almost inevitably have borrowed the name by which the Slavs described those men. But since in fact they did not adopt the Slavonic name ‘vampire,’ it is probable that they already possessed in their own language some word adequate to express that idea, and therefore possessed also some native superstition concerning resuscitation of the dead which Slavonic influence merely modified.

Further, there is positive evidence that such a word or words existed; for there have been, and still are, dialects which employ a word of Greek formation in preference not merely to the word ‘vampire,’ which seems to be unknown in Greece proper, but even to the misapplied Slavonic word vrykolakas. Thus Leo Allatius was familiar with the word τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drum-like,’ but whether in his day it belonged especially to his native island Chios[1009] or was still in general usage, he does not record. At the present day it survives only, so far as I know, in Cythnos, where also ἄλυτος, ‘incorrupt,’ is used as another synonym[1010]. From Cythera are reported three names, ἀνάρραχο, λάμπασμα, and λάμπαστρο[1011], evidently Greek in formation but to me, I must confess, unintelligible. In Cyprus (where, as we have seen, the word vrykolakas may still bear its old sense ‘were-wolf’) the revenant is named σαρκωμένος[1012], because his swollen appearance suggests that he has ‘put on flesh,’ or more rarely στοιχειωμένος[1013], perhaps with the idea that he has become the ‘genius’ (στοιχειό)[1014] of some particular locality. Again, from the village of Pyrgos in Tenos is reported the word ἀναικαθούμενος[1015] meaning apparently one who ‘sits up’ in his grave. Finally, in Crete the name popularly employed is καταχανᾶς[1016], the origin of which is not certain. Bernhard Schmidt[1017], following Koraës[1018], derives it from κατὰ and χάνω (= ancient Greek χαόω), ‘lose,’ ‘destroy,’ and would have it mean accordingly ‘destroyer.’ I would suggest that derivation from κατὰ and the root χαν-, ‘gape,’ ‘yawn,’ is at least equally probable, inasmuch as other local names such as τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drumlike,’ and σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ have reference to the monster’s personal appearance, and the ‘gaper’ in like manner would be a name eminently suitable to a creature among whose features are numbered by Leo Allatius ‘a gaping mouth and gleaming teeth[1019].’ The same name was some forty years ago[1020], and probably still is, used in Rhodes, and in a Rhodian poem of the fifteenth century occurs both in its literal sense and as a term of abuse[1021]. This secondary usage however is in no way a proof that the word meant originally ‘destroyer’ rather than ‘gaper’; for by the fifteenth century there can be little doubt that the revenant was everywhere an object of horror, and therefore his name, whatever it originally meant, furnished a convenient term of vituperation. But one thing at least is clear, that καταχανᾶς, whichever interpretation of it be right, is certainly a word of Greek origin no less than the others which I have enumerated.

Now all these dialectic Greek names are found, it will have been observed, only in certain of the Greek islands, while on the mainland vrykolakas has come to be universally employed. But it was the mainland which was particularly exposed to Slavonic immigration and influence, while islands like Crete and Cyprus were practically immune. Hence, while the mainland gradually adopted a Slavonic word, it was likely enough that some of the islands should retain their own Greek terms, even though in the course of their relations with the mainland they became acquainted also with the new Slavonic word. These insular names for the vrykolakas may therefore be regarded as survivals from a pre-Slavonic period, and, though they are now merely dialectic, it is reasonable to suppose that one or more of them formerly held a place in the language of mainlanders and islanders alike. But the existence of such words presupposes the existence of a belief in some kind of resuscitated beings denoted by them. In other words, the Greeks when first brought into contact with the Slavs already possessed a belief in the re-animation and activity of certain dead persons, which so far resembled the Slavonic belief in vampirism, that the Slavonic vampire could be adequately denoted by some Greek word or words already existing and there was no need to adopt the Slavonic name.

I claim then to have established two important points: first, that the word vrykolakas was originally borrowed by the Greeks from the Slavs in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ though now it is almost universally employed in the sense of ‘vampire’; secondly, that, whatever ideas concerning vampires the Greeks may have learnt from the Slavs, they did not adopt the Slavonic word ‘vampire’ but employed one of those native Greek words, such as τυμπανιαῖος or καταχανᾶς, which are still in local usage; whence it follows that some superstition anent re-animated corpses existed in Greece before the coming of the Slavs.

These points being established, I am now in a position to trace the development of the superstition in Greece from the time of the Slavonic immigrations onward, and to show how it came to pass that, whereas in the tenth century, let us say, when the Greeks had had ample time to imbibe Slavonic superstitions, vrykolakas meant a ‘were-wolf,’ and a ‘vampire’ was denoted by τυμπανιαῖος or some other Greek word, nowadays vrykolakas almost always means a ‘vampire’ and τυμπανιαῖος is well-nigh obsolete.

The Slavs brought with them into Greece two superstitions, the one concerning were-wolves and the other concerning vampires. The old Hellenic belief in lycanthropy was apparently at that time weak—confined perhaps to a few districts only—for the Greeks borrowed from the invaders their word vrykolakas in the place of the old λυκάνθρωπος[1022], by which to express the idea of a ‘were-wolf.’ They also learnt the Slavonic superstition concerning vampires, but in this case did not borrow the word ‘vampire’ but expressed the notion adequately by means of one of those words which now survive only in insular dialects—adequately, I say, but not exactly. For—and here I must anticipate what will be proved later—the Greeks denoted by those words a revenant but not a vampire. They believed in the incorruptibility and the re-animation of certain classes of dead men, but they did not impute to these revenants the savagery which is implied by the name ‘vampire.’ The dead who returned from their graves acted, it was held, as reasonable men, not as ferocious brutes. This did not of course exclude the idea that a revenant might return to seek revenge where vengeance was due; he was not necessarily peaceable; but if he exacted even the life of one who had wronged him, the act of vengeance was reasonable. To the proof of this, as I have said, I shall come later on; here I will only point out that the names which survive in the island-dialects are perfectly consistent with my view. Of the words τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drumlike,’ σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ στοιχειωμένος, ‘genius,’ ἀναικαθούμενος, ‘sitting up’ in the grave, and, if my interpretation is right, καταχανᾶς, ‘gaper,’ not one suggests any inherent ferocity in the resuscitated dead.

