When I was in Scyros I heard of an equally curious case of a long-deferred cure which had recently taken place and was the talk of the town. For seven consecutive years a man from Euboea had brought his wife, who was mad, to the church of S. George to ‘sleep in’ for forty days. Shortly before I arrived the last of these periods was just drawing to a close, when one night both the man and his wife saw a vision of S. George who came and laid his hand on her head; and in the morning she woke sane. Of her sanity when I saw her—for they were still in the island, paying, I think, some vow which the man had made—I had no doubt; and the evidence of the people of the place who for seven years previously had seen her mad seemed irrefragable.
The instances which I have cited are from the records of churches which have succeeded to the reputation possessed by Epidaurus in antiquity. These owing to the enthusiasm which their fame inspires are probably the scenes of more faith-cures than humbler and less known sanctuaries. But in every church throughout the land the observance of the custom may occasionally be seen; for in the less civilised districts at any rate it is among the commonest remedies for childish ailments for a mother to pass the night with her child in the village church.
We shall notice in later chapters the remnants of other pagan institutions which the Greek Church has harboured—an oracle established in a Christian chapel and served by a priest—a church-festival at which sacrifice is done and omens are read—the survival of ancient ‘mysteries’ in the dramatic celebration of Good Friday and Easter. For the present enough has been said to show that, even within the domain of what is nominally Christian worship, the peasant of to-day in his conception of the higher powers and in his whole attitude towards them remains a polytheist and a pagan. And as in this aspect of religion, so in that other which concerns men’s care for the dead and their conception of the future life, the persistence of pagan beliefs and customs is constantly manifest. The ancient funeral usages are undisturbed; and in the dirges which form part of them the heaven and the hell of Christianity seem almost unknown: ‘the lower world’ (ὁ κάτω κόσμος), over which rules neither God nor the Devil but Charon, is the land to which all men alike are sped.
But there is no need to dilate upon these matters yet. It is clear enough already, I hope, that the fact of Greece being nominally a Christian country should not preclude the hope of finding there instructive survivals of paganism. The Church did not oust her predecessor. By a policy of conciliation and compromise she succeeded indeed in imposing upon Hellenic religion the name of Christianity and the Christian code of morality and all the external appanages of Christian worship: but in the essentials of religion proper she deferred largely to the traditional sentiments of the race. She utilised the sanctuaries which other associations had rendered holy; she permitted or adopted as her own the methods by which men had approached and entreated other gods than hers; she condoned polytheism by appropriating the shrines of gods whom men had been wont to worship to the service of saints whom they inevitably would worship as gods instead; and even so she failed to suppress altogether the ejected deities. The result is that for the peasant Christianity is only a part of a larger scheme of religion. To the outside observer it may appear that there are two distinct departments of popular religion, the one nominally Christian, devoted to the service of God and the Saints, provided with sanctuaries and all the apparatus of worship, served by a regular priesthood, limited by dogma and system; the other concerned with those surviving deities of pre-Christian Greece to whom we must next turn, free in respect of its worship alike from the intervention of persons and the limitations of place, obedient only to a traditional lore which each may interpret by his own feelings and augment by his own experience. But the peasant seems hardly sensible of any such contrast. His Christian and his pagan deities consort amicably together; prayer and vow and offering are made to both, now to avert their wrath, now to cajole them into kindness; the professed prophets of either sort, the priests and the witches, are endowed with kindred powers; everywhere there is overlapping and intertwining. And when the very authorities of the Greek Church have adopted or connived at so much of pagan belief and custom, how should the common-folk distinguish any longer the twin elements in their blended faith? Their Christianity has become homogeneous with their paganism, and it is the religious spirit inherited from their pagan ancestors by which both alike are animated.
CHAPTER II.
THE SURVIVAL OF PAGAN DEITIES.
§ 1. The Range of Modern Polytheism.
Thus far we have considered paganism in its bearing and influence upon modern Greek Christianity. We have seen how the Church, in endeavouring to widen her influence, countenanced many practices and conciliated many prejudices of a people whose temperament needed a multitude of gods and whose piety could pay homage to them all, a people moreover to whom the criterion of divinity was neither moral perfection nor omnipotence. From the ethical standpoint some of the ancient gods were better, some worse than men: in point of power they were superhuman but not almighty. Some indeed claimed that there was no difference in origin between mankind and its deities. ‘One is the race of men’ sang Pindar ‘with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath of life: yet sundered are they by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[107].’ One in origin, they are diverse in might. The test of godhead is power sufficing to defy death. Rightly therefore did Homer make ‘deathless’ and ‘everbeing’ his constant epithets for the gods. Immortality alone is the quality which distinguishes them in kind and not merely in degree from men, and makes them worthy of worship.
A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad—broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.
So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word ‘Christian’ has become a popular synonym for ‘Greek’ in contradistinction not only with ‘Mohammedan,’ but even sometimes with ‘Western’ or ‘Catholic’ or with ‘Protestant,’ and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[108]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.
The origin of the non-Christian deities, even if we were unable to identify any of them with the gods of classical Greece, would be clearly enough proved by some of the general terms under which all of them are included. Those who use these terms indeed no longer appreciate their significance; for all sense of antagonism between the pagan and Christian elements in the popular religion has, as we have seen, long been lost. But the words themselves are a relic of the early days in which the combat of Christianity with the heathen world was still stern. Among the most widespread of these terms is the word ξωτικά[109] (i.e. ἐξωτικά), the ‘extraneous’ powers, clearly an invention of the early Christians. The phrase ‘those that are without’ (οἱ ἔξω or οἱ ἔξωθεν) was used by S. Paul first[110] and afterwards generally by the Fathers of the Church to denote men of all other persuasions. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea employed the adjective ἐξωτικός also in a corresponding sense[111]. This word no doubt became popular, and hence τὰ ἐξωτικά, ‘the extraneous ones,’ became a convenient term by which to denote comprehensively all those old divinities whose worship the Church disallowed but even among her own adherents could not wholly suppress. Another comprehensive term equally significant, if not so commonly used, is τὰ παγανά[112], ‘the pagan ones.’ This is in use in the Ionian islands and some parts of the mainland, but I have not met with it nor found it understood in the Peloponnese or in the islands of the Aegean Sea[113]. In Cephalonia it is chiefly, though not exclusively, applied to a species of supernatural beings usually called callicántzari (καλλικάντζαροι) of whom more anon: the reason of this restriction may be either the fact that these monsters—to judge from the folk-stories of the island—so far outnumber there all other kinds of ‘pagan’ beings that this one species has almost appropriated to itself the generic name, or that in old time, when the word παγανά, ‘pagan,’ was still understood in the sense which we attribute to it, these monsters were deemed specially ‘pagan’ because, as we shall see later, they delight in disturbing a season of Christian gladness. But elsewhere the term, still employed in what must have been its original meaning, comprises all kinds of non-Christian deities; and in earlier times ‘the pagan ones’ was probably as frequent an expression as its synonym ‘the extraneous ones.’ To these may perhaps be added the rare appellation recorded by Schmidt[114], τσίνια: for if the derivation from τζίνα, ‘fraud,’ ‘deceit,’ be right, it will mean ‘the false gods.’