Transcriber's Note

The text includes diacritics which may not display well in all software, e.g. the inverted breve in ἀστροπελέκι̯α.

MODERN GREEK FOLKLORE
AND
ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
C. F. CLAY, Manager

Edinburgh: 100, PRINCES STREET
Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS
New York: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

All rights reserved

MODERN GREEK FOLKLORE
AND
ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION
A STUDY IN SURVIVALS

BY
JOHN CUTHBERT LAWSON, M.A.
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
FORMERLY CRAVEN STUDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY

Cambridge:
at the University Press
1910

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PIIS MANIBUS
ROBERTI ALEXANDRI NEIL
LABORUM ADHORTANTE IPSO SUSCEPTORUM
HUNC DEDICAVI FRUCTUM.

PREFACE.

This book is the outcome of work undertaken in Greece during my two years’ tenure of the Craven Studentship from 1898 to 1900. It is therefore my first duty gratefully to commemorate John, Lord Craven, to whose benefactions of two and a half centuries ago I owed my opportunity for research.

The scheme of work originally proposed was the investigation of the customs and superstitions of modern Greece in their possible bearing upon the life and thought of ancient Greece; and to the Managers of the Craven Fund at that time, with whom was associated Mr R. A. Neil of Pembroke College to whose memory I have dedicated this book, I render hearty thanks for their willingness to encourage a venture new in direction, vague in scope, and possibly void of result.

The course of research proposed was one which required as the first condition of any success considerable readiness in speaking and understanding the popular language, and to the attainment of this my first few months were necessarily devoted. When once the ear has become accustomed to the modern pronunciation, a knowledge of ancient Greek makes for rapid progress; and some three or four months spent chiefly in the cafés of small provincial towns rendered me fairly proficient in ordinary conversation. Subsequent practice enabled me also to follow conversations not intended for my ear; and on more than one occasion I obtained from the talk of peasants thus overheard information which they might have been chary of imparting to a stranger.

The time at my disposal however, after I had sufficiently mastered the language, would have been far too short to allow of any complete enquiry into the beliefs and customs of the country, had it not been for the existence of two books, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das Hellenische Alterthum by Bernhard Schmidt, and Μελέτη ἐπὶ τοῦ βίου τῶν νεωτέρων Ἑλλήνων by Professor Polites of Athens University, which at once supplied me with a working knowledge of the subject which I was studying and suggested certain directions in which further research might profitably be pursued. My debt to these two books is repeatedly acknowledged in the following pages; and if I have given references to Schmidt’s work more frequently than to that of Polites, my reason is not that I owe less to the latter, but merely that the former is more generally accessible.

In pursuit of my task I followed no special system. I have known of those who professed to obtain a complete knowledge of the folklore of a given village in the course of a few hours’ visit, and whose method was to provide themselves with an introduction to the schoolmaster, who would generally be not even a native of the place, and to read out to him a formidable questionnaire, in the charitable and misplaced expectation that the answers given would be prompted not by courtesy and loquacity, which are the attributes of most Greeks, but by veracity, which is the attribute of few. The formal interview with paper and pencil is in my opinion a mistake. The ‘educated’ Greek whose pose is to despise the traditions of the common-folk will discourse upon them no less tediously than inaccurately for the sake of having his vapourings put on record; but the peasant who honestly believes the superstitions and scrupulously observes the customs of which he may happen to speak is silenced at once by the sight of a note-book. Apart however from this objection to being interviewed, the countryfolk are in general communicative enough. They do not indeed expect to be plied with questions until their own curiosity concerning the new-comer has been satisfied, and even then any questions on uncanny subjects must be discreetly introduced. But it is no difficult matter to start some suitable topic. A wedding, a funeral, or some local fête perhaps is in progress, and your host is eager to have the distinction of escorting you to it and explaining all the customs appropriate to the occasion. You have been taken to see the village-church, and some offering there dedicated, to which you call attention, elicits the story of some supernatural ‘seizure’ and miraculous cure. You express a desire to visit some cave which you have observed in the mountain-side, and the dissuasion and excuses which follow form the prelude to an account of the fearful beings by whom it is haunted. Your guide crosses himself or spits before fording a stream, and you enquire, once safely across, what is the particular danger at this spot. Your mule perhaps rolls with your baggage in the same stream, and the muleteer’s imprecations suggest luridly novel conceptions of the future life.

Much also may be effected by playing upon patriotism or vanity or, let it be confessed, love of lucre. You relate some story heard in a neighbouring village or praise some custom there observed, and the peasant’s parochial patriotism is up in arms to prove the superiority of his native hamlet. You show perhaps some signs of incredulity (but not until your informant is well launched upon his panegyric), and his wounded pride bids him call in his neighbours to corroborate his story. Or again you may hint at a little largesse, not of course for your host—only witches and the professional reciters of folk-tales and ballads are entitled to a fee—but on behalf of his children, and he may pardon and satisfy what might otherwise have seemed too inquisitive a curiosity.

Such are the folk to whom I am most beholden, and how shall I fitly acknowledge my debt to them? Their very names maybe were unknown to me even then, or at the most a ‘John’ or ‘George’ sufficed; and they in turn knew not that I was in their debt. You, muleteers and boatmen, who drove shrewd bargains for your services and gave unwittingly so much beside, and you too, cottagers, who gave a night’s lodging to a stranger and never guessed that your chatter was more prized than your shelter, how shall I thank you? Not severally, for I cannot write nor could you ever read the list of acknowledgements due; but to you all, Georges and Johns, Demetris and Constantines, and rare anachronistic Epaminondases, in memory of services rendered unawares, greeting from afar and true gratitude!

Nor must I omit to mention the assistance which I have derived from written sources. In recent times it has been a favourite amusement with Greeks of some education to compile little histories of the particular district or island in which they live, and many of these contain a chapter devoted to the customs and superstitions of the locality. From these, as also from the records of travel in Greece, particularly those of French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I have culled much that is valuable.

Nearly ten years have passed since my return from Greece, and such leisure as they have allowed has been devoted to co-ordinating the piecemeal information which I personally obtained or have gathered from the writings of others, and to examining its bearing upon the life and thought of Ancient Greece. In the former half of this task I have but followed in the steps of Bernhard Schmidt and of Polites, who had already presented a coherent, if still incomplete, account of the folklore of Modern Greece, and my work has been mainly to check, to correct, and to amplify; but for the latter half I would ask the indulgent consideration which may fairly be extended to a pioneer. Analogies and coincidences in the beliefs and customs of modern and of ancient Greece have indeed been pointed out by others; but no large attempt has previously been made to trace the continuity of the life and thought of the Greek people, and to exhibit modern Greek folklore as an essential factor in the interpretation of ancient Greek religion.

It is my hope that this book will prove interesting not to Greek scholars only, but to readers who have little or no acquaintance with Greek. All quotations whether from the ancient or modern language are translated, and references to ancient and modern writers are distinguished by the use of the ordinary Latinised names and titles in the case of the former, and the retention of the Greek character for denoting the latter. As regards the transliteration of modern Greek words, I have made no attempt to represent the exact sound, except to indicate in some words the accented syllable and to make the obvious substitution of the English v for the Greek β; but to replace γ by gh and δ by dh, as is sometimes done, gives to words an uncouth appearance without assisting the majority of readers in their pronunciation.

It remains only to express my thanks to the reviser of my proofs, Mr W. S. Hadley of Pembroke College, but these are the hardest to express adequately. I was conscious of making no small demand on the kindness of the Tutor of a large College when I asked him to do me this service; and I am conscious now that any words in acknowledgement of his kindness are a poor expression of my gratitude for the generous measure of time and of trouble which he has expended on each page.

Lastly I would thank the Syndics of the University Press for their willingness to undertake the publication of this book, and the staff of the Press for their unfailing courtesy in the course of its preparation.

J. C. L.

Pembroke College,
Cambridge,
December 31, 1909.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.

§ 1. Modern Folklore as a source for the study of Ancient Religion.