Nevertheless, when the Greeks first heard of the Slavonic ‘vampire,’ they naturally regarded it merely as a new and particularly vicious species of the genus revenant. Their own words for the genus implied no idea beyond that of the resuscitation of the dead, and were therefore no less applicable to the uniformly ferocious Slavonic variety than to the more reasonable and human type with which they themselves were familiar. They therefore did not require the word ‘vampire,’ but were content at first to comprise all revenants, whatever their character, under one or other of the existing Greek names.

Subsequently however, it appears, a change took place. The Slavonic superstition concerning were-wolves included then, we may suppose, as it includes now[1023], the idea that were-wolves become after death vampires. The Greeks, who borrowed from the Slavs the very name of the were-wolf, must therewith have learnt that these vrykolakes as they then called them were among the classes of men who were liable to vampirism; and in this particular case it would surely have seemed natural to them that the revenant should be conspicuous for ferocity. The conduct of a reasonable being could not be expected after death from one who in his lifetime had suffered from lycanthropic mania; or rather, if there could be any reason in his conduct, the most reasonable and consistent thing would be for him to turn vampire.

Thus one class of revenants came to be distinguished in the now composite Greek superstition by its wanton and blood-thirsty character; and in order to mark this distinction in speech also the Greeks, it would seem, began to call one who from a were-wolf had become a genuine vampire by the same name after as before death, vrykolakas, while to the more reasonable and human revenants they still applied some such term as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike.’

By the seventeenth century the superstition had undergone a further change, which is reflected in the usage of the word τυμπανιαῖος. In proportion as the horror of real vrykolakes had grown and spread, the very memory of the more innocent kind of revenants had faded, until the genus revenant was represented only by the species vrykolakas. The word τυμπανιαῖος was indeed still known, but Leo Allatius was undoubtedly following the popular usage of his time when he made it synonymous with vrykolakas; for those narratives of the seventeenth century from which I have quoted above make it abundantly clear that the common-folk had come to suspect all revenants alike of predatory propensities.

This change in popular beliefs placed the Church in an awkward predicament, and was the cause of a marked divergence between the popular and the clerical usages of the word τυμπανιαῖος. It had long been claimed that a sentence of excommunication was binding upon a man even beyond death and could arrest the natural process of decomposition; indeed the formula officially employed ended, as Father Richard of Santorini notes, with the phrase, ‘and after death to remain indissoluble.’ But when the fear of real vampires spread over Greece, the priests would naturally have been unwilling to be held responsible for the resuscitation of such pests, while they were equally unwilling to diminish the terrors of excommunication by omitting the final imprecation. Their only course therefore was to emphasize what seems indeed to have been always the authorised doctrine of the Church, that excommunicated persons remained indeed incorrupt and ‘drum-like,’ but were not, like vrykolakes, subject to diabolical re-animation. It is Father Richard’s acceptance of this clerical view which explains why, writing as he did some few years after Leo Allatius, he distinguished the two words which Leo had treated as synonymous, making resuscitation the criterion of the vrykolakas and stating that the ‘drum-like’ body, though withheld from natural decay, lay quiet in its grave. But the ecclesiastical doctrine made no impression upon the popular belief; to this very day the common-folk regard any corpse which is found incorrupt as a potential vrykolakas, and excommunication is everywhere numbered among the causes of vampirism.

Thus it has come to pass that any revenants other than the savage vrykolakes are well-nigh forgotten, and in most districts their very name is no longer heard. The word vrykolakes, which first meant were-wolves, came to denote also the vampires into which were-wolves changed, and gradually, as these vampires by exciting men’s horror and concentrating on themselves the people’s attention became the predominant class of revenants, ousted from the very speech of Greece as a whole the old Greek names for the more harmless sort, and established itself as the regular equivalent of revenant.

Such is my solution of the somewhat complex problem of nomenclature; and in presenting it I have incidentally stated my view that the genuinely Greek element in the modern superstition is a belief in the incorruptibility and re-appearance of dead persons under certain special conditions, and that the imported and now dominant element is the Slavonic belief that the resuscitation of the dead renders them necessarily predatory vampires. This I now have to prove.

It is a well-established characteristic of the Slavonic vampire that his violence is directed first and foremost against his nearest of kin. The same trait is so pronounced too in the modern Greek vrykolakas that it has given rise to the proverb, ὁ βρυκόλακας ἀρχίζει ἀπὸ τὰ γένειά του, ‘the vrykolakas begins with his own beard’—a saying which carries a double meaning, so a peasant told me. It may be taken literally, inasmuch as the vrykolakas usually appears bald and beardless; but the words τὰ γένειά του, ‘his beard,’ are popularly understood as a substitute, half jocose and half euphemistic, for τὴ γενεά του, ‘his family.’ In other words, this most deadly of pagan pests, like the most lively of Christian virtues, begins at home.

Such being the acknowledged and even proverbial habits of the vrykolakas, nothing, it might be supposed, could be more repugnant and fearful to the near relations of a dead man than the possibility that he would turn vrykolakas and return straightway to devour them. The first sufferers from such an eventuality would be the man’s own kinsfolk, the next his acquaintances and fellow-villagers, but he himself would appear to be aggressor rather than sufferer. Nevertheless, in face of this consideration, there is no more commodious form of curse in popular usage than the ejaculation of a prayer that the person who has incurred one’s displeasure may be withheld from corruption after death and return from his grave. I have heard it extended even to a recalcitrant mule; but it is also used gravely by parents as an imprecation of punishment hereafter upon undutiful children. A few samples of this curse will not be out of place, as showing at once its frequency and its range[1024].

