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

by J. C. Lawson

§ 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood.

The conclusions which have now been reached show, among others, the somewhat surprising result, that the popular religion of Greece both ancient and modern has always comprised the belief that both the murdered and the murderer were doomed to the same unhappy lot after death. The murderer, in the class of men polluted and accursed by heinous sin, and his victim, in the class of those who have met with violent deaths, have alike been regarded as pre-disposed to become revenants. The two facts thus simply stated constitute a problem which deserves investigation. It can be no accident that two classes of men, so glaringly contrasted here, should be believed to share the same fate hereafter. Some relation between the two beliefs must surely subsist.

The solution to which the mind naturally leaps is the idea that in some way retributive justice causes the murderer to be punished with the selfsame suffering as he has brought upon his victim; that, as blood calls for blood, so the resuscitation of the murdered calls for the resuscitation of the murderer; that the old law, δράσαντι παθεῖν, ‘as a man hath wrought, so must he suffer,’ is not limited to this world nor fully vindicated by the mere shedding of the murderer’s blood, but dooms him to become, like his victim, a revenant from the grave.

Such an explanation of the two facts before us is, it may almost be said, obviously and self-evidently right, so far as it goes; but the proof of its correctness is best to be obtained by going further, so as not merely to indicate the appropriateness of the murderer’s punishment, but to discover also the agency whereby it is inflicted; for, if it can be established that according to the popular belief it is the murdered man himself who, in the form of a revenant, plagues his murderer, then the retributive character of all the murderer’s sufferings both here and hereafter will be manifest.

The most striking testimony to the existence of such a belief is to be found in a gruesome practice to which, we are told, murderers in old time were addicted—the practice of mutilating (μασχαλίζειν) the murdered man by cutting off his hands and feet, and either placing them under his armpits or tying them with a band (μασχαλιστήρ) round his breast. What object was had in view in so disposing of the severed extremities, if indeed our information as to the act itself be correct, remains uncertain; perhaps indeed that information amounts to nothing more than a faulty conjectural interpretation of the word μασχαλίζειν itself, which might equally well mean to sever the arms from the body at the armpit and to treat the lower limbs in similar fashion. But at any rate the intention of the whole act of mutilation is known and clear; the murderer sought to deprive his victim of the power to exact vengeance for his wrongs. Clearly then the vengeance apprehended was not that of a disembodied spirit entreating the gods to act on its behalf or appearing in visions to its surviving kinsfolk and urging them to requite the murderer, but the vengeance of a bodily revenant with feet swift to pursue and hands strong to strike. On no other grounds is the mutilation of the dead body intelligible.

But if any doubt could still rest upon this interpretation of the old custom, it must be finally dispersed by a consideration of the one instance of the same custom known to me in modern times. This occurs in a story which I have already related[1110]—the story of a human sacrifice in Santorini at the time of the Greek War of Independence, as narrated to me by an old man of the island who claimed to have himself taken part in the affair. According to his narrative not only the head of the victim was cut off but also his hands, and in that order. Why then this mutilation of the dead body? That question I put in vain to the old man; he had obliged me by giving me his reminiscences, but he had no intention of letting himself be cross-questioned upon them. Yet the real answer is not hard to conjecture. Santorini is the most famous haunt of vrykolakes in the whole of Greece, and familiarity with them has bred in the minds of the islanders no contempt for them, but rather a more lively terror. Nowhere therefore is any expedient for combating the powers of the vrykolakas more likely to be remembered and adopted. Since then the human victim in the story is not represented as a willing victim, but was evidently seized and slain by violence, his slayers, in performing their task, must have recognised that he would in all probability turn vrykolakas, and in their mutilation of his corpse (a deed inexpressibly repugnant to Greek feeling now as in old time) can only have been actuated by the hope of thus incapacitating the revenant for his otherwise sure and terrible vengeance.

The reason then why the murderer as well as the murdered becomes a revenant is plain. The victim, rising from his grave in bodily substance, pursues his enemy with untiring rancour until he brings him to the same sorry state as that to which he himself has come.

Such, I venture to say, has been the conviction deep down in the hearts of the Greek people from the earliest times down to this day. A custom, which consists in a deliberate and sacrilegious act of mutilation, more ghastly than murder itself, perpetrated upon the helpless dead, and which yet has continued unchanged throughout the changes and chances which the Greek people have undergone for more than a score of centuries, can only be based upon the most immutable of superstitious beliefs and dreads, and reveals more unerringly than even the whole literature of Greece the fundamental ideas of the Greek people concerning the avenging of blood. The murdered man in bodily shape avenges his own wrongs.

But while the existence of this belief is thus established by the best evidence of all, namely the fact that men have continued to act upon it, the views of ancient writers on the subject of blood-guilt are not on that account to be neglected; on the contrary, the whole literature bearing thereupon, and above all the story of the house of Atreus as told by Aeschylus, much as they have been studied, deserve fresh consideration just for the very reason that our judgement of them must be modified by this new fact. Starting with the knowledge of the part which the murdered man himself played according to popular belief in securing the punishment of his murderer, we are enabled more fully to appreciate the genius of Aeschylus in so handling a superstition which, like other things primitive in Greek religion, was still venerated by an age which could discern its grossness, that, without either losing the religious sympathies of his audience by too wide a departure from venerable traditions, or offending their artistic taste by too close an adherence to primitive crudities, he wrought out of that material the fabric of the greatest of tragedies.

What we shall find in thus studying anew some of the literature of the subject is a modification of the grosser elements in the popular superstition such as the last section has already prepared us to expect. We saw there how restricted was the use which the tragedians and others dared to make of the popular belief in corporeal revenants of any kind; we saw that dramatic propriety absolutely forbade the introduction of a dead man to play a part otherwise than in the form of a ghost; and yet more than once we found, especially as the climax of some imprecation, a verbal allusion to the belief in incorruptibility and bodily resuscitation. And now similarly we shall see that the tragedians allowed themselves no greater license in dealing with revenants in quest of vengeance than in dealing with the more innocuous sort; we shall see that dramatic propriety forced them to find some other agency than that of the bodily revenant whereby the vengeance of Agamemnon upon Clytemnestra, and of Clytemnestra upon Orestes, might be executed; but we shall find withal that here again there are a few verbal references to the uprising of the dead themselves as avengers of their own wrongs, and moreover that, though in the actual development of the plot they can have no part save only that of a ghost, and some other avenger is made to act on their behalf, yet it is they themselves who instigate and urge him to his task. The bodily activity of the murdered man is suppressed, save for some few hints, as a thing too gross for representation by tragic art; but at the same time fidelity to old religious tradition is in a way maintained by proclaiming his personal, though ghostly, activity in inciting and even compelling others to avenge him.