Singling out of the many traditions concerning the Callicantzari the widely, and perhaps universally, prevalent belief that their activities are confined to the Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany, he argues that if we can discover the origin of this limitation, we shall be in a fair way to discover also whence came the conception of the Callicantzari themselves.
Accordingly he traces the history of winter festivals in Greece, starting from the period in which the Greeks, in deference to their Roman masters, adopted the festivals known as the Saturnalia, the Brumalia, and the Kalándae (for so the celebration of the Kalends of January was called by the Greeks) in place of their own old festivals such as the Kronia and some of the festivals of Dionysus. The change however was more one of name than of method of observance[591]. The pagan orgies which marked these festal days were strongly denounced by the Fathers of the Church from the very earliest times. In the first century of our era, Timothy, bishop of Ephesus, met with his martyrdom in an attempt to suppress such a festival. At the end of the fourth century S. John Chrysostom and, after him, Asterios, bishop of Amasea, loudly inveighed against the celebration of the Kalandae. At the end of the seventh century the sixth Oecumenical Council of the Church promulgated a canon forbidding all these pagan winter-festivals. But still in the twelfth century, as Balsamon testifies[592], the old abuses continued unabated; and there are local survivals of such festivals at the present day.
The most prominent feature of these celebrations was that men dressed themselves up in various characters, to represent women, soldiers, or animals, and thus disguised gave themselves up to the wildest orgies. At Ephesus it is clear that these orgies included human sacrifice, and that Bishop Timothy was on one occasion the victim; for we are told by Photius that he met with his death in trying to suppress ‘the polluted and blood-stained rites of the Greeks[593]’; and the same writer speaks of τὸ καταγώγιον—so this particular ceremony was called—as a ‘devilish and abominable festival[594]’ in which men ‘took delight in unholy things as if they were pious deeds[595].’ And again another account of the same celebration tells how men with masks on their faces and with clubs in their hands went about ‘assaulting without restraint free men and respectable women, perpetrating murders of no common sort and shedding endless blood in the best parts of the city, as if they were performing a religious duty (ὡσανεὶ ἀναγκαῖόν τι καὶ ψυχωφελὲς πράττοντες)[596].’
At Amasea, according to Asterios, at the beginning of the fifth century, things were not much better. The peasants, he says, who come into the town during the festival ‘are beaten and outraged by drunken revellers, they are robbed of anything they are carrying, they have war waged upon them in a time of peace, they are mocked and insulted in word and in deed[597].’ Here too the custom of dressing up was in vogue among those who took part in the festival—women’s dress being especially affected.
Again in the seventh century the points specially emphasized by the canon of the Church are that ‘no man is to put on feminine dress, nor any woman the dress proper to men, nor yet are masks, whether comic, satyric, or tragic, to be worn’; and the penalty for disregard of this ordinance was to be excommunication. Yet for all these fulminations the old custom continued. The author of ‘the Martyrdom of S. Dasius[598],’ writing perhaps as late as the tenth century, speaks of the festival of the Kronia as still observed in the old way: ‘on the Kalends of January foolish men, following the custom of the (pagan) Greeks, though they call themselves Christians, hold a great procession, changing their own appearance and character, and assuming the guise of the devil; clothed in goat-skins and with their faces disguised,’ they reject their baptismal vows and again serve in the devil’s ranks. And still in the twelfth century these practices obtained not only among the laity but even among the clergy, some of whom, in the words of Balsamon[599], ‘assume various masks and dresses, and appear in the open nave of the church, sometimes with swords girt on and in military uniform, other times as monks or even as quadrupeds.’
Several instances of the continuance of this custom in modern times have been collected by Polites[600] and others; the savage orgies of old time have indeed dwindled into harmless mummery; but their most constant feature, the wearing of strange disguises, remains unchanged; and the occasion too is still a winter-festival, either some part of the Twelve Days or the carnival preceding Lent. From certain facts concerning these modern festivals it will be manifest that some relation exists between the mummers who celebrate them and the Callicantzari.