Νὰ μήν τον δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him’: νὰ μήν τον φάγῃ τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground not consume him’: ἡ γῆ νὰ μή σε χωνέψῃ[1025], ‘May the earth not digest thee’: ἡ μαύρη γῆ νά σ’ ἀναξεράσῃ[1026], ‘May the black earth spew thee up’: νὰ μείνῃς ἄλυ̯ωτος, ‘Mayest thou remain incorrupt’: νὰ μή σε λυώσῃ ἡ γῆ, ‘May the earth not loose thee’ (i.e. not let thy body decompose): νά σε βγάλῃ τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground reject thee’: κουτοῦκι νὰ βγῇς[1027], ‘Mayest thou become (after death) like a log (in solidity)’: τὸ χῶμα ’ξεράσ’ τόνε, ‘May the ground spew him out’—this last phrase being made more terrible by being a parody, as it were, of the prayer uttered by the mourners at every Greek funeral ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τόνε, ‘May God forgive him.’ Such are the popular forms of the curse; and akin to them are the ecclesiastical imprecations, with which the formula of excommunication used to end: καὶ ἔσῃ μετὰ θάνατον ἄλυτος αἰωνίως, ὡς αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1028], ‘And after death thou shalt be bound (i.e. incorrupt) eternally, even as stone and iron’; or, in a shorter form, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος[1029], ‘And after death bound and indissoluble.’ Here, it will be observed, the Church spoke only of incorruptibility, but several of the popular expressions contain explicit mention of resuscitation as well; and the very forms of the curse which I have quoted show how closely knit together, how almost identical, are these two notions in the mind of the peasants. That which the earth will not ‘receive,’ she necessarily ‘rejects’; that which she does not ‘consume’ or ‘digest,’ she necessarily ‘spews up.’ The man whose body does not decompose is necessarily a revenant.

Now curses, it must be remembered, among a primitive people are considered as operative, and not merely expletive; each bullet of malediction deliberately aimed is expected to find its billet; each imprecation seriously uttered has a magical power of fulfilling itself. That this belief is firmly held by the Greek folk is sufficiently proved by certain quaint solemnities enacted beside the deathbed. It is a common custom[1030] for a dying man to put a handful of salt into a vessel of water, and when it is dissolved to sprinkle with the liquid all those who are present, saying, ὡς λυ̯ώνει τ’ ἀλάτι, νὰ λυ̯ώσουν ᾑ κατάραις μου, ‘As the salt dissolves, so may my curses dissolve.’ By this ceremony all persons whom he has cursed are released from the bonds of an imprecation which after death he would no longer be able to revoke or annul. Then in turn the relations and friends formally pronounce their forgiveness of aught that the dying man has done to their hurt. Thus pardoning and pardoned the sick man may expect a short and easy passing; and, if the death-struggle be prolonged, it is taken as a sign that some one whom he has injured has not forgiven him. Accordingly the friends and kinsmen, having decided among themselves who the delinquent must be, send to fetch him, if he be still living, in order that he too may pronounce his forgiveness and so smooth the passage of the parting soul. If however he be dead, a portion of his shroud or of his ashes is brought and burnt, and the sick man, who needs his forgiveness ere he can die in peace, is fumigated with the smoke therefrom.

Since then curses in general are regarded by the Greek folk no less than by other primitive peoples as effective instruments of wrath which work out their own fulfilment, the particular curses which we are considering, when they are gravely uttered, do seriously contemplate the possibility of the person cursed becoming after death a revenant and are designed to bring about that future state.

But, if already at the time when such imprecations first became popular it had been believed that their effect was to render the corpse, whose decay was arrested and whose resuscitation was assured, a wanton and blood-thirsty monster, preying first of all upon his nearest of kin, the question of relationship or no relationship between the curser and the cursed would necessarily have been taken into account.

On the one hand, where a man was in no degree akin to the object of his wrath, he would have welcomed the opportunity of including his enemy’s whole family in his vengeance by causing him to return and devour them. For in Greece recrimination is wholly unsparing, and no man pretending to any elegance or taste in the matter of abuse could neglect to level his taunts and threats and curses at least as much against the relatives—especially the female relatives—of his enemy as against the man himself. Just as the tenderest blessings among the peasants are prayers, not for him to whom they wish well, but rather for those whom he has loved and lost, so that the beggar’s thanks are often ‘May God forgive your father and your mother’ (which, however it may sound, is not intended otherwise than graciously) or again, prettier still in its vague genderless plural which no translation can adequately render, ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τὰ πεθαμμένα σου, ‘May God forgive your dead,’ so the harshest and bitterest of curses are vented, not upon the man who has excited them, but upon those who are nearest and dearest to him. And bitterness in cursing being as much a part of the Greek character as gentleness in blessing, it is almost inconceivable that, if any idea of real vampirism had originally been associated with revenants, the merest novice in malediction could have missed the opportunity of adding to his imprecations of incorruptibility and resuscitation a prayer that his enemy might devastate with horrid carnage the home of those who mourned him. Yet not one of the curses which I have quoted above suggests any savagery to be shown by the resuscitated body; not one of them hints at the blood-thirsty predatory character of the modern vrykolakas; nay, most significant of all, not one of them contains the word vrykolakas, nor have I ever heard or found recorded, so far as I can remember, any form of the curse in which that word appears[1031]. Now this is certainly not due to any difficulty of language in using the word, for there is a convenient enough verb formed from it, βρυκολακιάζω, ‘I turn vampire,’ and νὰ βρυκολακιάσης, ‘May you turn vampire,’ should commend itself as both sonorous and compendious. The reason why all mention and all thought of the ordinary vrykolakas are lacking in these curses must rather be that, when they first came into vogue, revenants were not yet credited with the savage character which under Slavonic influence they afterwards acquired; and that, when the word vrykolakas was introduced, the old traditional forms of curse underwent no modification, but were bandied to and fro by boys with the same glib uniformity as by their fathers before them. They had been cast in set forms before the idea of vampirism had been introduced and when men believed only in reasonable and usually harmless revenants.

On the other hand, where the curser was akin to the cursed, the nearer the tie of blood the more incomprehensible would be the attitude of one who by an imprecation should recall from the grave so malignant a thing as the modern vrykolakas, only to fall himself perhaps the first victim to its blood-thirstiness. If the phrase ‘May the earth reject thee’ had suggested anything beyond simple resuscitation, if there had been any resemblance in character between the Greek revenant and the Slavonic vampire, such an imprecation would have been impossible where close kinship existed; it would at once recoil with fatal force upon the curser’s own head; above all, that most solemn curse, the curse of parent upon child, would have been the first to ‘come home to roost’; and yet the use of such parental imprecations is both celebrated in ballad and not unknown, I am told, in actual experience. Once more then the use of these curses is explicable only on the hypothesis that the original Greek revenants were not the formidable monsters now known as vrykolakes, and that, when under Slavonic influence the popular conception of them changed, the old set phrases of commination—coins, as it were, of speech, struck in the mint of the original superstition—continued current in spite of their inconsistency with the new ideas. These colloquial survivals of the original Greek superstition are at once a proof and a measure of its later contamination. The Greeks had believed in reasonable human revenants; the Slavs taught them to believe in brutish inhuman vampires.

