Yet Schmidt, who recorded these lines from Zacynthos, found that the actual custom was barely remembered there. He met indeed, in 1863, one old woman aged eighty-two, who as a child had known the practice of putting a copper in the mouth of the dead as also that of laying a key on the corpse’s breast; but of the purpose of the coin she knew nothing; the key she believed to be useful for opening the gates of Paradise. For myself, though I have heard mention of the use of the coin, I have never known it to be associated with Charos. I incline therefore to the opinion that in most places where the custom is or has recently been practised, it has outlived the interpretation which was in classical times put upon it.
But was the classical interpretation a true index to the origin of the custom? Was it anything more than an aetiological explanation of a custom whose significance even in an early age had already become obscured by lapse of time? One thing at least has been made certain by the modern study of folklore, namely that a custom may outlive not only the idea which gave it birth but even successive false ideas which it has itself engendered in the minds of men who have sought vainly to explain it. When therefore Lucian[217] stated that ‘they put an obol in the dead man’s mouth as boat-fare for the ferryman,’ it is possible that he was recording a late and incorrect interpretation of a custom which had existed before the rôle of ferryman had ever been invented for Charon. Further if that interpretation had been in the main a literary figment, it would have been natural for the original meaning of the custom to be still remembered among the unlettered common-folk of outlying districts. There are plenty of cases in modern Greece in which different explanations of the same custom are offered in different localities. In spite therefore of the fact that one view only found expression in classical literature, there is no antecedent improbability in the supposition that an older view may have been handed down even to recent generations in the purer oral traditions of the common-folk.
Once only, from a fellow-traveller in the Cyclades, did I obtain any explanation at all of the use of the coin, εἶναι καλὸ γιὰ τἀερικά[218], ‘it is useful because of the aërial ones.’ This sounds vague enough, but nothing more save gestures of uncertainty could I elicit. Was the coin useful, in his view, as a fee to be paid to ‘the aërial ones’ on the soul’s journey from this world to the next, or as a charm against the assaults of such beings? That was the question to which I sought an answer from him, but in vain. For myself I cannot determine in which sense the dark saying was actually meant. The former would accord well with one local belief of the present day, if only my informant had specified one particular kind of aërial beings who are believed to take toll of departing souls; but to this I shall return in a later section of this chapter[219]. The second interpretation of the words, however, whether they were intended in that sense by the speaker or not, furnishes what will be shown by other evidence to be the key to the origin of the custom.
A coin is often used as a charm against sinister influences[220]. In this case then it may have been a prophylactic against aërial spirits. Why then is it generally put in the dead man’s mouth? Not, I think, because the mouth is a convenient purse, as seems to be assumed in the classical interpretation of the custom, but because the mouth is the entrance to the body. The peasants of to-day believe as firmly as men of the Homeric age that it is through the mouth that the soul escapes at death. The phrase μὲ τὴ ψυχὴ ’στὰ δόντια, ‘with the soul between the teeth,’ is the popular equivalent for ‘at the last gasp’; and in the folk-songs the same idea constantly recurs; ‘open thy mouth,’ says Charos to a shepherd whom he has thrown in wrestling, ‘open thy mouth that I may take thy soul[221].’ Now the passage by which the soul makes its exit, is naturally the passage by which evil spirits (or the soul[222], if it should return,) would make their entrance; and, as we shall see later, there is a very real fear among the peasantry that a dead body may be entered and possessed by an evil spirit. Clearly then the mouth, by which the spirit would enter, is the right place in which to lay the protective coin.