The sources of information most obviously open to the student of ancient Greek religion are the Art and the Literature of ancient Greece; and the idea that modern Greece can have any teaching to impart concerning the beliefs of more than two thousand years ago seems seldom to have been entertained. Just as we speak of ancient Greek as a dead language, and too often forget that many of the words and inflexions in popular use at the present day are identical with those of the classical period and even of the Homeric age, while many others, no longer identical, have suffered only a slight modification, so are we apt to think of Greek paganism as a dead religion, and do not enquire whether the beliefs and customs of the modern peasant may not be a direct heritage from his classical forefathers. And yet, if any such heritage exist, there is clearly a fresh source of knowledge open to us, from which to supplement and to correct the lessons of Art and Literature.

Art, by its very nature, serves rather as illustration than as proof of any theory of ancient religion. Sculpture has preserved to us the old conceptions of the divine personalities. Vase-paintings record many acts of ritual and scenes of worship. Architectural remains allow us to restore in imagination the grandeur of holy places. But these things are only the externals of religion: they need an interpreter, if we would understand the spirit which informed them: and however able the interpreter, the material with which he deals is so small a remnant of the treasures of ancient art, that from day to day some fresh discovery may subvert his precariously founded theories. Though all would acknowledge how fruitful in religious suggestion the evidence of art has proved when handled by competent critics, none would claim that that evidence either in its scope, which the losses of time have limited, or in its accuracy, which depends upon conjectural interpretation, is a complete or infallible guide to the knowledge of ancient religion.

From literature more might be expected, and more indeed is forthcoming, though not perhaps where the modern mind, with its tendency to methodical analysis, would look for it. If anyone should attempt to classify ancient Greek literature in modern fashion, under the headings of religion, science, history, drama, and so forth, he would remark one apparent deficiency. While history, philosophy, and poetry of every kind are amply represented and, however much has perished to be read no more, the choicest blossoms and richest fruit of Greek toil in these fields have been preserved to us, religion seems at first sight to have been almost barren of literary produce. The department of religion pure and simple would have little beyond an Hesiodic Theogony or some Orphic Hymns to exhibit,—and even these have little enough bearing upon real religion. In short, it is not on any special branch of Greek literature, but rather upon the whole bulk thereof, that the student of Greek religion must rely. He must recognize that a religious spirit pervades the whole; that there is hardly a book in the language but has some allusion to religious beliefs and customs, to cults and ceremonies and divine personalities. And while recognizing this, he must still admit the fact that nowhere is there found any definite exposition of accepted beliefs as a whole, any statement of doctrine, any creed which except a man believe he cannot be saved. How are we to reconcile these two facts,—the constant presence of religion in all Greek literature, and the almost total absence of any literature appertaining to religion only? The answer to this question must be sought in the character of the religion itself.

Greek religion differed from the chief now existing religions of the world in its origin and development. It had no founder. Its sanction was not the ipse dixit of some inspired teacher. It possessed nothing analogous to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or the Koran. It was a free, autochthonous growth, evolved from the various hopes and fears of a whole people. If we could catch a glimpse of it in its infancy, we should probably deny to it the very name of religion, and call it superstition or folklore. Great teachers indeed arose, like Orpheus, advocating special doctrines and imposing upon their followers special rules of life. Great centres of religious influence were developed, such as Delphi, exercising a general control over rites and ceremonies. But no single preacher, no priesthood, succeeded in dominating over the free conscience of the people. Nothing was imposed by authority. In belief and in worship each man was a law unto himself; and so far as there were any accepted doctrines and established observances, these were not the subtle inventions of professional theologians or an interested priesthood, but were based upon the hereditary and innate convictions of the whole Greek race. The individual was free to believe what he would and what he could; it was the general, if vague, consensus of the masses which constituted the real religion of Greece. The vox populi fully established itself as the vox dei.

Again in this popular religion, when it had emerged from its earliest and crudest form and had reached the definitely anthropomorphic stage in which we know it, we can discern no trace of any tendency towards monotheism. The idea of a single supreme deity, personal or impersonal, appealed only to some of the greatest thinkers: the mass of the people remained frankly polytheistic. For this reason the development of Greek religion proceeded on very different lines from that of Hebrew religion. The earliest Jewish conception of a God ‘walking in the garden in the cool of the day’ was certainly no less anthropomorphic than the Homeric presentation of the Olympian deities: but the subsequent growth of Judaism was like that of some tall straight palm tree lifting its head to purer air than is breathed by men; whereas Greek religion resembled rather the cedar spreading wide its branches nearer the earth. The Jew, by concentrating in one unique being every transcendent quality and function, exalted gradually his idea of godhead far above the anthropomorphic plane: the Greek multiplied his gods to be the several incarnations of passions and powers and activities pertaining also, though in less fulness, to mankind.

It is obvious that in point of simplicity and consistency the monotheistic system must prove superior. As the worshipper’s intellectual and spiritual capacities develop, he discards the older and cruder notions in favour of a more enlightened ideal. Abraham’s crude conception of the deity as a being to whom even human sacrifice would be acceptable was necessarily rejected by an humaner age to whom was delivered the message ‘I will have mercy and not sacrifice.’ In the growth of Greek polytheism, on the contrary, the new did not supersede the old, but was superimposed upon it. Fresh conceptions were expressed by the creation or acceptance of fresh gods, but the venerable embodiments of more primitive beliefs were not necessarily displaced by them. The development of humaner ideas in one cult was no bar to the retention of barbarous rites by another. The same deity under different titles of invocation (ἐπωνυμίαι) was invested with different and even conflicting characters: and reversely the same religious idea found several expressions in the cults of widely different deities. The forms of worship, viewed in the mass, were of an inconsistent and chaotic complexity. Human sacrifice, we may be sure, was a thing abhorrent to the majority of the cults of Zeus: yet Lycaean Zeus continued to exact his toll of human life down to the time of Pausanias[1]. The worship of Dionysus embodied something of the same religious spirit which pervaded the teachings of Orpheus and the mysteries of Demeter, and came to be closely allied with them: yet neither the austerity of Orphism nor the real spirituality of the Eleusinian cult succeeded in mitigating the wild orgies of the Bacchant or in repressing the savage rite of omophagia in which drunken fanatics tore a bull to pieces with their teeth. Aphrodite was worshipped under two incompatible titles: in the rôle of the ‘Heavenly’ (οὐρανία), says Artemidorus[2], she looks favourably upon marriage and childbirth and the home life, while under her title of ‘Popular’ (πάνδημος) she is hostile to the matron, and patroness of laxer ties. It is needless to multiply illustrations. The forms in which the religious spirit of Greece found embodiment are beyond question confused and mutually inconsistent. The same religious idea might be expressed in so great a variety of rites, and the same divine personality might be associated with so great a variety of ideas, that no formal exposition of Greek religion as a whole was possible. The verbal limitations of a creed, a summa theologiae, would have been too narrow for the free, imaginative faith of Greece. It was a necessary condition of Hellenic polytheism that, as it came into being without any personal founder, without any authoritative sacred books, so in its development it should be hampered and confined neither by priestcraft nor by any literature purely and distinctively religious. The spirit which manifested itself in a myriad forms of worship could not brook the restraint of any one form of words.

And not only would it have been difficult to give adequate expression to the essential ideas of Greek religion, but there was no motive for attempting the task. Those of the philosophers who dealt with religion wrote and taught for the reason that they had some new idea, some fresh doctrine, to advance. Plato certainly abounds in references to the popular beliefs of his age: but his object is not to expound them for their own sake: rather he utilizes them as illustration and ornament of his own philosophical views: his treatment of them in the main is artistic, not scientific. In fact there was no one interested in giving to popular beliefs an authoritative and dogmatic expression. There was no hierarchy concerned to arrest the free progress of thought or to chain men’s minds to the faith of their forefathers. A summary of popular doctrines, if it could have been written, would have had no readers, for the simple reason that the people felt their religion more truly and fully than the writer could express it: and few men have the interests of posterity so largely at heart, as to write what their own contemporaries will certainly not read. Thus it appears that there was neither motive nor means for treating the popular religion in literary form: to formulate the common-folk’s creed, to analyse the common-folk’s religion, was a thing neither desired nor feasible.

