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....’