The larger kind vary from the size of a man to that of a gigantic monster whose loins are on a level with the chimneypots. They are usually black in colour, and covered with a coat of shaggy hair, but a bald variety is also sometimes mentioned. Their heads and also their sexual organs are out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their faces are black; their eyes glare red; they have the ears of goats or asses; from their huge mouths blood-red tongues loll out, flanked by ferocious tusks. Their bodies are in general very lean, so that in some districts the word Callicantzaros is applied metaphorically to a very lean man[512]; but a shorter and thickset variety also occurs. They have the arms and hands of monkeys, and their nails are as long again as their fingers and curved like the talons of a vulture. They are sometimes furnished with long thin tails. They have the legs of a goat or an ass, or sometimes one human leg and one of bestial form; or again both legs are of human shape, but the foot so distorted that the toes come where the heel should be[513]. Hence it is not surprising that they are often lame, but even so they are swift of foot and terrible in strength. ‘They devour their road at the pace of Pegasus,’ wrote Leo Allatius[514]; and at the present day several by-names bear witness to their speed. In Samos they are called Καλλισπούδηδες[515], ‘those who make good speed’; in Cyprus Πλανήταροι[516], ‘the wanderers’; in Athens they have the humorous title Κωλοβελόνηδες, formed from the proverbial expression βελόνια ἔχει ’στὸν κῶλο του, ‘he has needles in his buttocks,’ said of any one who cannot sit still, but is always on the move[517]. Their strength also has earned them one by-name, reported from Kardamýle in Maina, τὰ τσιλικρωτά, said to be formed from the Turkish tselik (‘iron’), in the sense of ‘strong as iron[518].’
All or any of the features which I have mentioned may be found in the person of a single Callicantzaros; but it must be allowed also that no one of them is essential. For sometimes the Callicantzaros appears in ordinary human form without so much as a cloven hoof to distinguish him from ordinary mankind, or again completely in animal shape. In one place they are described as ἀγριάνθρωποι[519], savages but human in appearance, while in another they are ἄγρια τετράποδα[520], ‘savage quadrupeds.’
Yet in general the Callicantzari are neither wholly anthropomorphic nor wholly theriomorphic, but a blend of the two. In a story of some men at Athens who dressed themselves up as Callicantzari, it is said that they blacked their faces and covered themselves with feathers[521]. Again two grotesque and bestial clay statuettes from the Cabirium near Thebes and now in the National Museum at Athens, were identified by peasants as Callicantzari[522]; an identification I have also met with when questioning peasants about similar objects in local museums; in one case it was a Satyr and in another a Centaur which my guide identified as a Callicantzaros. On the whole I should say that the goat contributes more than any other animal to the popular conception of these monsters. Besides having the legs and the ears of goats, as was noted above, they are sometimes said to have their horns also; and in Chios their resemblance to goats is so clearly recognised that in one village they have earned the by-name of Κατσικᾶδες[523], which by formation should mean ‘men who have to do with goats (κατσίκια),’ though it has apparently been appropriated to the designation of beings who are in form half goat and half man. There are however districts, as we shall see later, in which some other animal than the goat forms the predominant element in the monstrous ensemble.
The smaller sort of Callicantzari is rarer than the large, but their distribution is at any rate wide. They are the predominant type in north-west Arcadia, in the district about Mount Parnassus, and at Oenoë[524] on the southern shore of the Black Sea. They are most often human in shape, but are mere pigmies, no taller than a child of five or six. They are usually black, like the larger sort, but are smooth and hairless. They are very commonly deformed, and in this respect the strange beasts on which they ride are like them. At Arachova[525], on the slopes of Parnassus, every one of them is said to have some physical defect. Some are lame; others squint; others have only one eye; others have their noses or mouths, hands or feet set all askew; and as a cavalcade of them passes by night through the village, one is to be seen mounted on a cock and his long thin legs trail on the ground as he rides; another has a horse no bigger than a small dog; another, the tiniest of them all, is perched on an enormous donkey’s back, and when he falls off cannot mount again; and others again ride strange unknown beasts, lame, one-eyed, or one-eared like their masters.