But because we observe an almost total absence of distinctively religious literature, we need not for that reason be surprised at the constant presence of religious feeling in all that a Greek wrote or sang. Rather it was consistent with that freedom and that absence of all control and circumscription which we have noted, that religion should pervade the whole life of the people, whose hearts were its native soil, and should consequently pervade also the literature in which their thoughts and doings are recorded. For religion with them was not a single and separate department of their civilisation, not an avocation from the ordinary pursuits of men, but rather a spirit with which work and holiday, gaiety and gloom, were alike penetrated. We should be misled by the modern devotion to dogma and definite formulae of faith, were we to think that so vague a religion as Greek polytheism was any the less an abiding force, any the less capable of inspiring genuine enthusiasm and reverence. It is not hard to imagine the worshipper animated for the time by one emotion only, his mind void of all else and flooded with the one idea incarnate in the divine being at whose altar he sat in supplication. It is impossible really to misdoubt the strength and the depth of Greek religious sentiment, however multifarious and even mutually contradictory its modes of display. A nation who peopled sky and earth and sea with godlike forms; who saw in every stream and glen and mountain-top its own haunting, hallowing presence, and, ill-content that nature alone should do them honour, sought out the loveliest hills and vales in all their lovely land to dedicate there the choicest of their art; who consecrated with lavish love bronze and marble, ivory and gold, all the best that wealth could win and skill adorn, in honour of the beings that were above man yet always with him, majestic as Zeus, joyous as Dionysus, grave as Demeter, light as Aphrodite, yet all divine; such a nation, though it knew nought of inspired books and formulated creeds, can be convicted of no shortcoming in real piety and devotion.

Their gods were very near to those whom they favoured; no communion or intercourse was beyond hope of attainment; gods fought in men’s battles, guided men’s wanderings, dined at men’s boards, and took to themselves mortal consorts; and when men grew degenerate and the race of heroes was no more, gods still held speech with them in oracles. Religious hopes, religious fears, were the dominant motive of the people’s whole life. It was in religion that sculpture found its inspiration, and its highest achievements were in pourtraying deities. The theatre was a religious institution, and on the stage, without detriment to reverence, figured the Eumenides themselves. Religious duties were excuse enough for Sparta to hang back from defending the freedom of Greece. Religious scruples set enlightened Athens in an uproar, because a number of idols were decently mutilated. Religious fears cost her the loss of the proudest armament that ever sailed from her shores. A charge of irreligion was pretext enough for condemning to death her noblest philosopher. In everything, great and small, the pouring of libations at the feast, the taking of omens before battle, the consulting of the Delphic oracle upon the most important or most trivial of occasions, the same spirit is manifest. Religion used or abused, piety or superstition, was to the Greeks an abiding motive and influence in all the affairs of life.

It is chiefly of these definite doings and customs that literature tells us, just as art depicts the mise-en-scène of religion. Yet it would be inconceivable that a people who displayed so strong and so abundant a religious feeling in all the circumstances and tasks of life, should not have pondered over the essential underlying questions of all religion, the nature of the soul and the mystery of life and death. Literature tells us that to their poets and philosophers these problems did present themselves, and many were the solutions which different thinkers propounded: but of the general sense of the people in this respect, of the fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life and prompted their care for the dead, literature furnishes no direct statement: its evidence is fragmentary, casual, sporadic. Everywhere it displays the externals, but it leaves the inner spirit veiled. Literature as well as art needs an interpreter.

It is precisely in this task of interpretation that the assistance offered by the folklore of Modern Greece should be sought. It should be remembered that there is still living a people who, as they have inherited the land and the language, may also have inherited the beliefs and customs, of those ancients whose mazes of religion are bewildering without a guide who knows them. Among that still living people it is possible not only to observe acts and usages, but to enquire also their significance: and though some customs will undoubtedly be found either to be mere survivals of which the meaning has long been forgotten, or even to have been subjected to new and false interpretations, yet others, still rooted in and nourished by an intelligent belief, may be vital documents of ancient Greek life and thought.

§ 2. The survival of Ancient Tradition.

There may perhaps be some few who, quite apart from the continuity of the Hellenic race, a question with which I must deal later, would be inclined to pronounce the quest of ancient religion in modern folklore mere lost labour. The lapse, they may think, of all the centuries which separate the present day from the age of Hellenic greatness would in itself disfigure or altogether efface any tradition of genuine value. Such a view, however, is opposed to all the lessons that have of late years been gained from a more systematic study of the folklore of all parts of the world. Certain principles of magic and certain tendencies of superstition seem to obtain, in curiously similar form, among peoples far removed both in racial type and in geographical position. It is sometimes urged by way of explanation that the resources of the primitive mind are necessarily so limited, that many coincidences in belief and custom are only to be expected, and that therefore the similarity of form presented by some superstitions of widely separated peoples is no argument in favour of their common origin. But, for my part, when I consider such a belief as that in the Evil Eye, which possesses, I believe, an almost world-wide notoriety, I find it more reasonable to suppose that it was a tenet in the creed of some single primitive people, of whom many present races of the world are offshoots, and from whom they have inherited the superstition, than that scores or hundreds of peoples, who had long since diverged in racial type and dwelling and language, should subsequently have hit upon one uniform belief. Indeed it may be that in the future the study of folklore will become a science of no less value than the study of language, and that by a comparison of the superstitions still held by various sections of the human race it will be possible to adumbrate the beliefs of their remotest common ancestors as clearly as, by a comparison of their various speeches, the outlines of a common ancestral language have been, and are being, traced. The data of folklore are in the nature of things more difficult to collect, more comprehensive in scope, and more liable to misinterpretation, than the data of linguistic study; but none the less, when once there are labourers enough in the field, it is not beyond hope that the laws which govern the tradition and modification of customs and beliefs may be found to be hardly less definite than the laws of language.

But comparative folklore is outside my present purpose. I assume only, without much fear of contradiction, that many of the popular superstitions and customs and magical practices still prevalent in the world date from a period far more remote than any age on which Greek history or archaeology can throw even a glimmering of light. If then I can show that among the Greek folk of to-day there still survive in full vigour such examples of primaeval superstition as the belief in ‘the evil eye’ and the practice of magic, I shall have established at least an antecedent probability that there may exist also vestiges of the religious beliefs and practices of the historical era.

The fear of ‘the evil eye’ (τὸ κακὸ μάτι, or simply τὸ μάτι[3],) is universal among the Greek peasantry, and fairly common though not so frankly avowed among the more educated classes. The old words βασκαίνω and βασκανία are still in use, but ματιάζω and μάτι̯αγμα[4], direct formations from the word μάτι, are more frequently heard. It would be difficult to say on what grounds this power of ‘overlooking,’ if I may use a popular English equivalent, is usually imputed to anyone. Old women are most generally credited with it, but not so much owing to any menacing appearance as because they are the chief exponents of witchcraft and it is only fitting that the wise woman of a village should possess the power of exercising the evil eye at will. These form therefore quite a distinct class from those persons whose eyes are suspected of exerting naturally and involuntarily a baneful influence. In the neighbourhood of Mount Hymettus it appears that blue eyes fall most commonly under suspicion: and this is the more curious because in Attica, with its large proportion of Albanian inhabitants, blue eyes are by no means rare. Possibly, however, it was the native Greeks’ suspicion of the strangers who settled among them, which first caused this particular development of the belief in this district. Myself possessing eyes of the objectionable colour, I have more than once been somewhat taken aback at having my ordinary salutation (’γει̯ά σου, ‘health to you,’) to some passing peasant answered only by the sign of the Cross. Fortunately in other localities I never to my knowledge inspired the same dread; had it been general, I should have been forced to abandon my project of enquiring into Greek folklore; for the risk of being ‘overlooked’ holds the Greek peasant, save for a few phrases of aversion, in awe-stricken silence. My impression is that any eyes which are peculiar in any way are apt to incur suspicion, and that in different localities different qualities, colouring or brilliance or prominence, excite special notice and, with notice, disfavour. The evil eye, it would seem, is a regular attribute both of the Gorgon and of the wolf; for both, by merely looking upon a man, are still believed to inflict some grievous suffering,—dumbness, madness, or death; and yet there is little in common between the narrow, crafty eye of the wolf and either the prominent, glaring eyes in an ancient Medusa’s head or the passionate, seductive eyes of the modern Gorgon, unless it be that any fixed unflinching gaze is sufficient reason for alarm.