The interpretation which I suggest gains support from some points in modern usage. In Macedonia, according to one traveller[223], the coin which formerly used to be laid in the corpse’s mouth was Turkish and bore a text from the Koran, an aggravation of the pagan custom which was made a pretext for episcopal intervention[224]. Now clearly, if the coin had in that district been designed as payment for the services of Charos as ferryman, there would have been no motive for preferring one bearing an inscription from the Mohammedan scriptures, which assuredly could not enhance the coin’s value in the eyes of Charos: but if the coin was itself employed as a charm against evil spirits, the sacred text might well have been deemed to add not a little to its prophylactic properties. Thus the character of the particular type of coin chosen indicates that the coin in itself too was at one time viewed as a charm; a charm moreover whose effect would be precisely that of the key which in the island of Zacynthos was also laid upon the dead man’s breast; for the key was certainly not designed, as Schmidt’s informant would have it, to open the gates of Paradise, but, like any other piece of iron, served originally to scare away spirits. The use of a coin as well as of a key in that island was merely meant to make assurance doubly sure.
Again, in many places throughout Greece, where this use of a coin is no longer known, a substitute of more Christian character has been found. On the lips of the dead is laid either a morsel of consecrated bread from the Eucharist[225], or more commonly a small piece of pottery—a fragment it may be of any earthenware vessel—on which is incised the sign of the cross with the legend Ι. Χ. ΝΙ. ΚΑ. (‘Jesus Christ conquers’) in the four angles[226]. Here the choice of the inscribed words of itself seems to indicate the intention of barring the dead man’s mouth against the entrance of evil spirits; and as final proof of my theory I find that in both Chios[227] and Rhodes[228], where a wholly or partially Christianised form of the custom prevails, the charm employed is definitely understood by the people to be a means of precaution against a devil entering the dead body and resuscitating it. Nor must the mention of a devil in this connexion be taken as evidence that the Chian and Rhodian interpretation of the custom is not ancient. I shall be able to show in a later chapter that the idea of a devil entering the corpse is only the Christian version of a pagan belief in a possible re-animation of the corpse by the soul[229].
But there is yet another variety of the custom, in which no coin and no Mohammedan nor Christian[230] symbol is used, but a charm whose magic properties were in repute long before Mohammed, long before Christ, probably long before coinage was known to Greece. Again a piece of pottery is used, but the symbol stamped upon it is the geometrical figure
, the ‘pentacle’ of mediaeval magic lore. In Greece it is now known as τὸ πεντάλφα, but of its properties, beyond the fact that it serves as a charm[231], the people have nothing to say. In the mediaeval and probably in the yet earlier magic of Europe and the East it is one of the commonest figures, appearing sometimes as Solomon’s seal, sometimes as the star which led the wise men to Bethlehem, sometimes, in black colouring, as a symbol of the principle of evil, and correspondingly, in white, as the symbol of the principle of good. But though the figure has been known to the magicians of many nations and many epochs, there is no reason to suppose that it is in recent times or from other races that the Greeks have learnt it: for it was known too by the ancient Greeks, who noted among its more intelligible properties the fact that the five lines composing it can be drawn without removing pencil from paper. The Pythagoreans, who called it the πεντάγραμμον[232], are known to have attached to it some mystic value. There is a reasonable likelihood therefore that the symbol has been handed down in Greece as a magical charm—for we have seen how many other methods of magic have survived—from the time of Pythagoras. Further back we cannot penetrate; yet—vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, and there were professors of occult sciences before Pythagoras. Was it then he who first discovered the figure’s mystic value? Or did he merely adopt and interpret in his own way a symbol which for long ages before him had been endowed with magical powers? Was it perhaps this figure, graven on some broken potsherd, which long before coinage supplied a more ready charm protected the corpse from possession by evil spirits, or rather, in those days, from reanimation by the soul? Who shall say? The belief, which has found its modern expression in the engraving of Christian or Mohammedan texts on prophylactic coins or pottery and in barring with them the door of the lips which gives access to the corpse, is certainly primitive enough in character to date from the dimmest prehistoric age.
If my suggestion as to the origin of the custom is correct, it was only the accident of a coin being commonly used as the prophylactic charm, which caused the classical association of the custom with Charon; and, once disembarrassed of this association, the popular conception of Charon in antiquity is more easily studied.