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

by J. C. Lawson

Such is my explanation of the discrepancy; and the probability of it is warranted by three considerations—first, that Greek Tragedy does contain one or two references to the possible resuscitation of other than the accursed—second, that Plato modifies the popular notions concerning the accursed in almost the same way that the tragedians modified the fate of the unburied and of those slain by violence—third, that the literary tradition concerning ghosts is in itself inconsistent and bears the marks of arbitrary modification.

The most important reference in Tragedy occurs in the Choephori, where Orestes and Electra pray their murdered father to rise from the grave in bodily form[1103]. This passage, together with a close parallel from Sophocles, will be fully discussed later[1104]. Here I need only point out the justification by Aeschylus of my theory that the substitution of ghost for revenant is a necessary literary convention. He suggests verbally the possible uprising of the murdered Agamemnon as a revenant; but, when it comes to an actual presentation of the murdered Clytemnestra on the stage, his dramatis persona is a ghost.

Next, Plato, in a well-known passage of the Phaedo[1105], speaks of the souls of dead men having actually been seen in the form of shadowy apparitions haunting the neighbourhood of tombs—souls, he explains, which have not been fully cleansed and freed from the visible material world, but still have some part therein and hence are themselves visible; and, he adds, these are the souls of the wicked, which are compelled to wander thus in punishment for their former evil life. Naturally Plato of all men—and of all his works in the Phaedo—could not accept the notion that the body under any conditions remained incorruptible; his whole doctrine is imbued with his belief that the gross and material perishes, and only the pure and spiritual endures. When therefore he came to utilise the popular doctrine, which the tragedians had endorsed, that certain sinners were condemned to incorruption, some modification of the idea was necessary; and accordingly he makes the wicked to wander as ghosts, not as corporeal revenants, just as Homer and the tragedians seem to have done in the case of the unburied and those who had met their death by violence. Plato’s extension of the literary tradition suggests that its earlier development had been such as I have indicated.

Lastly, the literary tradition, as represented by earlier writers than Plato, is by no means uniform. If it had been a definite religious doctrine, and not merely a literary convention, that the unburied returned as ghosts, the presentment of Patroclus and of Polydorus should have been in all respects similar. But what do we find? Each certainly appears as a ghost and asks for burial; but there the resemblance ends. According to Homer[1106] the spirit of Patroclus, in craving burial of his body, declares that, ere that rite be performed, the spirit itself cannot pass the gates of Hades but is held aloof by the spirits of the other dead, and moreover that having once passed it can no more return to this world. According to Euripides[1107], familiar though he must have been with Homer’s teaching, the spirit of Polydorus had passed within the gates of Hades and by permission of the nether gods had returned to demand the burial of his body. Homer’s reason for the soul’s anxiety about the body’s burial is none too convincing in itself; for it only raises a further question: if death means the final separation of soul from body, and the lower world is tenanted by souls only—for so Homer at any rate teaches—why should the denizens of that world make the admission of a newly-sped soul conditional upon the burial of the body which it had finally quitted? But, what is more important, Homer’s reason, such as it is, is flatly disavowed by Euripides, who yet advances no reason of his own why the spirit of Polydorus, having once passed into Hades’ halls, should have any further interest in its old carnal tenement. This disagreement can only mean that Homer and Euripides were not following an acknowledged doctrine of popular religion in representing Patroclus and Polydorus in the form of ghosts; for in that case they would surely have agreed with the popular doctrine, and therefore also with each other, in assigning a reason for the ghost’s interest in the burial of its discarded body. Either then there was no popular belief on the whole subject—which is incredible—or else it was such as literary propriety forbade them to follow. Now if the popular belief was that the unburied appeared as corporeal revenants, their eagerness for burial is intelligible; but if a ghost be substituted by literary convention for the revenant, a good reason for such eagerness becomes hard to find. Hence the inconsequence of Homer’s reason; hence the silence of Euripides.