In Crete, where the New Year is thus celebrated, the mummers are called καμπουχέροι, while in Achaia a fuller form of the same word, κατσιμπουχέροι, is a by-name of the Callicantzari. At Portariá on Mount Pelion, each night of the Twelve Days, a man is dressed up as an ‘Arab,’ wearing an old cloak and having bells affixed to his clothes. He goes the round of the streets with a lantern; and the villagers explicitly state that this is done γιὰ τὰ καρκαντζέλια, ‘because of the Callicantzari,’ i.e., says Polites, as a means of getting rid of them. At Pharsala there is a sort of play at the Epiphany, in which the mummers represent bride, bridegroom, and ‘Arab’; the Arab tries to carry off the bride, and the bridegroom defends her. In some parts of Macedonia similar mumming takes place at the New Year; in Belbentós the men who take part in it are called ‘Arabs’; at Palaeogratsana they have the name ῥουκατζιάρια (evidently another compound of κάντζαρος, but one which I cannot interpret); formerly also ‘at Kozane and in many other parts of Greece,’ according to a Greek writer in the early part of the nineteenth century, throughout the Twelve Days boys carrying bells used to go round the houses, singing songs and having ‘one or more of their company dressed up with masks and bells and foxes’ brushes and other such things to give them a weird and monstrous look.’
This custom is evidently identical with one which I myself saw enacted in Scyros at the carnival preceding Lent. The young men of the town array themselves in huge capes made of goat-skin, reaching to the hips or lower, and provided with holes for the arms. These capes are sometimes made with hoods of the same material which cover the whole head and face, small holes being cut for the eyes but none for purposes of respiration. In other cases the cape covers the shoulders only, leaving the head free, and the young man contents himself with the blue and white kerchief, which is the usual head-gear in Scyros, and a roughly made domino. A third variety of cape is provided with a hood to cover the back of the head, while the mask for the face is made of the skin of some small animal such as a weasel, of which the hind legs and tail are attached to the hood, while the head and forelegs hang down to the breast of the wearer; eye-holes are cut in these as in the other forms of mask. These capes are girt tightly about the waist with a stout cord or strap, from which are hung all round the body a large number of bronze goat-bells, of the ordinary shape but of extraordinary dimensions, some measuring as much as ten inches for the greatest diameter. The method by which these bells are attached to the belt is remarkable, and is designed to permit a large number of them to be worn without being in any way muffled by contact with the cape. Each bell is fastened to one end of a curved and springy stick of about a foot in length, and the other end is inserted behind the belt from above; the curve and elasticity of the stick thus cause the bell to hang at some few inches distance from the body, free to jangle with every motion of the dancer. Some sixty or seventy of these bells, of various sizes, are worn by the best-equipped, and the weight of such a number was estimated by the people of the place as approximately a hundredweight—no easy load with which to dance over the narrow, roughly-paved alleys of ‘steep Scyros.’ Those however who lack either the prowess or the accoutrements to share in the glorious fatigue do not abstain altogether from the festivities; even the small boys beg, borrow, or steal a goat-bell and attach it to the hinder part of their person in lieu of a tail, or, at the worst, make good the caudal deficiency with a branch from the nearest tree.
Thus in various grades of goat-like attire the young men and boys traverse the town, stopping here and there, where the steep and tortuous paths offer a wider and more level space, to leap and dance, or anon at some friendly door to imbibe spirituous encouragement to further efforts. In the dancing itself there is nothing peculiar to this festival; the swinging amble, which is the gait of the more heavily equipped, is prescribed by the burden of bells and the roughness of roads. The purpose of the leaping and dancing is solely to evoke as much din as possible from the bells; and prodigious indeed is the jarring and jangling in those narrow alleys when the troupe of dancers leap together into the air, as high as their burdens allow, and come down with one crash.
Since I first published[601] an account of these festivities in Scyros, similar celebrations of carnival-time have been reported from other places; at Sochos in Macedonia[602] the scene is almost identical with that which I have described; in the district of Viza in Thrace a primitive dramatic performance was recently observed in which the two chief actors wore similar goat-skins, masks, and bells, and had their hands blackened[603]; and again at Kostí in the extreme north of Thrace there is mummery of the same kind[604].