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.