This conclusion is confirmed by the ballad to which I have just referred; in it a mother’s imprecation recalls her son from the grave; the revenant, who is the protagonist in a most dramatic story, is, as will be seen, of the type which I claim to have been the original Greek type and exhibits no Slavonic traits.

The ballad[1032], which as an important document I translate at length, runs as follows:

Mother with children richly blest, nine sons and one dear daughter,

The darling of thy heart was she, and fondly did’st thou tend her;

For full twelve years thou guardedst her, and the sun looked not on her,

But in the dusk thou bathedst her, by moonlight trim’dst her tresses,

By evening-star and morning-star her curls in order settest.

And lo! a message brought to thee, from Babylon a message,

Bidding thee wed thy child afar, afar in a strange country;

Eight of her brethren will it not, but Constantine doth hearken:

—‘Nay, mother, send thine Areté, send her to that strange country,

That country whither I too fare, that land wherein I wander,

That I may find me comfort there, that I may find me lodging.’

—‘Prudent art thou, my Constantine, yet ill-conceived thy counsel:

If there o’ertake me death, my son, if there o’ertake me sickness,

If there hap bitterness or joy, who shall go bring her to me?’

He made the Saints his witnesses, he gave her God for surety,

If peradventure there come death, if haply there come sickness,

If there hap bitterness or joy, himself would go and bring her.

Now when they had sent Areté to wed in the strange country,

There came a year of heaviness, a month of God’s displeasure,

And there befell the Pestilence, that the nine brethren perished;

Lone as a willow in the plain, lone, desolate their mother.

Over eight graves she beats her breast, o’er eight makes lamentation,

But from the tomb of Constantine she tears the very grave-stones:

—‘Rise, I adjure thee, Constantine, ’tis Areté I long for;

Thou madest the Saints thy witnesses, thou gavest me God for surety,

If there hap bitterness or joy, thyself would’st go and bring her.’

Forth from the mound that covered him the stern adjuring drave him;

He takes the clouds to be his steed, the stars to be his bridle,

The moon for escort on his road, and goes his way to bring her.

He leaves the mountains in his wake, he gains the heights before him,

He finds her ’neath the moonlight fair combing her golden tresses.

E’en from afar he bids her hail, cries from afar his message:

—‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, for lo! our mother needs thee.’

—‘Alack, alack, dear brother mine, what chance hath then befallen?

If haply ’tis an hour of joy, let me go don my jewels,

If bitterness, speak, I will come and tarry not for robing.’

—‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, and tarry not for robing.’

Beside the way whereon they passed, beside the road they travelled,

They heard the singing of the birds, they heard the birds a-saying:

—‘Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?’

—‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?

“Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?”’

—‘Nay, foolish birds, let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’

Anon as they went faring on, yet other birds were calling:

—‘What woeful sight is this we see, so piteous and so plaintive,

That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living?’

—‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?

“That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living.”’

—‘Nay, what are birds? let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’

—‘Ah, but I fear thee, brother mine, thou savourest of censing.’

—‘Nay, at the chapel of Saint John we gathered yester even,

And the good father hallowed us with incense beyond measure.’

And yet again as they fared on, yet other birds were crying:

—‘O God, great God omnipotent, great wonders art thou working;

So gracious and so fair a maid with a dead man consorting!’

—‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?

Tell me, where are those locks of thine, thy trimly-set mustachio?’

—’Twas a sore sickness fell on me, nigh unto death it brought me,

And spoiled me of my golden locks, my trimly-set mustachio.’

Lo! they are come; but locked their home, the door fast barred and bolted,

And all the windows of their home in spider-webs enshrouded.

—‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Areté thy daughter.’

—‘An thou art Charon, go thy way, for I have no more children;

My one, my little Areté, bides far in the strange country.’

—‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Constantine that calls thee;

I made the Saints my witnesses, I gave thee God for surety,

If there hap bitterness or joy, myself would go and bring her.’

Scarce had she passed to ope the door, and lo! her soul passed from her.

The versions of this ballad which have been collected are very numerous[1033], and some of them differ so widely from others in language as not to have a single line in common. That which I have selected for translation is one of the most complete, presenting fairly all the essential points of the story, and free from the eccentricities which some versions have developed. At the same time it must be allowed that here the mother’s curse is only implied by her action of tearing up the gravestones and adjuring Constantine to rise, whereas in one or two versions, otherwise inferior, it is clearly and forcibly expressed.

Thus in one[1034] her words run:

πέτρα νὰ γίνῃ ὁ Κωσταντής, λιθάρι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,

πώστειλε τὴν Ἀρέτω μου, τὴν Ἀρετὼ ’στὰ ξένα.

‘May Constantine become as rock, yea even as stone, and have no loosing (i.e. dissolution), for that he sent my Areto to a strange land.’

And in another[1035]:

Ὅλοι μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὁ Κώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,

Ὅπ’ ἔδωκε τὴν Ἀρετὴ πολὺ μακρυὰ ’στὰ ξένα.

‘May all my other sons have “loosing” and Constantine be not “loosed,” for that he let my Areté be taken afar to a strange country.’

Again, another version[1036] ends, not with the arrival of Areté in time to close her dying mother’s eyes, but with the revoking of the curse upon Constantine in gratitude for the fulfilment of his oath:

‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’

ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.

‘May the earth where thou liest loose thee and thy tomb consume thee.’ Scarce had she finished her speech and he became but a handful of earth.

