The quackeries and incantations common in Greece to-day as specifics for certain diseases are many of them very quaint, being long rhymes and formulas mixing up Christ, the Virgin, and saints with magic words and signs which savour of heathendom. It is the old women only who are supposed to know them, and they are very shy of producing them before a foreign unbeliever. They are just like those women who in ancient Athens practised quackery and secret cures, which were zealously guarded and kept up as specialities in families. Curiously enough these old women in Greece who profess to cure diseases will tell you, arguing from the analogy of plants, that all diseases are worms, which consume the body, and that they are generated by the wrath of the gods. They have arrived at the bacillus theory by much straighter reckoning than our physicians.
On the day of the commemoration of the dead I was in a small village in Amorgos, and there witnessed the quaint ceremony of κόλλυβα. Every house on this occasion sends to the church a plate of boiled corn; tottering old women with one foot in the grave generally bring it, and pour the contents into a large basket placed before the high altar whilst the service is going on, and then into the mass of corn they stick a candle, and if the family is especially grand they have separate plates with sesame seeds, or adorned with patterns of raisins and almonds. After the service is over the boiled corn and other delicacies are distributed amongst the poor outside the church. These offerings are very suggestive of the ancient idea of Demeter and her daughter.
We will now consider another branch of mythology—the fickle goddesses, the Fates (Μοῖρα), whose workings in modern Greece are looked upon with as much superstition as of old. On the island of Sikinos I attended an interesting ceremony called the μοίρισμα of a child, which happens a year after its birth. All the friends and relatives are gathered together to a feast. A tray is brought out, and on it are put various objects—a pen, money, tools, an egg, &c., and whichever the infant first touches with its hands is held to be the indication of the μοῖρα as to the most suitable career to be chosen for it. The meaning of the first-mentioned articles is obvious. The demarch of Sikinos told me that his son had touched a pen, consequently he had been sent to the university at Athens, and had there distinguished himself, but the meaning of the egg is not quite so clear, and the egg is the horror of all parents, for if the child touches it he will be fitted for no calling in life—he will be a good-for-nothing, a mere duck’s egg, so to speak, in society.
Some ceremony such as this must have been the one alluded to by Apollodorus when he tells us that seven days after the birth of Meleager the Fates told the horologue of the child, and the torch was lighted on the hearth. In some places still the seventh day is chosen as the one for this important ceremony, and it is called ἑφτὰ. When it is dark and the lamps lighted a table is put in the middle of the house, a basin full of honey in the centre of the table, and all round quantities of food. Numerous oil lamps are then lighted; one dedicated to Christ, another to the Virgin, another to the Baptist, and so forth. A symbol of faith is then read and deep silence prevails, and the saint whose lamp is first extinguished is chosen as the protector of the infant. At this moment they say the Fates come in and “κάλομοιραζουσι” the child, and take some of the food from the table.
The Fates are in some places supposed to write on the forehead of a man his destiny. Pimples on the nose and forehead are called γραψίματα τῶν Μοίρων. The decrees of the Fates are unalterable. According to various legends, attempts have been made to change them, but without avail. Only once, a girl of Naxos, so I was told, up in a mountain village, who was excessively ugly, managed to learn from a magician where the Fates lived, and that if she could get them to eat salt they would go blind and change her fate. She contrived to bring this about, and became lovely, married a prince, but had no children; “showing,” continued the legend by way of moral, “that the Fates never consent to a person being altogether happy.”
This changing from ugliness to beauty is a common subject for legends and beliefs. The first woman to see a child after birth must be lovely, so as to impart to it her beauty, and the first man must be of great strength, so as to impart his vigor. This reminds one of one of Herodotus’s stories (vi. 61), when he seriously tells us of the change of an ugly child into the fairest woman of Sparta by her nurse taking her daily to the temple of the heroine Helen to pray. One day the heroine met the nurse and predicted that the child would become fair, which accordingly, says Herodotus, came to pass.
In Melos the Fates are greatly consulted in matrimonial concerns. The 25th of November, St. Catharine’s day, is considered the most suitable, and St. Catharine is accordingly prayed to by unmarried maidens to intercede on their behalf. On the vigil of her feast they make cakes with a good deal of salt in, which they eat before going to bed. As a natural result of eating so much salt and thinking about matrimony their dreams often take the turn of water and a kindly man offering them to drink. If this is so they are sure to marry that man.
Many of our mythological personages and legends have their parallel to-day. There are the Lamiæ, for instance, evil-working women who live in desert places, ill-formed like their ancestors, daughters of Belus and Sibyl; utterly unfit are they for household duties, for they cannot sweep, so an untidy woman to-day is said to have made the sweepings of a Lamia (Τῆς Λαμίας τὰ σαρώματα); they cannot bake, for they put bread into the oven before heating it; they have dogs and horses, but give bones to their horses and straw to their dogs. They are very gluttonous, so much so that in Byzantine and modern Greek the verb λαμιώνω is used to express over-eating. They have a special predilection for baby’s flesh, and a Greek mother of to-day will frighten her child by saying that a Lamia will come if it is naughty, just as was said to naughty children in ancient days; for the legend used to run that Zeus loved Lamia too well, untidy though she was, and Hera, out of jealousy, killed her children, whereat Lamia was so grieved that she took to eating the children of others. Some Lamiæ are like the Sirens, and by taking the form of lovely nymphs, beguile luckless men to their destruction; for example, an ecclesiastical legend, savoring strongly of Boccaccio, tells us how a Lamia charmed a monk as he sat by the side of a lake one evening; dawn came, and the monk was seen no more, but some children swore to having seen his hoary beard floating on the waters of the lake.
Dragons are common now in every weird place, especially where those large stoned Hellenic walls are standing, and stories like those of Perseus, the Centaurs, the Cyclops, &c., are common among the peasants who speak of these old remains as Τοῦ Δράκου τὸ σπίτι, the Dragon’s house. In one fable we have the exact story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. One Spanos is the traveller, ὁ Δράκος is Polyphemus, and the facts are the same.
The witches (στρίγλαι) of modern folk-lore are supposed to be over a hundred, and to be able to turn into birds at will like the harpies of old; they love the flesh of unbaptised babies, and for this reason children wear charms, as they do also against the evil eye (βασκανεῖα). My host on the island of Pholygandros most solemnly told me how a person with the evil eye could wither a fruit-tree by admiring it, and on my looking sceptical, he quoted several instances which had come under his immediate notice. This is the ὀφθαλμὸς βάσκανος of antiquity, the god Fascinus of Latin mythology, whom Pliny tells us was worshipped so strangely by the Vestal Virgins.