But, while the object in view was single and constant, there would have been no inconsistency in making a certain distinction between the two methods available. On the contrary, if the sole object was the disintegration of the dead body, the surer and quicker means of attaining it should logically have been preferred. Cremation therefore might legitimately have been reckoned a superior rite to inhumation; for it cannot but have been recognised that the disintegration of the body is more rapidly and unfailingly effected by the action of fire than by the action of the soil.
It is true indeed that the solvent action of the earth upon the buried body—even with all due allowance for the absence of any coffin in many cases—is popularly regarded as far more rapid than it can actually be. The period usually reckoned by the common-folk as the limit of time requisite for complete dissolution is forty days. This is stated clearly enough in a few lines of a song of lamentation heard in Zacynthos:
καὶ μέσ’ ’στὸ σαραντοήμερο ἀρμοὺς ἀρμοὺς χωρίζουν,
πέφτουνε τὰ ξανθὰ μαλλιὰ, βγαίνουν τὰ μαύρα μάτια,
καὶ χώρια πάει τὸ κορμὶ καὶ χώρια τὸ κεφάλι[1226].
‘And within the forty days, they (the dead) are severed joint from joint, their bright hair falls away, their dark eyes fall out, and asunder go trunk and head.’
The Zacynthian muse is horribly explicit; its utterances need no interpreter; itself rather gives the true interpretation of certain customs which are wide-spread in modern Greece and appear to date from pre-Christian days.
The fortieth day after death is almost universally observed in Greece as one on which the relations of the deceased should provide a memorial feast. There are indeed other fixed days for the like commemoration and ‘forgiveness[1227]’ of the dead, but these all fall at periods of three, or a multiple of three, days, weeks, months, or years, from the date of death. These, I think, have been selected in deference to the mysterious virtue of the number three[1228], and not improbably multiplied by the importunities of a penurious priesthood, to whom some half-dozen hearty meals in the course of the year do not appear an inappropriate remuneration for their services at death-bed and burial. But the fortieth day was originally devoted to this purpose, it may reasonably be supposed, because it was the last opportunity of setting before the dead man’s neighbours and acquaintances savoury meat such as their soul loved, that they might eat thereof and ‘loose’ the dead man from any curse wherewith in his lifetime they had bound him; if dissolution was not to be retarded, the fortieth day was in popular reckoning the last opportunity for absolution.
From this it should follow that any memorial feasts held later[1229] than the fortieth day are of purely ecclesiastical contrivance; and the correctness of this inference is attested by a curious local usage which clearly distinguishes the popular and the ecclesiastical feasts. At Sinasos in Asia Minor two classes of commemorations are recognised. The one is called κανίσκια, ‘little baskets,’ from the method in which food is distributed to the poor; this is held on the fortieth day. The other has usurped the name μνημόσυνα, which commonly belongs to all memorial-feasts, and is held on the three anniversaries of the death (for, after the third, exhumation generally takes place, and no further memorial-feasts are needed) and consists in the presentation of an ornamental dish of boiled wheat (κόλλυβα) at the church and the reading of a service[1230]. In other words, the fortieth day is the popular festival, and the observances of later dates are ecclesiastical. Clearly the reason for this distinction must lie in the fact that the common-folk believe, as the song from Zacynthos shows, that dissolution is normally complete by the fortieth day, while the Church has prudently fixed the date, after which exhumation is permissible, at the end of the third year. Presumably then a period of forty days was the old pagan period, for which the Church has tried, with partial success, to substitute three years.
Several other small pieces of evidence point to the wide distribution of this popular notion. In Sinasos[1231], once more, and also in Patmos[1232], the fees paid to the priests for memorial services derive their name from the word ‘forty’ (σαράντα), as if the fortieth day were the limit; after that date, apparently, though my authorities are not explicit on the point, the priests have for their remuneration only the dish of boiled wheat or other presents in kind. In Crete, if a dead man is suspected of turning vrykolakas soon after his death, the people are anxious to deal with him before he enters upon his second period of forty days[1233]; for then all hope of natural dissolution is past, and he becomes as it were a confirmed vampire. In Scyros, the old custom of burning such corpses as were found on exhumation at the end of three years (or, in case of a panic, earlier) to be still whole, and were therefore suspected of vampire-like proclivities, has been replaced by the milder expedient of carrying the body round to forty churches in turn and then re-interring it, in the hope, as it seems, that each of the forty saints, whose sanctuaries have been honoured with a visit and a certain consumption of candles, will in return take a proportionate share in ‘loosing’ the suppliant dead—or, it may be, in the more mathematical expectation that the work effected in cases of ordinary burial by one funeral-service in forty days, will be achieved by forty funeral-services in one day. Whichever be the calculation on which the practice has been based, the number of churches to be visited is clearly governed by the number of days requisite, in popular belief, for ordinary dissolution.