Clearly then the curse, which in this story is conceived as binding Constantine’s body and driving him forth from the grave and which must be revoked before his body can be loosed by natural decay, is one of that class which we have been considering; but the story confers the further advantage of letting us see such a curse in operation. Constantine is presented as a revenant, but not of the modern type; for what turn must the story have taken if he had been a normal vrykolakas? His first act would have been to devour his nearest of kin—his mother, who was tearing up his grave-stones and cursing him: and his next, if he had troubled to go as far as Babylon, to make a like end of Areté. And what do we actually find? Constantine acts not only as a reasonable man in seeking to allay his sister’s suspicions, but also as a good man in keeping his oath. He is driven forth from the grave on a quest which (in most versions of the story) earns him no thanks from those whom he benefits; he does his weary mission and (in most versions) goes back again to the cold grave from which the curse had raised him. Our sympathy is engaged by Constantine no less than by his mother. He too is a sufferer, first stricken down in his youth by pestilence, and then cursed because his oath remained unfulfilled. He claims our pity, and in this differs fundamentally from the ordinary vrykolakas which could only excite our horror.

Furthermore it is noteworthy that in the many versions of this poem, just as in the popular curses which I have quoted, the word vrykolakas is nowhere found[1037].

Hence I am inclined to believe that the original poem, from which have come so many modern versions, differing widely in many respects, but agreeing completely in the exclusion both of the Slavonic word vrykolakas and of all the suggestions of horror which surround it, was composed in a period anterior to the intrusion of Slavonic ideas; and that the modern versions therefore, which prove their fidelity to the spirit of the original precisely by having refused admittance to anything Slavonic, furnish that which we are seeking, the purely and genuinely Greek element in the now composite superstition. That Greek element then is the conception of the revenant as a sufferer deserving even of pity, the very antithesis in character of the Slavonic vampire, an aggressor exciting only loathing and horror.

In the composite modern Greek superstition, as described in the last chapter, the Slavonic element is clearly predominant. But the conclusion to which my analysis of the superstition has now led, explains what would otherwise have been almost inexplicable, the existence of a few stories in which the revenant, though called vrykolakas, is none the less represented as harmless or even amiable.

One such case is mentioned in Father Richard’s narrative[1038]—the case of a shoemaker in Santorini, who having turned vrykolakas continued to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; and though it is added that the people became frightened and exhumed and burned him, this was only a measure of precaution dictated by their experience of other vrykolakes; no charge was brought against this particular revenant. It might also be supposed that the vrykolakes of Amorgos, mentioned next in the same narrative, who were seen in open day five or six together in a field feeding apparently on green beans, were of the less noxious kind; but they may of course have been carnivorous also.

Another story, recently published[1039], records how a native of Maina, also a shoemaker by trade, having turned vrykolakas issued from his grave every night except Saturday, resumed his work, and continued to live with his wife, whose pregnancy forced her to reveal the truth to her neighbours. When once this was known, many accusations, it is true, were brought against the vrykolakas; but the story at least recognises some domestic and human traits in his character.

But a much more remarkable tale[1040] is told of a field-labourer of Samos who was so devoted to the farmer for whom he worked, that when he died he became a vrykolakas and continued secretly to give his services. At night he would go to the farm-buildings, take out the oxen from their stall, yoke them, and plough three acres while his master slept; in the daytime an equal piece of work was done by the master—so that incidentally the oxen were nearly killed. The neighbours however having had their suspicions aroused by the rapidity of the work, which the farmer himself could in no wise explain, kept watch one night, and having detected the vrykolakas opened his grave, found him, as would be expected, whole and incorrupt, and burned him.

Such stories as these testify that the old and purely Greek conception of revenants is not quite extinct even in places where the only name for them is the Slavonic word vrykolakes.

---

The Slavonic element in the modern superstition having been now removed, it remains to consider what was the attitude of the Church towards the Greek belief in revenants and what effect her teaching had upon it.

I have already pointed out that the Jesuit, Father Richard, discriminated between vrykolakes and certain bodies called ‘drums,’ which were found incorrupt after many years of burial. This distinction he had no doubt learnt from clergy of the Greek Church; for, while the common-folk held that those whom the earth did not receive and consume were necessarily ejected by her, or, in other words, that a dead man whose body did not decay was necessarily also a revenant, the Church distinguished, as we shall see, between belief in incorruptibility and belief in resuscitation, inculcating the former, and varying between condonation and condemnation of the latter. These two ideas must therefore be handled separately.

The incorruptibility of the body of any person bound by a curse was made a definite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. In an ecclesiastical manuscript, seen by Father Richard, were specifications of the discoloration and other unpleasant symptoms by which the precise quality of that curse—parental, episcopal, and so forth—which had arrested the decay of a corpse might be diagnosed; and in one of the forms of absolution which may be read over any corpse found in such a condition there is a clause which provides for all possible cases without requiring expert diagnosis: ‘Yea, O Lord our God, let Thy great mercy and marvellous compassion prevail; and, whether this Thy servant lieth under curse of father or mother, or under his own imprecation, or did provoke one of Thy holy ministers and sustained at his hands a bond that hath not been loosed, or did incur the most grievous ban of excommunication by a bishop, and through heedlessness and sloth obtained not pardon, pardon Thou him by the hand of me Thy sinful and unworthy servant; resolve Thou his body into that from which it was made; and stablish his soul in the tabernacle of saints[1041].’ But the curse to which the Church naturally gave most prominence and attached most weight was the ban of excommunication; and therefore, consistently with the accepted doctrine, the formula of excommunication ended by sentencing the offender to remain whole and undissolved after death—a condition from which the body was not freed unless and until absolution was read over it and the decree of excommunication thereby rescinded.

This doctrine was held to have the authority of Christ’s own teaching[1042]. The power which was conferred upon the apostles in the words, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1043],’ was believed to have been so transmitted to their successors, the bishops[1044] of the Church, that they too had the faculty of binding and loosing men’s bodies—that is, of arresting or promoting their decomposition after death. Such an interpretation of the text was facilitated by the very simplicity of its wording; for λύω, in modern Greek λυόνω, ‘loose,’ expresses equally well the ideas of dissolution and of absolution, while δέω, in modern Greek δένω, ‘bind,’ embraces their respective opposites. A nomocanon de excommunicatis[1045], promulgated in explanation of the fact that excommunication sometimes failed to produce its expected result, presents clearly the authorised doctrine and at the same time illustrates effectively the twofold usage of the words ‘loosing’ and ‘binding.’