Some such explanation will best account for the strange vagary of superstition which brings under the category of the evil eye two classes of things which seemingly would have no connexion either with it or with each other, looking-glasses and the stars.

To look at oneself in a mirror is, in some districts, regarded as a dangerous operation, especially if it be prolonged. A bride, being specially liable to all sinister influences, is wise to forego the pleasure of seeing her own reflection in the glass; and a woman in child-bed, who is no less liable, is deprived of all chance of seeing herself by the removal of all mirrors from the room. The risk in all cases is usually greatest at night, and in the town of Sinasos in Cappadocia no prudent person would at that time incur it[5]. The reflection, it would seem, of a man’s own image may put the evil eye upon him by its steady gaze: and it was in fear of such an issue that Damoetas, in the Idylls of Theocritus, after criticizing his own features reflected in some glassy pool, spat thrice into his bosom that he might not suffer from the evil eye[6].

The belief in a certain magical property of the stars akin to that of the evil eye is far more widely held. They are, as it were, the eyes of night, and in the darkness ‘overlook’ men and their belongings as disastrously as does the human eye in the day-time. Just as a woman after confinement is peculiarly liable to the evil eye and must have amulets hung about her and mirrors removed from her room, so must particular care be taken to avoid exposure to stellar influence. Sonnini de Magnoncourt, who had some medical experience in Greece, speaks authoritatively on this subject. According to the popular view, he says, she must not let herself be ‘seen by a star’; and if she goes out before the prescribed time,—according to this authority, only eight days, but now preferably forty days, from the birth of the child,—she is careful to return home and to shut herself up in her room by sunset, and after that hour to open neither door nor window, for fear that a star may surprise her and cause the death of both mother and child[7]. So too in the island of Chios, if there is occasion to carry leaven from one house to another, it must be covered up,—in the day-time ‘to prevent it from being seen by any strange eye,’ at night ‘to prevent it from being seen by the stars’: for if it were ‘overlooked’ by either, the bread made with it would not rise[8]. Such customs show clearly that the stars are held to exercise exactly the same malign influence as the human eye: the same simple phrases denote in Greek the operation of either, and the ‘overlooking’ of either has the same blighting effect.

The range of this mischievous influence—for I now take it that the evil eye and the stars are indistinguishable in their ill effects—is very large. Human beings are perhaps most susceptible to it. In some districts[9] indeed new-born infants up to the time of their baptism are held to be immune; till then they are the children of darkness, and the powers of darkness do not move against them. But in general no one at any moment of his life is wholly secure. Amulets however afford a reasonable safety at ordinary times; it is chiefly in the critical hours of life, at marriage and at the birth of children, that the fear of the evil eye is lively and the precautions against it more elaborate. Animals also may be affected. Horses and mules are very commonly protected by amulets hung round their necks, and this is the original purpose of the strings of blue beads with which the cab-horses of Athens are often decorated. The shepherd too has cause for anxiety on behalf of his flock, and, when a bad season or disease diminishes the number of his lambs, is apt to re-echo the pastoral complaint,

Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos[10].

‘Some jealous eye “o’erlooks” my tender lambs.’

And the pernicious influence makes itself felt in even a lower scale of life. In the neighbourhood of Sparta, where there is a considerable silk industry, the women believe that silk-worms are susceptible of mischief from the evil eye; and the same superstition is recorded by de Magnoncourt from Chios.

Of inanimate things, those most easily damaged in a similar way are leaven, salt, and vinegar,—as being possessed of quickening or preservative properties to which the blighting, destructive power of the evil eye or of the stars is naturally opposed. The precautions to be observed in carrying leaven from house to house have already been noticed. Equal care is required in the making of the bread. It often happens, so I have been told, that when a woman is kneading, some malicious neighbour will come in, ostensibly for a chat, and put the evil eye upon the leaven; and unless the woman perceives what is going on and averts disaster by a special gesture which turns the evil influence against the intruder, nothing to call bread will be baked that day. Similarly it is unwise to borrow or to give away either salt or vinegar at night[11]; but if it is necessary, it is prudent to take precautions to prevent its exposure to the stars, which may even be cheated of their prey by some such device as calling the vinegar (ξεῖδι) ‘syrup’ (γλυκάδι) in asking for it[12]. Further, an object which has been exposed to the stars may even carry the infection, as it were, to those who afterwards use it. For this reason the linen and clothes of a mother and her new-born infant must never be left out of doors at night[13].

The precaution, as I have said, most commonly adopted is the wearing of amulets. The articles which have the greatest intrinsic virtue for this purpose are garlic, bits of blue stone or glass often in the form of beads, old coins, salt, and charcoal: but many other things, by their associations, may be rendered efficacious. The stump of a candle burnt on some high religious festival, or a shred of the Holy Shroud used on Good Friday, is by no means to be despised; and the bones of a bat or a snake’s skin over which a witch has muttered her incantations acquire thereby an equal merit. But such charms as these are objets de luxe; the ordinary man contents himself with the commoner articles whose virtue is in themselves. No midwife, I understand, would go about her business without a plentiful supply of garlic. It is well that the room should be redolent of it, and a few cloves must be fastened about the baby’s neck either at birth or immediately after the baptism. Blue beads are in general use for women, children, and animals. If men wear them, they are usually concealed from view. But mothers value them above all, because in virtue of their colour—γαλάζιος is modern Greek for ‘blue’—they ensure an abundant supply of milk (γάλα) unaffected by the evil eye or any other sinister potency. Salt and charcoal are most conveniently carried in little bags with a string to go round the neck. An effective charm consists of three grains of each material with an old coin. But many other things are also used; when I have been permitted to inspect the contents of such a bag, I have found strange assortments of things, pebbles, pomegranate-seeds, bits of soap, leaves of basil and other plants, often hard to recognize through age and dirt and grease. One scientifically-minded man recommended me sulphate of copper.

Special occasions also have special precautions proper to them. At a wedding, the time of all others when envious eyes are most likely to cause mischief, the bridegroom commonly carries a black-handled knife slipped inside his belt[14], and the bride has an open pair of scissors in her shoe or some convenient place, in order that any such evil influence may be ‘cut off.’ But some of these magical safeguards concern not only the evil eye, but ghostly perils in general, and will claim notice in other connexions.

If, however, through lack of precautions or in spite of them, a man suspects that he is being ‘overlooked,’ he must rely for protection on the resources with which nature has provided him. The simplest thing is to spit,—three times for choice, for that number has magical value,—but on oneself, not at the suspected foe. Theocritus was scrupulously correct, according to the modern view, in making his shepherd spit thrice on his own bosom. Another expedient, though no garlic be at hand to give effect to the words, is to ejaculate, σκόρδο ’στὰ μάτι̯α σου, ‘garlic in your eyes!’ Or use may be made of an imprecation considered effective in many circumstances of danger, νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου, ‘may you devour your own head!’ Lastly there is the φάσκελον, a gesture of the hand,—first raised with the fist closed and then suddenly advanced either with all the fingers open but bent, or with the thumb and little finger alone extended,—which returns the evil upon the offender’s own head with usury.

