Nothing is more amazing in the peasantry of modern Greece than their familiarity with these various beings. More than once I have overheard two peasants comparing notes on the ghostly fauna of their respective districts; and the intimate and detailed character of their knowledge was a revelation in regard to their powers of visualisation. It is the mountaineers and the mariners who excel in this; but even the duller folk of the lowlands see much that is hidden from foreign eyes. Once however I did see a nymph—or what my guide took for one—moving about in an olive-grove near Sparta; and I must confess that had I possessed an initial faith in the existence of nymphs and in the danger of looking upon them, so lifelike was the apparition that I might have sworn as firmly as did my guide that it was a nymph that we had seen, and might have required as strong a dose as he at the next inn to restore my nerves. The initial faith in such things, which the child acquires from its mother, is no doubt an important factor in the visualisation; but it is certainly strange that often in Greece not one man only but several together will see an apparition at the same moment, and even agree afterwards as to what they saw.
These beings then are not the mere fanciful figures of old wives’ fables, but have a real hold upon the peasant’s belief and a firm place in his religion. To the objects of Christian worship or veneration—God and Christ and the Virgin together with the archangels and all the host of saints—have been accorded the highest places and chiefest honours: but beside them, or rather below them, yet feared and honoured too, stand many of the divine personalities of the old faith, recognised and distinguished still. Artemis, Demeter, and Charon, as well as Nymphs and Gorgons, Lamiae and Centaurs, have to be reckoned with in the conduct of life; while in folk-stories the memory at least of other deities still survives. To these remnants of ancient mythology the next chapter will be devoted; the purely pagan element in the modern polytheism may be sufficiently illustrated here by a few curious cases of the use even of the word ‘god’ (θεός) in reference to other than the God of Christendom.
In Athens, down to recent times, there was a fine old formula of blessing in vogue—and who shall say but that among the simpler people it may still be heard?—which combined impartially the one God and the many:—νὰ ς’ ἀξιῶσῃ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ εὐχαριστήσῃς θεοὺς καὶ ἀνθρώπους[78], ‘God fit thee to find favour with gods and men!’ In the island of Syra, according to Bent[79], it was ‘a common belief amongst the peasants that the ghosts of the ancient Greeks come once a year from all parts of Greece to worship at Delos, ... and even to-day they will reverently speak of the “god in Delos.”’ Another writer mentions a similar expression as used in several parts of the mainland, though only it would seem as an ejaculation, θεὲ τῆς Κρήτης or γιὰ τὸ θεὸ τῆς Κρήτης ‘by the god of Crete[80]!’ In the island of Santorini (the ancient Thera) I personally encountered a still more striking case of out-spoken polytheism. I chanced one day upon a very old woman squatting on the extreme edge of the cliff above the great flooded crater which, though too deep for anchorage, serves the main town of the island as harbour—a place more fascinating in its hideousness than any I have seen. Wondering at her dangerous position, I asked her what she was doing; and she replied simply enough that she was making rain. It was two years since any had fallen, and as she had the reputation of being a witch of unusual powers and had procured rain in previous droughts, she had been approached by several of the islanders who were anxious for their vineyards. Moreover she had been prepaid for her work—a fact which spoke most eloquently for the general belief in her; for the Greek is slow enough (as doubtless she knew) to pay for what he has got, and never prepays what he is not sure of getting. True, her profession had its risks, she said; for on one occasion, the only time that her spells had failed, some of her disappointed clients whose money she had not returned tried to burn her house over her one night while she slept. But business was business. Did I want some rain too? To ensure her good will and further conversation, I invested a trifle, and tried to catch the mumbled incantations which followed on my behalf. Of these however beyond a frequent invocation of the Virgin (Παναγία μου) and a few words about water and rain I could catch nothing; but I must acknowledge that her charms were effectual, for before we parted the thunder was already rolling in the distance, and the rain which I had bought spoilt largely the rest of my stay in the island. The incantations being finished, she became more confidential. She would not of course let a stranger know the exact formula which she employed; that would mar its efficacy: she vouchsafed to me however with all humility the information that it was not by her own virtue that she caused the rain, but through knowing ‘the god above and the god below’ (τὸν ἄνω θεὸ καὶ τὸν κάτω θεό). The latter indeed had long since given up watering the land; he had caused shakings of the earth and turned even the sea-water red. The god above also had once rained ashes when she asked for water, but generally he gave her rain, sometimes even in summer-time. One thing she could not make out—who was the god that caused the thunder; did I know? I evaded the question, and our theological discussion went no further, for the god of thunder was making his voice heard more threateningly, and the old witch would not stay to make his acquaintance at closer quarters.
