Such then is the main aspect of this custom; but the preliminary details also require notice. The fire with which to light the ‘unsleeping lamp’ must not be kindled on the spot beside the grave, but is conveyed from the house of the deceased. There, in general, the moment that death takes place or at any rate so soon as the body is laid out in state, candles or lamps are lighted and are placed at the head and at the foot of the couch on which the body reposes. These are kept burning until the funeral-procession is ready to start, and along with the procession either the same lights or other tapers and candles lighted from them are carried to the grave; and here the same fire which was burning in the house of the dead is transmitted to the ‘unsleeping lamp’ at the grave.
This I believe to be the correct form of the custom, but I must notice other varieties and give my reasons for regarding them as less authentic. It is stated in a reliable treatise on the island of Chios[1288], that there the people keep a lamp burning for forty nights in the room where a death has taken place, thinking that the soul wanders for forty nights before it goes down to Hades. The interpretation given evidently implies that the lamp is intended to give light to the spirit of the dead if in the course of its nightly wanderings it visits its former home.
Now so far as the Chian form of the custom is concerned, some such meaning might reasonably be assigned to it. But what of the more usual form of the custom by which the lamp is kept burning both night and day? A disembodied spirit, if it resemble an ordinary man, may reasonably be supposed to need a candle to see its way at night, but surely it needs none in the day-time; yet it is only the custom of burning the light all day long as well as at night that can have gained for it the name of ‘the unsleeping lamp,’ the lamp that is never extinguished. Here then is a visible defect in the Chian manner of observing the custom and likewise in the Chian manner of interpreting it; and a custom defective and misinterpreted in one important detail is open to suspicion in others. So far therefore as Chios is concerned, no great importance attaches to the fact that there the chamber of death is the place where the remnants of the custom are observed.
But there are other parts of Greece in which the death-chamber is the place for the ‘unsleeping lamp,’ and where the lamp still deserves that designation inasmuch as it is kept burning both day and night until the fortieth day after the funeral, and is not, as in Chios, lighted afresh each night. In such districts, I believe, the custom has long ceased to bear any meaning, and being on the wane has for convenience undergone a change. It is still felt to be obligatory to keep the flame that is lighted as soon as death has occurred burning constantly for forty days, but the work of tending it has been found to be more conveniently performed at home than in the grave-yard. The necessity to transmit the flame to the grave, to keep it continuously in close proximity to the dead, is no longer felt. This form of the custom can then be accounted for as a relaxation of that which I have put forward as the old and correct form; whereas on the other hand if the room where death occurred had originally been the proper place for maintaining the ‘unsleeping lamp,’ it would be impossible to account for the transference of the custom to the grave-side, where special shelters or receptacles must be made for the protection of the flame and where more trouble is needed to feed and to trim the lamps day by day. Aráchova and Leonídi where most pains are taken in the observance of the custom—and that not for forty days only but for three years—have the best claim to be regarded as the true exponents of the old custom. The proper place for the ‘unsleeping lamp’ is the grave-side.
But there is a variation also, as I have said, in the period of time during which this custom is kept up in different districts. In some it is a period of forty days, in others a period of three years; and in this respect there is a divergence between the usages even of those places which in other details have been shown to adhere faithfully to the old custom; for at Aráchova and Leonídi the longer period is customary, in Aegina the shorter. It is in this very variation that we find a clue to the meaning and purpose of the custom. In the earlier part of this chapter I showed, by quotation from a popular dirge and by the consideration of various customs connected with death, that in the belief of the common-folk the dissolution of a dead body is effected by the fortieth day after burial. On the other hand the Church has more prudently fixed three years as the time required for dissolution, the period which must elapse before the body may be exhumed. Thus there are two periods, fixed respectively by popular opinion and by ecclesiastical authority, between which there is a choice; the vox populi and the vox Dei are here in disagreement; and according as preference is locally given to the one or to the other mandate, so is a period of forty days or a period of three years locally believed to be that required for the dissolution of the body. But these two periods are also those between which there is a local variation in the custom of maintaining the ‘unsleeping lamp.’ Hence it is reasonably to be inferred that the ‘unsleeping lamp’ is in some way closely connected with the dissolution of the body.
Moreover this connexion is actually recognised by the common-folk themselves, as witness the following two couplets from a funeral-dirge. The words are put, as so often in the dirges, in the mouth of the dead man, who in this instance is supposed to be young and to be addressing his forlorn lady-love.
‘And when the priests with solemn song march toward the grave with me,
Steal thou out from thy mother’s side and light me torches three;
And when the priests shall quench again those lights for me,—ah then,
Then, like the breath of roses, sweet, thou passest from my ken[1289].’