But, in spite of these manifold means of defence, the evil eye has its victims; some malady seizes upon a man, for which no other cause can be assigned; and the question of a cure arises. Here the Church comes to the rescue, with special forms of prayer, commonly known as βασκανισμοί, provided for the purpose. The person affected goes to the church, or, if the case be serious, the priest comes to his house, the prayers are recited, and the sufferer is fumigated with incense. Also if there happens to be a sacred spring or well, ἅγι̯ασμα as it is called, in the precincts of any church near,—and there are a fair number of churches in Greece which derive both fame and emolument from the possession of healing and miracle-working waters[15],—the victim of the evil eye is well-advised to drink of them. There are some, however, who rate the powers of a witch more highly than those of a priest, and prefer her incantations to the prayers of the Church. She knows, or is ready to improvise, forms of exorcism (ξόρκια, ξορκισμοί) for all kinds of affliction. A typical example[16] begins, as do many of the incantations of witchcraft, with an invocation of Christ and the Virgin and the Trinity and the twelve Apostles; then comes a complaint against the grievous illness which needs curing; next imprecations upon the man or woman responsible for causing it; and finally an adjuration of the evil eye to depart from the sufferer’s ‘head and heart and finger-nails and toe-nails and the cockles of the heart, and to begone to the hills and mountains[17]’ and so forth; after all which the Lord’s prayer or any religious formula may be repeated ad libitum. During the recitation of some such charm, the witch fumigates her patient either with incense, or,—what is more effectual where a guess can be made as to the identity of the envious enemy,—by burning something belonging to the latter, a piece of his clothing or even a handful of earth from his doorway[18]. Or again, if the patient is at a loss to conjecture who it is that has harmed him, recourse may be had to divination. A familiar method is to burn leaves or petals of certain plants,—basil and gillyflower being of special repute[19],—mentioning at the same time a number of names in succession. A loud pop or crackling denotes that the name of the offender has been reached, and the treatment can then proceed as described above.

No less widespread in Greece than the belief in the evil eye, and equally primitive in character, is the practice of magic. Few villages, I believe, even at the present day do not possess a wise woman (μάγισσα). Often indeed, owing to the spread of education and the desire to be thought ‘European’ and ‘civilised,’ the inhabitants will indignantly deny her existence, and affect to speak of witches as things of the past. But in times of illness or trouble they are apt to forget their pretensions of superiority, and do not hesitate to avail themselves of the lore inherited from their superstitious forefathers. For the most part women are the depositaries of these ancient secrets, and the knowledge of charms, incantations, and all the rites and formularies of witchcraft is handed down from mother to daughter. But men are not excluded from the profession. The functions of the priest, for example, are not clearly distinguished from those of the unconsecrated magician. At a baptism, which often takes place in the house where the child is born and not at the church, the priest opens the service by exorcising all evil spirits and influences from the four corners of the room by swinging his censer, but the midwife, who usually knows something of magic, or one of the god-parents, accompanies him and makes assurance doubly sure by spitting in each suspected nook. Moreover if a priest lead a notoriously evil life or chance to be actually unfrocked, the devil invests him with a double portion of magical power, which on any serious occasion is sure to be in request. But, apart from the clergy who owe their powers to the use or abuse of their office, there are other men too here and there who deal in witchcraft. They are usually specialists in some one branch, and professors of the white art rather than of the black,—one versed in popular medicine and the incantations proper to it, another in undoing mischievous spells, another in laying the restless dead. The general practitioners, causing disease as often as curing it, binding with curses as readily as loosing from them, are for the most part women.

I shall not attempt to enumerate here all the petty uses of magic of which I have heard or read: indeed an exhaustive treatment of the subject, even for one who had devoted a lifetime to cultivating an intimacy with Greek witches, would be hardly possible; for their secrets are not lightly divulged, and new circumstances may at any time require the invention of new methods. I propose only to describe some of the best known and most widely spread practices, some beneficent, others mischievous. Most of them will be seen to be based on the primitive and worldwide principle of sympathetic magic,—the principle that a relation, analogy, or sympathy existing, or being once established, between two objects, that which the one does or suffers, will be done or suffered also by the other.

If it be desired to cause physical injury or death to an enemy, the simplest and surest method is to make an image of him in some malleable material,—wax, lead, or clay,—and, if opportunity offer, to knead into it or attach to it some trifle from the enemy’s person. Three hairs from his head are a highly valuable acquisition, but parings of his nails or a few shreds of his clothing will serve: or again the image may be put in some place where his shadow will fall upon it as he passes. These refinements of the practice, however, are not indispensable; the image by itself will suffice. This being made, the treatment of it varies according to the degree of suffering which it is desired to inflict.

Acute pain may be caused to the man by driving into his image pins or nails. This device is popularly known as κάρφωμα, ‘pinning’ or ‘nailing,’ and many variations of it are practised. One case recorded in some detail was that of a priest’s wife who from her wedding-day onward was a prey to various pains and ills. The priest tried in vain to relieve them by prayer, and finally called in a witch to aid him. After performing certain occult rites of divination, she informed him that he must dig in the middle of his courtyard. There he found a tin, which on being opened revealed an assortment of pernicious charms,—one of his wife’s bridal shoes with a large nail through it, a dried-up bit of soap (presumably from the bridal bath) stuck full of pins, a wisp of hair (probably some of the bride’s combings) all in a tangle, and lastly a padlock. The nail and pins were at once pulled out and the hair carefully disentangled, with the result that the woman was freed from her pains and her complicated ailments. But the padlock could not be undone, and was thrown away into the sea, with the result that the woman remained childless. The bride had been ‘nailed’ (καρφωμένη) by a rival. In this case, it is true, no waxen or leaden image was used, but the principle is the same. The use of an image is only preferable as allowing the maker of it to select any part of the body which he wishes to torture.

Another method of dealing with the image is to melt or wear it away gradually; if it be of wax or lead, it may be seared with a red-hot poker, or placed bodily in the fire; if it be of clay, it may be scraped with a knife, or put into some stream which will gradually wash it away. Accordingly as it is thus wasted away, slowly or rapidly, so will the person whom it represents waste and die. This is in principle the same system as that adopted by Simaetha in the Idyll of Theocritus to win back the love of Delphis. ‘Even as I melt this wax,’ she cries, ‘with God’s help, so may the Myndian Delphis by love be straightway molten[20]’; and she too used in her magic rites a fringe from Delphis’ cloak, to shred and to cast into the fierce flame.[21] Only, in her case, the incantation turned what might have been a death-spell into a love-charm.

Love and jealousy are still the passions which most frequently suggest the use of magic. Occult methods are necessary to the girl whose modesty prevents her from courting openly the man on whom her heart is set, and not less so to her who would punish the faithlessness of a former lover.

The following are some recorded recipes[22] for winning the love of an apathetic swain.

Obtain some milk from the breasts of a mother and daughter who are both nursing male infants at the same time, or, in default of that, from any two women both nursing first-born male infants; mix it with wheat-flour and leaven, and contrive that the man eat of it. Repeat therewith the following incantation: ὅπως κλαῖνε καὶ λαχταρίζουν τώρα τὰ παιδία ποῦ τοὺς λείπει τὸ γάλα τους, ἔτσι νὰ λαχταρίσῃ καὶ ὁ τάδε γι̯ὰ τὴν τάδε, ‘As the infants now cry and throb with desire for the milk which fails them, so may N. throb with desire for M.’

Take a bat or three young swallows, and roast to cinders on a fire of sticks gathered by a witch at midnight where cross-roads meet: at the same time repeat the words, ὅπως στρηφογυρίζει, τρέμει, καὶ λαχταρίζει ἡ νυχτερίδα ἔτσι νὰ γυρίζῃ ὁ τάδε, νὰ τρέμῃ καὶ νὰ λαχταρίζῃ ἡ καρδι̯ά του γι̯ὰ τὴν τάδε, ‘As the bat writhes, quivers, and throbs, so may N. turn, and his heart quiver and throb with desire for M.’ The ashes of the bat are then to be put into the man’s drink.

Take a bat and bury it at cross-roads; burn incense over it for forty days at midnight; dig it up and grind its spine to powder. Put the dust in the man’s drink as before.