‘Concerning excommunicated persons, the which suffer excommunication by their bishops and after death are found with their bodies “not loosed” (ἄλυτα).

‘Certain persons have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law, and have died in the state of excommunication without amending their ways and receiving forgiveness, and have been buried, and in a short time their bodies have been found “loosed” (λελυμένα) and sundered bone from bone....

‘Now this is exceeding marvellous that he who hath been lawfully excommunicated should after his death be found with his body “loosed” (λελυμένος τὸ σῶμα) and the joints thereof sundered....’

This ‘exceeding marvellous’ occurrence was therefore submitted to the consideration of learned divines, whose verdict was to the effect that any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more hope of salvation, because he was no longer in a state to be ‘loosed’ and forgiven by the bishop who had excommunicated him[1046], but had become already ‘an inheritor of everlasting torment.’

‘But,’ continues the nomocanon formulated by these theologians, ‘they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole and “not loosed” (ἄλυτα), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order that the body may attain unto freedom from the “bond” (δεσμόν) of excommunication. For even as the body is found “bound” (δεδεμένον) in the earth, so is the soul “bound” (δεδεμένη) and tormented in the hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be “loosed” (λυθῇ) from excommunication, by power of God the soul likewise is freed from the hands of the Devil, and receiveth the life eternal, the light that hath no evening, and the joy ineffable.’

The whole doctrine of the physical results both of excommunication and of absolution appeared to Leo Allatius to be indisputable, and he mentions[1047] several notable cases in which the truth of it was demonstrated. Athanasius, Metropolitan of Imbros, is quoted as recording how at the request of citizens of Thasos he read the absolution over several incorrupt bodies, ‘and before the absolution was even finished all the corpses were dissolved into dust.’ A similar case was that of a converted Turk who was subsequently excommunicated at Naples, and had been dead some years before he obtained absolution and dissolution at the hands of two Metropolitans. More remarkable still was a case in which a priest, who had pronounced a sentence of excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained ‘bound.’ The matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian’s body, and towards the end of the reading, ‘the swelling of the body went down, and it turned completely to dust.’ The Turk thereupon embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.

Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1048]. The Sultan having been informed—among other evidences of the power of Christianity—that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest’s widow who had been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.

Exhumed at the Sultan’s instance the body was found to be still sound and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time under the Sultan’s seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could be heard from within the coffin. It was then again kept for a few days under the Sultan’s seal, and when finally the coffin was opened the body was found ‘dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained mercy.’ And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is recorded to have exclaimed, ‘Certainly the Christian religion is true beyond all question.’

Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and the nomocanon above quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear later[1049], the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a challenge to repentance.

The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person whose body was thus ‘bound’ by excommunication, was one which has already been explained, τυμπανιαῖος[1050] or, in another form, τυμπανίτης[1051]—swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius’ reference to it, was certainly less common than the word vrykolakas, had probably at one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect, borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being ‘bound’ and withheld from corruption by a curse.

At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely felt; for, when once the Greek revenant had acquired the baneful characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely never have claimed as a new thing the power to ‘bind’ the dead by excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling too) believed that persons so ‘bound’ became rampant and ravening vrykolakes. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the incorrupt dead as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ and conceived of them as reasonable revenants.

The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the words λύω, ‘loose,’ and δέω, ‘bind,’ may well have been the starting-point. If, on the one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated certain sins as ‘having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the world to come,’ and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo Allatius records, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death never to be “loosed”’ (meaning thereby ‘absolved’); while, on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse were not ‘loosed’ (in the sense of ‘dissolved’); then the common-folk for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical curse as a sentence of ‘non-dissolution’; while the clergy would have been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and by adding to their accustomed formula (μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος, ‘after death never to be “loosed”’) such apparently innocent words as ὥσπερ αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1052], ‘even as stone and iron,’ substituted the idea of ‘dissolution’ for that of ‘absolution’ and definitely committed the Church to the old pagan doctrine.

If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word ‘loosing’ was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the words of Christ, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1053].’ Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained[1054]”? This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some time borrowed from paganism.

The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose bodies were ‘bound’ by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth did not ‘receive,’ were ejected by her and re-appeared as revenants, caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray, and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.

Leo Allatius[1055] reflects both these views and shows their effect upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance of such bodies, which gained for them the name τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is exhumed, ‘the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.’ Yet shortly afterwards he states, ‘This belief is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’ There is a clear contrast between the conduct of ‘the priests’ in one passage and that of the ‘men of piety’ in the other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent attitude towards the popular superstition.

Similar inconsistency marks the nomocanon concerning vrykolakes, from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo’s account in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are here repeated:

‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they call vrykolakas...

‘It is impossible that a dead man become a vrykolakas save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents and oft-times at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew before cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.

‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man ... and the dead man—one who has long been dead and buried—appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether....’

Then, after denying again the reality of such things which exist κατὰ φαντασίαν, in imagination only, the nomocanon continues:

‘But know that when such remains be found, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral meats.’

The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services for his repose[1056] are required, the theory of hallucination is untenable. But this very inconsistency of the nomocanon, though according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as I will show, a very valuable document of the Church’s traditional teaching on this matter.

S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died in 599, refers to revenants in a passage which, literally rendered, runs as follows[1057]: ‘Again it appears that devils, by means of false prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in imagination (ἐν φαντασίᾳ). For a devil enters into the dead body of the man, and moves it, presenting the dead man risen again as it were in answer to the foolish prayer of the deceiver. And the evil spirit talks as it were in the person of the dead man with him whom he is deluding, telling him such things as he himself wishes to tell and answering also further questions....’