The physical interpretation of these references to the god above and the god below is not difficult. At the present day there are said to be three springs, and three only, in the whole island; nor are they of much use to the inhabitants; indeed the only one which I saw was dry save for a scanty moisture barely sufficient to keep the rock about it green and mossy: and in fact the population depends entirely upon rain-water stored up in large underground cisterns or reservoirs. Clearly the god below no longer gives water; but that there may have been more spring-water prior to the great eruptions of 1866 is very probable; for the people still call certain dry old torrent-beds by which the island is intersected ‘rivers’ (ποταμοί), and real rivers with water in them figure also in several of the local folk-stories. The perversity of the god above in sending ashes on one occasion instead of rain may also be understood in reference to the same eruptions, of which the old woman gave me a vivid description.
But the theology itself is more interesting than its material basis. This witch—a good Christian, they told me, but a little mad, with a madness however of which sane vine-growers were eager enough to avail themselves—acknowledged certainly three gods: the unknown thunder-god was clearly distinct from the god of the rain who was known to her: and there was also the god of the waters under the earth, in whose service she had perhaps followed the calling of a water-finder, and to whom she ascribed, as did the ancients to Poseidon, the shaking of the earth.
Polytheism then even in its purely pagan form is not yet extinct in Greece. In the disguise of Christianity, we shall see, it is everywhere triumphant.
Among the Christian objects of worship—for I have already explained that by the common-folk the saints are worshipped as deities—the Trinity and the Virgin occupy the highest places, rivalled perhaps here and there by some local saint of great repute for miracles, but nowhere surpassed. It is the Virgin indeed who, in Pashley’s opinion, ‘is throughout Greece the chief object of the Christian peasant’s worship[81]’; and certainly, I think, more numerous and more various petitions are addressed to her than to any person of the Trinity or to any saint. But the Trinity, or at any rate God (ὁ Θεός) and Christ (ὁ Χριστός), as the peasants say,—for the Holy Ghost is hardly a personality to them and is rarely named except in doxologies and formal invocations—are of almost equal importance, and are so closely allied with the Virgin that it is difficult to draw distinctions.
But while the Church has thus secured the first place for her most venerated figures, the influence of pagan feeling is clearly seen in the popular conception of this ‘God.’ His position is just such as that of Zeus in the old régime. He is little more than the unnamed ruler among many other divinities. His sway is indeed supreme and he exercises a general control; but his functions are in a certain sense limited none the less, and his special province is the weather only. Ζεὺς ὕει, said the ancients, and the moderns re-echo their thought in words of the same import, βρέχει ὁ Θεός, ‘God is raining,’ or ὁ Θεὸς ῥίχνει νερό, ‘God is throwing water[82].’ So too the coming and going of the daylight is described as an act of God; ἔφεξε, or ἐβράδει̯ασε, ὁ Θεός, say the peasants, ‘God has dawned’ or ‘has darkened.’ When it hails, it is God who ‘is plying his sieve,’ ῥεμμονίζει[83] ὁ Θεός. When it thunders, ‘God is shoeing his horse,’ καλιγώνει τ’ ἄλογό του, or, according to another version[84], ‘the hoofs of God’s horse are ringing,’ βροντοῦν τὰ πέταλα ἀπὸ τ’ ἄλογο τοῦ Θεοῦ. Or again the roll of the thunder sometimes suggests quite another idea; ‘God is rolling his wine-casks,’ ὁ Θεὸς κυλάει τ’ ἀσκιά του[85], or τὰ πιθάρι̯α του. And once again, because a Greek wedding cannot be celebrated without a large expenditure of gunpowder, the booming of the thunder suggests to some that ‘God is marrying his son’ or ‘God is marrying his daughters,’ ὁ Θεὸς παντρεύει τὸν ὑγιό του[86], or ταὶς θυγατέραις του[87].
Such expressions as these[88] are in daily use among the Greek peasantry: and nothing could reveal more frankly the purely pagan and anthropomorphic conception of God which everywhere prevails. The God of Christendom is indistinguishable from the Zeus of Homer. A line from a Cretan distich, in which God is described as ἐκεῖνος ἀποῦ συννεφιᾷ κι’ ἀποβροντᾷ καὶ βρέχει[89], ‘He that gathereth the clouds and thundereth and raineth,’ exhibits a popular conception of the chief deity unchanged since Zeus first received the epithets νεφεληγερέτης and ὑψιβρεμέτης, ‘cloud-gatherer,’ ‘thunderer on high.’
But even in the province of the weather God has not undivided control. The winds are often regarded as persons acting at their own will; and of the north wind in particular men speak with respect as Sir Boreas (ὁ κὺρ Βορε̯άς), for as in Pindar’s time he is still ‘king of the winds[90].’ So too the whirlwind is the passing of the Nereids, and the water-spout marks the path of the Lamia of the sea. Even the thunder is not always the work of God, but some say that the prophet Elias is ‘driving his chariot,’ or ‘pursuing the dragon.’ The more striking and irregular phenomena in short are governed by the caprice of lesser deities—Christian saints or pagan powers—while God directs the more orderly march of nature.