Such are some of the magic means of winning love; and the rites, while involving as much cruelty to the bat as was suffered by the bird of witchcraft, the ἴυγξ, in the ancient counterpart of these practices, are at any rate, save for the ashes in the man’s liquor, innocuous to him. But the weapon of witchcraft wherewith a jealous woman takes vengeance upon a man who has forsaken her or who has never returned her affection and takes to himself another for his bride, is truly diabolical. This is known as the spell of ‘binding’ (δέσιμον or ἀμπόδεμα[23]). Its purpose is to fetter the virility of the husband and so to prevent the consummation of the marriage. The rite itself is simple. Either the jealous girl herself or a witch employed by her attends the wedding, taking with her a piece of thread or string in which three loops have been loosely made. During the reading of the gospel or the pronouncement of the blessing, she pulls the ends of the string, forming thereby three knots in it, and at the same time mutters the brief incantation, δένω τὸν τάδε καὶ τὴν τάδε, καὶ τὸ διάβολο ’στὴ μέση, ‘I bind N. and M. and the Devil betwixt them.’ The thread is subsequently buried or hidden, and unless it can be found and either be burnt or have the knots untied, there is small hope for the man to recover from his impotence. There is no doubt, I think, that the extreme fear in which this spell is held has in some cases so worked upon the bridegroom’s nerves as to render the ‘binding’ actually effective, just as extreme faith in miraculous icons occasionally effects cures of nervous maladies[24]. Sonnini de Magnoncourt vouches for a case, known to him personally, in which the effect of this terror continued for several months, until finally the marriage was dissolved on the ground of non-consummation, and the man afterwards married another wife and regained his energy[25]. I myself have more than once been told of similar cases, in which however divorce was not sought (it is extremely rare in Greece) but the spell was broken by the finding of the thread or by countervailing operations of magic. In Aetolia, where this superstition is specially rife, I knew of a priest, a son of Belial by all accounts, who made a speciality of loosing these binding-spells. By his direction the afflicted man and his wife would go at sunset to a lonely chapel on a mountain-side, taking with them food and a liberal supply of wine, with which to regale themselves and the priest till midnight. At that hour they undressed and stood before the priest, who pronounced over them some form of exorcism and benediction,—my informant could not give me the words. They then retired to rest on some bedding provided by the priest on the chapel-floor, while he recited more prayers and swung his censer over them. I was assured that more than one couple in the small town where I was staying confessed to having obtained release from the spell by a night thus spent and with the extreme simplicity of the peasants of that district thought no shame to confess it. And this is the more easily intelligible, because, as we shall see later[26], the practice of ἐγκοίμησις, sleeping in some holy place with a view to being cured of any ailment, is as familiar to Christians of to-day as it was to their pagan ancestors.

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

And to God above doth pray,

Rain, O God, a gentle rain,

Shed, O God, a gentle shower,

That the fields may give their grain,

And the vines may come to flower,

and so forth in such simple strain[34]. At each doorway and more particularly at every spring and well, which it is the special duty of the Perpería to visit, anyone who will may empty a vessel of water over the boy, to whom some compensation for his drenching is usually made in the form of sweetmeats or coppers.

The word περπερία has been the subject of considerable discussion. By-forms περπερίτσα, περπεροῦνα, and παππαροῦνα also occur. The first two are of the nature of diminutives; the last-named is a corrupt form used only, so far as I know, in one district of Epirus, and means a ‘garden-poppy.’ The perversion of the word has in this district (Zagorion) affected the rite itself; for it is considered necessary for this flower to be used largely in dressing up the chief actor in the ceremony[35]. But the most general, and, as I think, most correct form is περπερία (or περπερεία). With the ancient word περπερεία, derived from the Latin perperus and used in the sense of ‘boasting’ or ‘ostentation,’ it can, I feel, have no connexion; and I suggest that it stands for περιπορεία, with the same abbreviation as in περπατῶ for περιπατῶ, ‘walk,’ and subsequent assimilation of the first two syllables. If my conjecture is right, the word originally meant nothing more than a ‘procession round’ the village; next it became confined in usage to a procession for the particular purpose of procuring rain; and finally, the words πορεία[36] and πορεύομαι having been lost from popular speech, it was taken to be the name of the boy who plays the uncomfortable part of vegetation craving water. And indeed it would seem likely that the song which forms part of the ceremony was actually first composed at a time when περπερία was still understood in the sense of ‘procession’: for in every recorded version known to me it would be still possible to interpret the word in this meaning without detriment to the context.

The rite itself as an example of sympathetic magic requires no commentary: a simpler application of the principle that like produces like could not be found.

Other examples of primitive customs and beliefs still prevalent in Greece might easily be amassed: but I have preferred to select these few for detailed treatment rather than to glance over a larger number, in order that they may the more clearly be seen to belong to certain types of superstition found the whole world over and therefore presumably dating from prehistoric ages: for if the population of Greece has proved a good vehicle for the transmission of superstitions so primaeval, it will surely follow that there is nothing extravagant in hoping to learn also from their traditions something of the religion of historic Hellas.

§ 3. The survival of Hellenic Tradition.

There may however be some who, while admitting that mere lapse of time need not have extinguished ancient Hellenic ideas, will be disposed to question the likelihood, even the possibility, of their transmission on racial grounds. The belief in the evil eye and the practice of sympathetic magic were once, they may say, the common property of the whole uncivilised world; and though the inhabitants of modern Greece have inherited these old superstitions and usages, there is nothing to show from what ancestry they have received the inheritance. The population, it may be urged, has changed; the Greeks of to-day are not Hellenes; their blood has been contaminated by foreign admixture, and with this admixture may have come external, non-Hellenic traditions; has not Fallmerayer stoutly maintained that the modern inhabitants of Greece have practically no claim to the name of Hellenes, but come of a stock Slavonic in the main, though cross-bred with the offscourings of many peoples?

The historical facts from which Fallmerayer argued are not to be slighted. It is well established[37] that, from the middle of the sixth century onwards, successive hordes of Slavonic invaders swept over Greece, driving such of the native population as escaped destruction into the more mountainous or remote districts; that in the middle of the eighth century, when the numbers of the Greek population had been further reduced by the great pestilence of 746, ‘the whole country,’ to use the exact phrase of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[38], ‘became Slavonic and was occupied by foreigners’; that the Slavonic supremacy lasted at least until the end of the tenth century; that thereafter a gradual fusion of the remnants of the Greek population with their conquerors began, but proceeded so slowly that at the beginning of the thirteenth century the ‘Franks,’ as the warriors of Western Christendom were popularly called, found Slavonic tribes in Elis and Laconia quite detached from the rest of the population, acknowledging indeed the supremacy of the Byzantine government, but still employing their own language and their own laws; and finally that the amalgamation of the two races was not complete even by the middle of the fifteenth century, for the Turks at their conquest of Greece found several tribes of the Peloponnese, especially in the neighbourhood of Mount Taygetus, still speaking a Slavonic tongue.

If then, as is now generally admitted, Fallmerayer’s conclusions were somewhat exaggerated, it remains none the less an historical fact that there is a very large admixture of Slavonic blood in the veins of the present inhabitants of Greece. The truth of this is moreover enforced by the physical characteristics of the people as a whole. Travellers conversant alike with Slavs and with modern Greeks have affirmed to me their impression that there is a close physical resemblance between the two races; and while I have not the experience of Slavonic races which would permit me to judge of this resemblance for myself, it certainly offers the best explanation of my own observations with regard to the variations of physical type in different parts of the Greek world. In the islands of the Aegean and in the promontory of Maina, to which the Slavs never penetrated, the ancient Hellenic types are far commoner than in the rest of the Peloponnese or in Northern Greece. Not a little of the charm of Tenos or Myconos or Scyros lies in the fact that the grand and impassive beauty of the earlier Greek sculpture may still be seen in the living figures and faces of men and women: and if anyone would see in the flesh the burly, black-bearded type idealised in a Heracles, he need but go to the south of the Peloponnese, and among the Maniotes he will soon be satisfied: for there he will find not merely an occasional example, as of reversion to an ancestral type, but a whole tribe of swarthy, stalwart warriors, whose aspect seems to justify their claim that in proud, though poverty-stricken, isolation they have kept their native peninsula free from alien aggression, and the old Laconian blood still pure in their veins. The ordinary Greek of the mainland, on the other hand, is usually of a mongrel and unattractive appearance; and in view of the marked difference of the type in regions untouched by the Slavs, I cannot but impute his lack of beauty to his largely Slavonic ancestry.