In this passage Anastasius is clearly thinking of revenants called up by sorcerers; in his time, when the first Slavonic invaders had only just entered Greece and anything like friendly intercourse between the two races was still a thing of the future, the conception of a real vampire was not yet known to the Greeks of Greece proper, much less to those of Antioch; and it is easy therefore to believe that the calling up of harmless revenants was then a recognised department of witchcraft, which afterwards lost its attractions. The particular circumstances however to which Anastasius refers are of minor importance; the interest of the passage lies in its inconsistency of thought, which results indeed in a certain confusion of language; for to say that ‘it appears that devils ... present even a dead man as risen again, and talk with the living in imagination,’ would be not a little obscure, if the context did not throw light upon the meaning. More lucidly expressed the ideas are these: men see a dead person apparently risen from his grave and able to talk with them; the raising of the dead is the work of a devil (whose modus operandi is described in the second sentence); the talking is also done by the devil (as explained in the third sentence); and finally the whole thing is an hallucination.

Here then are the same contradictory doctrines as in the nomocanon; the resuscitation of the dead man is the work of a devil who enters into the corpse and moves it and raises it from the grave; and yet it is the ‘imagination’ of the men who see it which is at fault. But it can be no casual coincidence that S. Anastasius in the sixth century and a nomocanon which was quoted as authoritative in the seventeenth attempted to combine two incompatible doctrines concerning the re-appearance of the dead. Rather is it proof that from a very early age the Church remained halting between two opinions; and the attitude adopted towards the superstition by the clergy, some of whom, according to Leo Allatius, had long tried to root it out of the popular mind, while others rendered aid in absolving suspected corpses, naturally varied according as they personally believed that revenants (including vrykolakes) were a figment of the people’s imagination or a real work of the Devil.

Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite of the efforts of the ‘men of piety who received the confessions of Christians[1058]’ to extirpate the superstition, it remains vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even educated men were convinced of it. ‘It is the height of folly,’ says Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, ‘to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race’; and similarly Father Richard opens his account of vrykolakes with the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates. As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the diabolical characteristics of the vrykolakas that they could hardly have failed to accept it.

The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the so-called custom of ‘Charon’s obol.’ I have shown that the practice of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not been forgotten, and is combined with the belief in vrykolakes. In the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the same place by marking on it the sign of the cross and the letters I. X. N. K. (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς νικᾷ, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’), both of them with the avowed purpose of preventing any evil spirit from entering the dead body and making of it a vrykolakas[1059]. In Rhodes a piece of ancient pottery, inscribed with the same words but marked with the pentacle[1060] instead of the cross, is placed in the mouth of the dead for the same purpose[1061]. Clearly then in these two islands this ecclesiastical view has been fully accepted by the people; and what I can illustrate by customs in these cases I know to be equally true of Greece in general. Whenever an explanation is sought of the resuscitation of the dead, the answer, if any be forthcoming, lays the responsibility for it on the Devil.

This opinion, as I have said, is abundantly justified by the conduct of modern vrykolakes; but I am inclined to think that it was held also, by the Church at any rate, in the pre-Slavonic age when revenants were of a less diabolical character. The actual practice of excommunication was thought to have been instituted by St Paul[1062], who twice speaks of ‘delivering persons unto Satan[1063].’ The early ecclesiastical interpretation of this phrase is clearly given by Theodoretus[1064]; commenting upon the sentence, “To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,” he draws special attention to the fact that the body, and not the soul, is to be subjected to diabolic affliction, and then adds, ‘We are taught by this, that those who are excommunicated, that is to say, severed from the body of the Church, will be assailed by the devil when he finds them void of grace.’ In other words, the bodily punishment inflicted by the act of excommunication was ‘possession’ by the devil.

Now Theodoretus, it is true, says nothing in this passage as to the continuance of the punishment after death. But clearly if demoniacal possession was the effect of excommunication, and if also, as we have seen, the sentence of excommunication remained valid after death, it must have followed that the dead body no less than the living body was possessed of the devil; and if the devil in possession of the corpse chose to agitate it and drive it out of the grave, the dead demoniac was at once a revenant.

There is therefore some probability that, though the Church never threatened the excommunicated with resuscitation but only with incorruptibility, she may at a very early date have offered this explanation of their alleged re-appearance; and the theory of diabolical agency may have gained popular approval from the first; for resuscitation was originally viewed by the Greek people as a calamity befalling the dead man, not as a source of danger to the living; and therefore an ecclesiastical doctrine, that it was by delivering an offender unto Satan that the curse of the Church rendered him a revenant, would have been felt to be a perfectly satisfactory, if novel, explanation of the process by which a known cause, imprecation, produced its known effect, resuscitation.

But, whatever the date at which the theory of diabolical possession was first developed and disseminated, the Church, and the Church only, was responsible for it. The Devil is a Christian conception, just as the vampire is Slavonic. Both must go, if the modern superstition is to be stripped of its accretions, and the genuinely Hellenic elements discovered. What then remains? Simply the belief that the bodies of certain classes of persons did not decay away in their graves but returned therefrom, and the feeling that such persons were sufferers deserving of pity. What then were the classes of persons so affected, according to the original Greek superstition?

The classes now regarded as liable to become vrykolakes were enumerated at the end of the last section. But both Slavonic and Christian influences have been felt here, as in the rest of the superstition. I must therefore take those classes one by one, and indicate the origin of each. None of them will require long discussion; their provenance is in many cases self-evident.

(1) Those who have not received the full and due rites of burial.

Here there can be no reason for supposing any alien influence; on the contrary, the high importance attached by the ancient Greeks to funeral-rites is everywhere apparent. It was these which Patroclus’ spirit returned to implore; these which Antigone risked her life to give. The sin of Clytemnestra culminated in that she ‘dared to bury her husband without mourning or lamentation[1065]’—an essential part of the Greek funeral; and again in historical times Lysander’s honour was tarnished not so much because he put to death some prisoners of war, but because ‘he did not throw earth even upon their dead bodies[1066].’ What effect such neglect was anciently believed to have upon the dead is a question to be considered later; but the general idea is plainly Hellenic.

(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those who having been murdered remain unavenged.

The most important element in this class is formed by those who have been murdered, especially when, as in Maina, they are believed to return from the grave with the purpose of seeking revenge upon their murderers. Such an idea, as will be shown later, is thoroughly consonant with ancient views of bloodguilt. But it appears also from a passage of Lucian[1067] that any ‘violent’ or ‘sudden,’ as opposed to ‘natural,’ death was commonly held to debar the victim from rest no less effectually than actual murder. The whole class may therefore be accepted as Hellenic, and may probably be considered to have always comprised all persons whose lives were cut short suddenly before their proper hour had come.