But if, as now seems likely, the substitution of mere ghost for bodily revenant was a literary convention, it by no means follows that that convention is valueless as a guide to the popular beliefs of the time. It may represent a part of those beliefs, though not the whole. The established doctrines on this whole subject were not remodelled by the tragedians save in obedience to the laws of their art. This we definitely know; for the causes which they assign for the unrest of the dead are numbered among the popularly received causes which remain to this day; and even the idea of physical resuscitation was retained and effectively utilised by them within certain limitations. Clearly then they kept what they could, and only changed what they must. Judicious selection rather than arbitrary invention was the method by which the literary tradition was established. Since then that tradition uniformly speaks of the soul’s return, while discrepancies only arise in accounting for the soul’s interest in the corpse, was it perhaps only in the latter respect that literary tradition parted company with popular belief? Did the spirit as well as the body of the dead play some part in the popular superstition? Did the common-folk too hold that, after the separation of soul from body at death, the soul itself under certain conditions returned from its flight towards the house of Hades—returned however not to appear alone in ghostly guise, but to re-animate the dead body and raise it up as a revenant? Was this the popular doctrine from which literature selected, recording the soul’s return, but suppressing the re-animation of the body, and thereby creating for itself the difficulty of explaining the soul’s interest in the body?

The hypothesis commends itself as providing at the same time an answer to the one question which remained unanswered in the last section. We saw that, through ecclesiastical influence, Christian Greece has long assigned the work of resuscitating the dead to the Devil. But to whom or to what did pagan Greece previously assign it? Surely in the whole range of Greek mythology it were hard to find any supernatural being either specially suited or probably condemned to such a task. The soul is, prima facie, the most appropriate and likely agent.

But there is even stronger evidence than this. The probable becomes proven when we turn back to the only full pagan account of a bodily revenant, the story of Philinnion. What are her words, when she is discovered by her parents? ‘Mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ And how is her threat of going away fulfilled? ‘Scarce had she spoken when she became a corpse, and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all.’ The words ‘I shall go away’ were therefore intended by the writer to mean ‘My soul will go away’; for the body remained. Clearly then, in the belief of that age, resuscitation of the dead meant the re-animation of the body by the soul which had been temporarily separated from it.

In the light of this fact Plato’s reference to the wandering of the souls of the wicked is found to approximate more nearly to the popular superstition. Such souls, he says, have been seen in the neighbourhood of tombs; and they are visible because they are not cleansed and freed from the visible and material world[1108], but participate therein. What then is the particular material thing in which they participate and which keeps them near the tombs? Evidently the body whose impurities they contracted in life, the body from which they are not cleansed and freed. Plato admits only participation, not re-animation; but in all else he adheres to the genuine popular belief.

The same idea furnishes also what I believe to be the true explanation of the custom of the so-called ‘Charon’s obol.’ The coin or other object placed in the mouth of the dead was originally, I have argued[1109], a charm to prevent the entry of some evil spirit or the re-entry of the soul into the corpse. In Chios and in Rhodes, as we have seen, this is the popular explanation still given—the particular spirit against whom the precaution is taken being, owing to Christian influence, a devil. But if, as is likely, a devil has merely been substituted for the soul, while the rest of the superstition has remained unchanged, it follows that the precaution was originally directed against the return of the soul, and so was a means of ensuring bodily dissolution; for, though I cannot actually prove it, it is natural to suppose that re-animation was not the result, but the cause, of incorruption.

To sum up, the conclusions which have been reached stand thus:—Death, according to the popular religion of ancient Greece, was not a final separation of body and soul; in certain cases the body remained incorrupt and the soul re-animated it. This condition, in which the dead belonged neither to this nor to the nether world, was one of misery; and bodily dissolution was to be desired. Dissolution could in no case be properly effected without the rite of interment or cremation. The unburied therefore formed one class of revenants. But even due interment did not necessarily produce dissolution; a sudden or violent death rendered the body incorruptible, presumably because the proper hour had not yet come for the soul to leave it; an imprecation withheld the body from decay by its own ‘binding’ power; and finally, the commission of a deadly sin, above all of murder, rendered the sinner subject to the same dire fate as if the curse which his sin merited had actually been pronounced. The only unfailing method of dissolution was cremation.