But pure magic too, no less than these quasi-Christian methods, may effect the loosing of the bond, even without the discovery of the knotted thread which is the source of the mischief. In a recent case on record, a witch, having been consulted by a couple thus distressed, took them to the sea-shore, bade them undress, bound them together with a vine-shoot, and caused them to stand embracing one another in the water until forty waves had beaten upon them[27]. On the significance of the details of this charm no comment is made by the recorder of it; but they deserve, I think, some notice. The vine-shoot, like the olive-shoot, is a known instrument of purification, and is sometimes laid on the bier beside the dead during the lying-in-state (πρόθεσις). Salt is likewise possessed of magical powers to avert all evil influences,—we have noticed the use of it in amulets to protect from the evil eye,—and the sea is therefore more efficacious than a river for mystic purposes. Forty is the number of purification; the churching of women takes place on the fortieth day from the birth, whence the Greek word for to ‘church’ is σαραντίζω,—from σαράντα, ‘forty.’ Lastly the beating of the waves seems intended to drive out by physical compulsion the devil or any power of evil by which husband and wife are kept apart.
In view of this danger it is natural that ample precautions should be taken at every wedding. During the dressing of the bride or the bridegroom, it is customary to throw a handful of salt into a vessel of water, saying, ὅπως λυώνει τὸ ἁλάτι, ἔτσι νὰ λυώσουν οἱ ὀχτροί (ἐχθροί), ‘As the salt dissolves, so may all enemies dissolve.’ The black-handled knife worn by the bridegroom in his belt, and the pair of scissors put in the bride’s shoe or sometimes attached to her girdle, both of which have been noticed as safeguards against the evil eye, serve also to ‘cut’ this magic bond of impotence. Sometimes too a pair of scissors and a piece of fisherman’s net are put in the bridal bed. In Acarnania and Aetolia, and it may be elsewhere, a still more primitive custom prevails; both bride and bridegroom wear an old piece of fishing-net,—in which therefore resides the virtue of salt water,—round the loins next to the body; and from these bits of netting are afterwards made amulets to be worn by any children of the marriage. Such customs are likely long to continue among the simpler folk of modern Greece, who frankly and innocently wish the bride at her wedding reception ‘seven sons and one daughter.’
But it is not only for ailments induced by malicious magic that magical means of cure or aversion are used. The whole of popular medicine is based upon the knowledge of charms and incantations. Many simples and drugs are of course known and employed; but it is still generally believed, as it was in old time, that ‘there would be no good in the herb without the incantation[28].’ For the most ordinary diseases are credited to supernatural causes, and there is no ill to which flesh is heir,—from a headache to the plague,—without some demon responsible for it. A nightmare and the sense of physical oppression which often accompanies it are not traced to so vulgar a cause as a heavy supper, but are dignified as the work of a malicious being named Βραχνᾶς[29], who in the dead of night delights to seat himself on the chest of some sleeper, and by his weight produces an unpleasant feeling of congestion. Material for a similar personification has been found also in the more terrible pestilences by which Greece has from time to time been visited. It is still believed among the poorest folk of Athens that in a cleft on the Hill of the Nymphs, undisturbed even by the modern observatory on its summit, there lives a gruesome sisterhood, a trinity of she-devils, Χολέρα, Βλογι̯ά, and Πανοῦκλα,—Cholera, Smallpox, and Plague.
Granted then that illness in general is the malicious work of supernatural beings, common reason recommends the employment of supernatural means to defeat and expel them. Forms of exorcism have in past times been provided by the Church and are still in vogue; but here, as in other matters, the functions of the priest are shared with the witch, and an old woman versed in the traditional lore of popular medicine is as competent as any bishop to cast out the devils of sickness. Nor do the popular incantations differ much in substance from the ecclesiastical. The witch knows better than to try to cast out devils in the Devil’s name, and her exorcisms contain invocations of God and the saints of the same character as those sanctioned by the Church; only in her accompanying rites and gestures there is a picturesque variety which is lacking in the swinging of the priest’s censer.
The details of the rites and the full forms of incantation are in general extremely difficult to obtain. The witches themselves are always reticent on such points, and I have known one plead, by way of excuse for her apparent discourtesy in withholding information, that the virtue of magic was diminished in proportion as the knowledge of it was disseminated. One cure, however,—a cure for headache—will sufficiently illustrate the principle on which the healing art among the common-folk generally proceeds. This cure is based upon the assumption that the tense and bruised feeling of a bad headache is due to the presence of some demon within the skull, and that the room which he occupies must have been provided by distention of the head,—which will therefore measure more in circumference while it aches than when the demon has been exorcised. This is demonstrated in the course of the cure. The witch takes a handkerchief and measures with it the patient’s head. Doubling back the six or eight inches of the handkerchief that remain over, she puts in the fold three cloves of garlic, three grains of salt, or some other article of magical virtue, and ties a knot. Then waving the handkerchief about the patient’s head, she recites her form of exorcism,—but usually in a tone so low and mumbling that the bystanders cannot catch the words. The exorcism being finished, she again measures the head, and this time the knot, which marks the previous measurement, is found to overlap, by two or three inches it may be, the other end of the kerchief,—a sure sign that the intruding demon has been expelled and that the head having returned to its natural dimensions will no longer ache[30]. The exact words of the incantation which should accompany this rite I could not obtain; but I make little doubt that in substance they would differ little from a Macedonian formula recently published:—
‘For megrim and headache:
‘Write on a piece of paper:—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, loose the demon of the megrim from the head of Thy servant. I charge thee, unclean spirit which ever sittest in the head of man, take thy pain and depart from the head: from half-head, membrane, and vertebra, from the servant of God, So-and-so. Stand we fairly, stand we with fear of God. Amen[31].’
In this instance we have the formula but not, it seems, the rite which should accompany it; for the mere act of committing the words to paper is hardly likely to be deemed sufficient. Probably the paper would be laid under the pillow at night, or, as I have known in other cases, would be burnt, and its ashes taken as a sedative powder.
The various charms which we have so far considered are directed towards the hurt or the healing of man: but external nature is also responsive to magic spells. It is rumoured that there are still witches who have power to draw down the moon from the heavens by incantation; but a more useful ceremony, designed to draw down the clouds upon a parched land, may still be actually witnessed. The most recent case known to me was in the April of 1899, when the rite was carried out some few days, unfortunately, after I had left the district by the people of Larissa. The custom is known all over the north of Greece—in Epirus[32], Thessaly, and Macedonia,—and also it is said among some of the Turks, Wallachs, and Servians; to the south of those regions and in the islands of the Aegean I heard nothing of it. A boy (or sometimes, it is said, a girl[33]) is stripped naked and then dressed up in wreaths and festoons of leafage, grass, and flowers, and, escorted by a troop of children of his own age, goes the round of the neighbourhood. He is known as the περπερία, and his companions sing as they go,
Perpería goes his way