(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals, and children still-born.

The first division of this class may be variously explained; either the child may be supposed to suffer for the sin committed by its parents on a day when the Church enjoins continence, or else the notion, that children born between Christmas and Epiphany are subject to lycanthropy[1068] and therefore also, according to Slavonic views, to vampirism, has become associated with other church-festivals also. Children still-born are probably to be numbered among victims of ‘sudden’ death. Thus the first division, being of ecclesiastical or Slavonic origin, is to be set aside; the second may probably be included in a larger Hellenic class already considered; neither therefore requires any further discussion.

(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.

The dread which a curse, above all a parent’s curse, excited in the ancient Greeks is well known. No one can have read Aeschylus’ story of the house of Atreus, nor followed with Sophocles the fortunes of Oedipus and his children, without perceiving therein the working of a curse that claims fulfilment and cannot be averted. The idea therefore here involved is purely Hellenic.

(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.

This class is an ecclesiastical variety of the last.

(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate.

The apostate is of course ipso facto excommunicate, even though no formal sentence have been pronounced against him. The unbaptised have probably been included by priestcraft for purposes of intimidation; baptism is commonly held to prevent children from becoming were-wolves, and therefore also vrykolakes at death.

(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.

Clerical influence is clearly discernible here, but is not, I think, responsible for the whole idea. A story from Zacynthos[1069] records how the treacherous murderer of a good man was first smitten by a thunderbolt so that he lost both his sight and his reason, and after his death was turned by God into a vrykolakas as a punishment for his crime, and has so remained for a thousand years. Here, in spite of the word vrykolakas being used, the revenant is represented, like Constantine in the popular ballad, as a sufferer. This idea has been shown to be pre-Slavonic—and incidentally it is not a little curious that the story itself claims to date from a thousand years ago, when this idea was only beginning to be ousted by Slavonic superstition. But if the idea of ‘punishment’ is old, the idea that the punishment was merited by a crime must be equally old. For this reason, and for others which will be developed later, I hold that the perpetrators of certain deadly sins were from early times regarded as accursed and subject to the same punishment as befell those on whom a curse had actually been called down. The Church, I think, merely added to the number of those sins, and at the same time undertook the task of pronouncing in many cases the curse which they had earned.

(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.

This class is purely Slavonic in origin. To become a were-wolf in consequence of having eaten flesh which a wolf’s fangs have infected with madness is to a simple mind rational enough; and a were-wolf becomes after death a vampire. Further the belief, so far as I know, belongs only to Elis, one of the districts where Slavonic ascendancy was most complete and continued longest.

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.

This class also is Slavonic. The jumping of a cat over a dead body is still believed by some Slavonic peoples to be a cause of vampirism[1070], while in Greece the idea is rare and local only.

Thus out of the many conditions by which, in modern belief, a man is predisposed to turn vrykolakas, only three can be genuinely Hellenic: first, lack of burial; second, a sudden or violent death; and third, a parental or other curse, or such sin as renders a man accursed. The revenant therefore was regarded, as we inferred also from the story of Constantine and Areté, as a sufferer. His suffering might be the result of pure mischance, as in the case of sudden death, or of neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to lament and to bury him, or again of some sin of his own which had merited a curse. But whether he was the victim of sheer misfortune or of punishment, he was still a sufferer, an object to excite the pity of mankind in general, although in special cases, as when he had been murdered or had not received the last offices of love at the hands of his kinsfolk, he might reasonably be feared by those who had injured him as an avenger.

Since then in the pre-Slavonic period the general feeling towards revenants was a feeling of pity, the treatment of them in that period requires investigation.

Starting once more from the modern superstition, we find that the treatment of vrykolakes by the Greeks differs widely from that accorded by the Slavs to vampires. The Slavonic method is generally to pierce the suspected corpse with a stake of aspen or whitethorn, taking care to drive it right through the heart at one blow. The usual Greek method is to burn the body. The Greeks therefore, who learnt from the Slavs all that is most horrible in their conception of vrykolakes, none the less thought that they knew a better way of disposing of these new-found pests than that which was practised by their teachers. Convinced by foreign influence of the danger, they relied on a native method of obviating it. They would not impale the vrykolakas; they would burn him. Clearly there must have been some strong conviction and assurance in the heart of a people who, freshly persuaded of the peril threatening them at the hands of so loathly and savage a monster, yet chose to pursue their own method of combating it rather than to adopt the foreign and repugnant practice of impaling the dead. That conviction plainly was that cremation, by ensuring the immediate and complete dissolution of the body, put an end to all relations of the dead with the living; and their confidence in it can only have been based upon their own experience in the treatment of the Greek species of revenants. Cremation then was the means by which the Greek folk had always been wont to succour those of the dead who suffered from incorruptibility and resuscitation.

Such a custom would not, so far as I can judge, have encountered any serious ecclesiastical opposition. The Church, it is true, in her earlier days had condemned cremation as a pagan rite, and with the spread of Christianity inhumation became the ordinary rite. But in the case of those who, having been buried, yet returned from the grave, since the Christian rite had proved of no avail, some concession to pagan traditions would have been natural. Many of the clergy, as we have seen, condoned cremation in the case of vrykolakes as a measure of self-defence; surely they would equally have allowed it as an act of charity to more innocent men to whom the earth had denied dissolution and death had brought no repose.

Thus the actual custom of burning dates from the pre-Slavonic era; it is only the motive of the act which is changed. Formerly men felt pity for the revenant, and sought to promote his dissolution in order to release him from a state of suffering; now, as for some centuries past, men feel only horror of the vrykolakas, and seek to promote his dissolution in order to release themselves from a state of peril. Hence no doubt came the more horrible barbarities occasionally inflicted on the corpse; to tear out the heart, to boil it in vinegar, to tear the body to shreds—these are the acts of a panic-stricken and vindictive people eager to torment their foe before annihilating him. But in the old custom of cremation there was nothing inhumane; it was the merciful act of a people who had compassion upon the unquiet dead and gave to them, in solicitude for their welfare, that boon of bodily dissolution by which alone they were finally severed from the living and admitted to the world of the departed.