Callicantzari of this type are usually harmless to men. They play indeed the same boisterous pranks as their larger brethren, but perhaps owing to their insignificant size are an object of merriment rather than of fear. But, as I shall show later, there is reason to believe that they are not the original type of Callicantzari. It is only by a casual development of the superstition, that these grotesque hobgoblins have been locally substituted for the grim and gaunt monsters feared elsewhere. They form, as it were, a modern and expurgated edition of the larger sort of Callicantzari, to whom I now return.
The Callicantzari appear only during the δωδεκαήμερον or ‘period of twelve days’ between Christmas and Epiphany[526]. The rest of the year they live in the lower world, and occupy themselves in trying to gnaw through or cut down the great tree (or in other accounts the one or more columns) on which the world rests. Each Christmas they have nearly completed their task, when the time comes for their appearance in the upper world, and during their twelve days’ absence, the supports of the world are made whole again.
Even during their short visit to this world, they do not appear in the daytime. From dawn till sunset they hide themselves in dark and dank places—in caves or beneath mills—and there feed on such food as they can collect, worms, snakes, frogs, tortoises, and other unclean things. But at night they issue forth and run wildly to and fro, rending and crushing those who cross their path. Destruction and waste, greed and lust mark their course. Now they break into some lonely mill, terrify and coerce the miller into showing them his store, bake for themselves cakes thereof, befoul with urine all that they cannot use, and are gone again. Now they pass through some hamlet, and woe to that house which is not prepared against their coming. By chimney and door alike they swarm in, and make havoc of the home; in sheer wanton mischief they overturn and break all the furniture, devour the Christmas pork, befoul all the water and wine and food which remains, and leave the occupants half dead with fright or violence. Now it is a wine shop that they enter, bind the publican to his chair, gag him with dung, break open each cask in turn, drink their fill, and leave the wine running. Now they light upon some belated wayfarer, and make sport of him as their fancy leads them. Sometimes his fate is only to dance all night with the Callicantzari and to be let go at cockcrow unscathed; for these monsters despite their uncouth shape delight in dancing, and to that end often seek the company of the Nereids; but more often men are sorely torn and battered before they escape, and women are forcibly carried off to be the monsters’ wives. In some accounts they even make a meal of their human prey.
The fact that the activities of the Callicantzari are always limited to the night-time has given them a special claim to the name Παρωρίταις or Νυχτοπαρωρίταις[527], formed from πάρωρα, ‘the hour before cockcrow,’ for then it is that their excesses and depredations have reached their zenith; but the word cannot correctly be called a by-name of the Callicantzari, for it is also, if more rarely, applied to other nocturnal visitants.
The only redeeming qualities in these creatures’ characters, from the point of view of men who fall into their clutches, are their stupidity and their quarrelsomeness. They have indeed a chieftain who sometimes tries to marshal and to discipline them, and who is at least wise enough to warn them when the hour of their departure draws near. But in general ‘the Great Callicantzaros[528],’ as he is called, or ‘the lame demon[529],’ is too like the rest of them to be of much avail; and indeed his place is not at the head of the riotous mob where he might control them, but he limps along, a grotesque and usually ithyphallic figure, in the rear. Thus in the popular stories it often happens that either the Callicantzari go on quarrelling about the treatment of some man or the possession of some woman whom they have captured, or else their prisoner is shrewd enough to keep them amused, until cock-crow brings release. For at that sound (or, to be more precise, at the crowing of the third cock, who is black and more potent to scare away demons than the white and red cocks who precede him[530]) they vanish away, like all terrors of the night in ancient[531] as well as modern times, to their dark lairs.
The tales told by the peasants about the Callicantzari are extremely numerous, though there is a certain sameness about the main themes. Three types of story however are deserving of notice, to illustrate the character of the Callicantzari and the ways in which they may be outwitted and eluded.