Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

So at last he went to an old woman and told her his trouble, and she said to him, “Go again to-night and play till dawn is near; then before the cock crows[313], make a dash and seize the kerchief in the Nereid’s hand, and hold it fast. And though she change into terrible shapes, be not afraid; only hold fast until she take again her proper form; then must she do as thou wilt.”

The young man therefore went again that night and played till close on dawn. Then as the Nereid passed close beside him, leading the dance, he sprang upon her and grasped the kerchief. And straightway the cock crew, and the other Nereids fled; but she whose kerchief he had seized could not go, but at once began to transform herself into horrible shapes in hope to frighten the shepherd and make him loose his hold. First she became a lion, but he remembered the witch’s warning and held fast for all the lion’s roaring. And then the Nereid turned into a snake, and then into fire[314], but he kept a stout heart and would not let go the kerchief. Then at last she returned to her proper form and went home with him and was his wife and bore him a son; but the kerchief he kept hidden from her, lest she should become a Nereid again.’

In this story there are two ancient traits especially noteworthy. The power of transformation into horrible shapes is precisely the means of defence which the Nereid Thetis once sought to employ against Peleus; the forms of wild beast and of fire, which she assumed according to ancient myth, are the same as Nereids now adopt; and the instructions now given to hold fast until the Nereid resume her proper shape are the same as Chiron, the wise Centaur, gave once to Peleus[315]. It is true that in the ancient story it is the person of Thetis that Peleus was bidden to grasp, while in the modern tale the shepherd’s immediate object is to retain hold of the kerchief only. But this feature of the story too is an interesting witness to antiquity, although in Thetis’ history it does not appear. Ancient art has left to us several representations[316] of nymphs with veil-like scarves worn on the head or borne in the hand and floating down the breeze; and the magic properties inherent in them are exemplified by Ino’s gift, or rather loan, to Odysseus. The scarf imperishable (κρήδεμνον ἄμβροτον) which she bade him gird about his breast and have no fear of any suffering nor of death, was not his own to keep after he reached the mainland; in accordance with her behest ‘he loosed then the goddess’ scarf from about him, and let it fall into the river’s salt tide, and a great wave bore it back down the stream, and readily did Ino catch it in her hands’[317]. Here Ino’s anxiety and strait command as to the return of her veil are most easily understood by the aid of the modern belief which makes the possession of the scarf or kerchief the sole, or at least the chief, means of godlike power. In Cythnos at the present day it is the μπόλια, or scarf worn about the head, which alone is believed to invest Nereids with their distinctive qualities[318]; and if the modern scarf is a lineal descendant of the Homeric type such as Ino wore—for even in feminine dress fashions are slow to change in the Greek islands[319]—the epithet ‘imperishable’ may have unsuspected force, as implying that the scarf confers a semblance of divinity on its owner and not vice versa.

In such of the stories of the above type as do not end with the marriage of the Nereid[320] the sequel is not encouraging to other adventurers. For though she be a good wife in commonplace estimation—and the Greek view of matrimony is in general commonplace to the verge of sordidness—though her skill in domestic duties be as proverbial as her beauty, she either turns her charms and her cunning to such account as to discover the hiding-place of her stolen kerchief, or, failing this, so mopes and pines over her work that her husband worn down by her sullenness and persistent silence decides to risk all if he can but restore her lightheartedness. Then though he have taken an oath of her that she will not avail herself of her recovered freedom, but will abide with him as his wife, her promise is light as the breeze that bears her away with fluttering kerchief, and he is alone.

But fickleness is not the worst of the Nereids’ qualities in their dealings with men. In malice they are as wanton as in love. Woe betide him who trespasses upon their midday carnival or crosses their nightly path; dumbness, blindness, epilepsy, and horrors of mutilation have been the penalties of such intrusion, though the man offend unwittingly; for the Nereids are tiger-like in all, in stealth and cruelty as in grace and beauty; and none who look upon their radiance can guess the darkness of their hearts. Terrible was the experience of a Melian peasant, who coming unawares upon the Nereids one night was bidden by them to a cave hard by, where they feasted him and made merry together and did not deny him their utmost favours; but when morning broke, they sent him to his home shattered and impotent.

If such be sometimes the results of their seeming goodwill and proffered companionship, how much more fearful a thing must be their enmity! Let a man but intrude upon their revels in some sequestered glen, or sleep beneath the tree that shelters them, or play the pipe beside the river where they bathe, and in such wrath they will gather about him[321], that the eyes which have looked upon them see no more, and the voice that cries out is thenceforth dumb, and madness springs of their very presence.

But if the Nereids are fickle and treacherous in their dealings with men, towards women they are consistently malicious. Especially on two occasions must every prudent peasant-woman be on her guard against their envy—at marriage and in child-birth. For though the Nereids themselves prove no true wives, so jealous are they of the joys of wedlock, that if a bride be not well secured from their molestation, they will mar the fruition of her love, or else, where they cannot prevent, they will endeavour at the least to cut short the happiness of motherhood, slaying with fever the woman whose bliss has stirred their malevolence, yet sparing always the child and even blessing it with beauty and wealth.

The means by which women most commonly protect themselves on these occasions are the wearing of amulets; the fastening of a bunch of garlic over the house-door; the painting of a cross in black upon the lintel (this custom may be a Christianised form of the ancient practice, mentioned by Photius[322], of smearing houses with pitch at the birth of children as a means of driving away powers of evil); and, if any strange visitants are heard about the house at night, the maintenance of strict silence. But steps are also sometimes taken to appease the Nereids; offerings of food, in which honey is the essential ingredient, are set out for them, and formerly in Athens[323] to this a bride used to add two chemises out of her trousseau.

Such precautions after a confinement are regularly continued for forty days. It would appear that in ancient times this was the period during which women were held to be specially exposed to the evil eye and all other ghostly and sinister influences[324], including probably, as now, the assaults of nymphs; and in modern usage the duration of the time of peril is so well established that the word σαραντίζω, literally to ‘accomplish forty (σαράντα) days,’ is used technically of the churching of women at the end of that period; while a more frankly pagan survival is to be found in the fact that for forty days no right-minded mother will cross the threshold of her own house to go out, nor enter a neighbour’s house, without stepping on the door-key, that being the most easily available piece of iron, a metal, which in the folk-lore of ancient Greece[325], as in that of many other countries, was a charm and safeguard against the supernatural.

It is not however the mothers only, who need protection from the Nereids, but the children also, and that too throughout their childhood; yet not against the same perils; for the mother is liable to malicious injuries; the child is safe indeed from wilful hurt, but it may be stolen by Nereids. We have already seen how Nereids who have wed with mortal men, though faithless to their husbands, are yet drawn home now and again by love of their children. And such of them too as have never yielded to human embrace are yet instinct with a strange yearning to possess a mortal woman’s prettiest little ones; on one child they exert a fascination which unhappily proves fatal to it; another they seize with open violence; or again they set stealthily in some cradle a babe of pure Nereid birth—a changeling that by some weird fatality is weakly and doomed to die—and carry off to the woods and hills the human infant, in whom they delight, to be their playmate and their fosterling. In a history of the island of Pholegandros, the writer, a native of the place, accounts for the multitude of small chapels in the island on the ground of the peasants’ anxiety each to have a saint close to his property to defend him from such raids by Nereids and other kindred beings[326].