Yet even in the centre of the Peloponnese where the Slavonic influence has probably been strongest, the pure Greek type is not wholly extinct. I remember a young man who acted as ostler and waiter and in all other capacities at a small khan on the road from Tripolitza to Sparta, who would not have been despised as a model by Praxiteles; and elsewhere too, now and again, I have seen statuesque forms and classic features, less perfect indeed than his, but yet proclaiming beyond question an Hellenic lineage; so that I should hesitate to say that in any part of Greece the population is as purely Slavonic as in Maina or many of the islands it is purely Greek.

But, as I think, the exact proportion of Slavonic and of Hellenic blood in the veins of the modern Greeks is not a matter of supreme importance. Even if their outward appearance were universally and completely Slavonic, I would still maintain that they deserve the name of Greeks. Though their lineage were wholly Slavonic, their nationality, I claim, would still be Hellenic. For the nationality of a people, like the personality of an individual, is something which eludes definition but which embraces the mental and the moral as well as the physical. A man’s personality is not to be determined by knowledge of his family and his physiognomy alone; and similarly racial descent and physical type are not the sole indices of nationality. Even if a purely Slavonic ancestry had dowered the inhabitants of Greece with a purely Slavonic appearance, yet, if their thoughts and speech and acts were, as they are, Greek, I would still venture to call them Greek in nationality. Ce n’est que la peau dont l’Ethiope ne change pas.

But the people of modern Greece do not actually present so extreme a case of acquired nationality. They are partly Greek in race: and if it should appear that they are wholly Greek in nationality, the explanation must simply be that the character, no less than the language, of their Hellenic ancestors was superior in vitality to that of the Slavs who intermarried with them, and alone has been transmitted to the modern Greek people.

What, then, is the national character at the present day?

The first feature of it which casual conversation with any Greek will soon bring into view is that narrow patriotism which was so remarkable a trait in the Greeks of old time. If he be asked what is his native land (πατρίδα), his answer will be, not Greece nor any of the larger divisions of it, but the particular town or hamlet in which he happened to be born: and if in later life he change his place of abode, though he live in his new home ten or twenty years, he will regard himself and be regarded by the native-born inhabitants as a foreigner (ξένος). Or again if a man obtain work for a short time in another part of the country, or if a girl marry an inhabitant of a village half a dozen miles from her own, the departure is mourned with some of those plaintive songs of exile in which the popular muse delights. Nor are there lacking historical cases in which this narrow love of country has produced something more than fond lamentations; the boast of the Maniotes that they have never acknowledged alien masters is in the main a true boast, and it was pure patriotism which nerved them in their long struggle with the Turks for the possession of their rugged, barren, storm-lashed home. It was patriotism too, narrow and proud, that both sustained the heroic outlaws of Souli in their defiance of Ottoman armies, and also,—because they disdained alliance with their Greek neighbours,—contributed to their final downfall.

But so tenacious and indomitable a courage is in modern, as it was in ancient, Greece the exception rather than the rule. The men of Maina and of Souli are comparable to the Spartans: but in no period of Greek history has steadfast bravery been commonly displayed. Yet, in spite of the humiliating experiences of the late Graeco-Turkish war, the Greek people should not be judged devoid of courage. But theirs is a courage which comes of impulse rather than of self-command; a courage which might prompt a charge as brilliant as that of Marathon, but could not cheerfully face the hardships of a campaign; a courage which might turn a slight success into a victory, but could not save a retreat from becoming a rout.

It must be acknowledged also that the rank and file are in general more admirable than their officers. The bravery of the men, impulsive and short-lived though it be, is inspired by a real devotion of themselves to a cause; whereas among the officers self-seeking and even self-saving are conspicuous faults. Even the really courageous leaders seldom have a single eye to the success of their arms. Their plans are marred by petty jealousies. The same rivalries for the supreme command which embarrassed the Greeks of old in defending their liberty against Persia, were repeated in the struggles of the last century to throw off the Turkish yoke. And if in both cases the Greeks were successful, in neither was victory due to the unity and harmony of their leaders, but rather to that passionate hatred of the barbarians which stirred the people as a whole.

Indeed, not only in war but in all conditions of life, any personal eminence or distinction has been apt to turn the head of a Greek. ‘The abundant enjoyment of power or wealth,’ said the ancients not without knowledge of the national character, ‘begets lawlessness and arrogance’; and in humbler phrase the modern proverb sums up the same qualities of the race,—καλὸς δοῦλος, κακὸς ἀφέντης, ‘a good servant and a bad master.’ In all periods of Greek history there have been few men who have attained to power without abusing it. The honour of being returned to the Greek Parliament upsets the mental balance of a large number of deputies. Without any more intimate knowledge of politics than can be obtained from second-rate newspapers, they believe themselves called and qualified to lead each his own party, with the result—so it is commonly said—that no government since the first institution of parliament has ever had an assured majority in the House, and on an average there have been more than one dissolution a year. The modern parliament is as unstable an institution as the ancient ecclesia of Athens when there was no longer a Pericles to control it, and its demagogues are as numerous.

Even the petty eminence of a village schoolmaster proves to be too giddy a pinnacle for many. Such an one thinks it necessary to support his position—which owing to the Greek love of education is more highly respected perhaps than in other countries—by a pretence of universal knowledge and a pedantry as lamentable as it is ludicrous. I remember a gentleman who boasted the title of Professor of Ancient History in the gymnasium or secondary school of a certain town, who called to me one day as I was passing a café where he and some of his friends were sitting, and said that they were having a pleasant little discussion about the first Triumvirate, and had recalled the names of Cicero and Caesar, but could not at the moment remember the third party. Could I help them? I hesitated a moment, and then resolved to risk it and suggest, what was at least alliterative if not accurate, the name of Cato. ‘Of course,’ he answered, ‘how these things do slip one’s memory sometimes!’ Yet this Professor posed as an authority on many subjects outside his own province of learning, and frequently when I met him would insist on talking dog-Latin with an Italian pronunciation, a medium in which I found it difficult to converse.

In this readiness to discourse on any and every subject and to display attainments in and out of season, he and the class of which he is typical are the living images of the less respectable of the ancient Sophists. And in pedantry of language too they fairly rival their famous prototypes. The movement in favour of an artificial revival of ancient Greek has already been of long duration, and has had a detrimental effect upon the modern language. The vulgar tongue has a melodious charm, while many classical words, in the modern pronunciation, are extremely harsh and uncouth. The object of the movement is to secure an uniform ‘pure’ speech, as they call it, approximate to that of Plato or of Xenophon; and the method adopted is to mix up Homeric and other words of antiquarian celebrity with literal renderings of modern French idioms, inserting datives, infinitives, and other obsolete forms at discretion. To aid in this movement is the task and the delight of the schoolmasters: and such is their devotion to this linguistic sophistry, that they are not dismayed even by the ambiguity arising from the use of ancient forms indistinguishable in modern speech. The two old words ἡμέτερος and ὑμέτερος have now no difference in sound: yet the schoolmaster uses them and inculcates the use of them, with the lamentable result that the children are not taught to distinguish meum and tuum even in speech.

And here again the character of the modern Greek reflects that of his ancestors. Honesty and truthfulness are not the national virtues. To lie, or even to steal, is accounted morally venial and intellectually admirable. It is a proof of superior mother-wit, than which no quality is more valued in the business of everyday life. Almost the only things in Greece which have fixed prices are tobacco, newspapers, and railway-tickets. The hire of a mule, the cost of a bunch of grapes, the price of meat, the remuneration for a vote at the elections,—such matters as these are the subject of long and vivacious bargaining, and if the money does not change hands on the spot, the bargain may be smilingly repudiated and an attempt made, on any pretext which suggests itself, to extort more. Yet there is a certain charm in all this; for, if a man get his own price, it is not so much the amount of his profit which pleases him as his success in winning it; and if he fail, he takes a smaller sum with perfect good humour and increased respect for the man who has outwitted him. Anyone may be honest; but to be ἔξυπνος, as they say, shrewd, wide-awake,—this is Greek and admirable. The contrast of an Aristides with a Themistocles is the natural expression of Greek thought. Moral uprightness and mental brilliance are not to be expected of one and the same man; and for the most part the Greeks now as in old time praise others for their justice and pride themselves on their cunning. The acme of cleverness is touched by him who can both profit by dishonesty and maintain a reputation for sincerity.

But, while truthfulness and fair dealing are certainly rare, there is one relation in which the most scrupulous fidelity is unfailingly shown. The obligations of hospitality are everywhere sacred. The security and the comfort of the guest are not in name only but in actual fact the first consideration of his host. However unscrupulous a Greek may be in his ordinary dealings, he never, I believe, harbours for one moment the idea of making profit out of the stranger who seeks the shelter of his roof. For hospitality in Greece, it must be remembered, means not the entertainment of friends and acquaintances who are welcome for their own sake or from whom a return in kind may be expected, but real φιλοξενία, a generous and friendly welcome to a stranger unknown yesterday and vanished again to-morrow. To each unbidden chance-comer the door is always open. For lodging he may chance to have an incense-reeking room where the family icons hang, or a corner of a cottage-floor barricaded against the poultry and other inmates; for food, hot viands rich in circumambient oil, or three-month-old rye-bread softened in a cup of water; but among rich and poor alike he is certain of the best which there is to give. Even where there are inns available, the stranger will constantly find that the first native of the place to whom he puts the Aristophanic enquiry ὅπου κόρεις ὀλίγιστοι[39]—which inn is of least entomological interest—will constitute himself not guide but host and will place the resources of his own house freely at the service of the chance-found visitor.

The reception accorded by Eumaeus to Odysseus, in its revelation of human—and also of canine—character, differs in no respect from that which may await any traveller at the present day. As Odysseus approached the swineherd’s hut, ‘suddenly the yelping dogs espied him, and with loud barking rushed upon him, but Odysseus guilefully sat down and let fall his staff from his hand[40].’ Such is the opening of the scene; and many, I suppose, must have wondered, as they read it, wherein consisted Odysseus’ guilefulness. A shepherd of Northern Arcadia resolved me that riddle. I had been attacked on a mountain-path by two or three of his dogs,—‘like unto wild beasts[41],’ as Homer has it,—and the combat may have lasted some few minutes when the shepherd thought fit to intervene. Sheep-dogs are of course valued in proportion to their ferocity towards any person or animal approaching the flock, and a taste of blood now and again is said to keep them on their mettle. Fortunately matters had not reached that point; but none the less I suggested to the man that he might have bestirred himself sooner. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘if you are really in difficulties, you should sit down’; and when I showed some surprise, he explained that anyone who is attacked by sheepdogs has only to sit down and let go his walking-stick or gun or other offensive weapon, and the dogs, understanding that a truce has been called, will sit down round him and maintain, so to speak, a peaceful blockade[42]. On subsequent occasions I tested the shepherd’s counsel, beginning prudently with one dog only and, as I gained assurance, raising the number: it is uncomfortable[43] to remain sitting with a bloodthirsty Molossian hound at one’s back, ready to resume hostilities if any suspicious movement is made; but I must own that, in my own fairly wide experience, Greek dogs, as they are sans peur in combat, are also sans reproche in observing a truce. The traveller may fare worse than by following the example of guileful Odysseus.

But if the scene of the encounter be not a mountain-path but the approach to some cottage, the dogs’ master will, like Eumaeus, hasten to intervene, ‘chiding them and driving them this way and that with a shower of stones[44],’—for the Greek dog does not heed mere words,—and again like Eumaeus will assure his visitor that he himself would have been ‘covered with shame[45]’ if the dogs had done his guest any hurt. Then he will conduct his guest into his cottage and bid him take his fill of bread and wine before he tells whence he is come and how he has fared[46]: for Greek hospitality spares the guest the fatigue of talking until he is refreshed. The visitor therefore sits at his ease, silent and patient, while his host catches and kills such beast or fowl as he may possess, cuts up the flesh in small pieces, threads these on a spit, and holds them over the embers of his fire till they are ready to serve up[47]: similarly, in Homeric fashion, he mixes wine and water[48]; and then, all the preparations being now complete, he urges his guest to the meal[49].

Thus the hospitality of to-day, in its details no less than in its spirit, recalls the hospitality of the Homeric age. The supreme virtue of the ancient Greek remains the supreme virtue of the modern, and a familiarity with the manners of the present day alone might suffice to explain why Paris who stole another man’s wife was execrable but Admetus who let his own wife die for him could yet win admiration. The one broke the laws of hospitality; the other, by hiding his loss and entertaining his guest, upheld them.

A comparative estimate, such as I have essayed, of the characters of Greeks of old and Greeks of to-day is perhaps evidence of a somewhat intangible nature to those who are not personally intimate with the people: but no foreigner, even though he were totally ignorant of the modern language, could chance upon one of the many festivals of the country without remarking that there, in humbler form, are re-enacted many of the scenes of ancient days. The πανηγύρια, as they call these festivals,—diminutives, both in name and in form, of the ancient πανηγύρεις,—present the same medley of religion, art, trading, athletics, and amusement which constituted the Olympian games. The occasion is most commonly some saint’s-day, and a church or a sacred spring (ἅγι̯ασμα) the centre of the gathering. Art is represented by the contests of local poets or wits in improvising topical and other verses, and occasionally there is present one of the old-fashioned rhapsodes, whose number is fast diminishing, to recite to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument still called the κιθάρα[50] the glorious feats of some patriot-outlaw (κλέφτης) in defiance of the Turks. Then there are the pedlars and hucksters strolling to and fro or seated at their stalls, and ever crying their wares—fruit, sausages, confectionery of strange hues and stranger taste, beads, knives, cheap icons ranging in subject from likenesses of patron-saints to gaudy views of hell, and all manner of tin-foil trinkets representing ships, cattle, and parts of the human body for dedication in the church. Then in some open space there will be a gathering of young men, running, wrestling, hurling the stone; yonder others, and with them the girls, indulge in the favourite recreation of Greece, those graceful dances, of which the best-known, the συρτός[51], and probably others too, are a legacy from dancers of old time. It is impossible to be a spectator of such scenes without recognising that here, in embryonic form, are the festivals of which the famous gatherings of Olympia and Nemea, Delphi and the Isthmus, were the full development.

And it may well happen too that the observant onlooker will descry also the rudiments of ancient drama. Often, as is natural in so mountainous and rugged a country, the only level dancing-place which a village possesses is a stone-paved threshing-floor hewn out of the hill-side. Hither on any festal occasion, be it a saint’s-day or one of the celebrations which naturally follow the ingathering of harvest or vintage, the dancers betake themselves. Here too a small booth or tent, still called σκηνή, is often rigged up, to which they can retire for rest or refreshment, while on the slopes above are ranged the spectators. The circular threshing-floor is the orchestra, the hill-side provides its tiers of seats, the dancers, who always sing while they dance, are the chorus; add only the village musician twanging a sorry lyre, and in the intervals of dancing an old-fashioned rhapsode reciting some story of bygone days, or, it may be, two village wits contending in improvised pleasantries, and the rudiments of ancient Tragedy or Comedy are complete.

Other illustrations might easily be amassed. On March 1st the boys of Greece still parade the village-streets with a painted wooden swallow set on a flower-decked pole, and sing substantially the same ‘swallow-song’ (χελιδόνισμα)[52] as was sung in old time in Rhodes[53]. On May 1st the girls make wreaths of flowers and corn which, like the ancient εἰρεσιώνη, must be left hanging over the door of the house till next year’s wreaths take their place. The fisherman still ties his oar to a single thole with a piece of rope or a thong of leather, as did the mariners of Homer’s age[54]. The farmer still drives his furrows with an Hesiodic plough.

Such are a few of the survivals which bear witness to the genuinely Hellenic nationality of the inhabitants of modern Greece: and last, but not least, there is the language, which, albeit no index of race, is most cogent evidence of tradition. To the action of thought upon language there corresponds a certain reaction of language upon thought: it is impossible to speak a tongue which contains, let us say, the word νεράϊδα (modern Greek for a ‘nymph’) without possessing also an idea of the being whom that word denotes. Therefore even if the whole population of Greece were demonstrably of Slavonic race, the fact that it now speaks Greek would go far to support its claim to Hellenic nationality: for its adoption of the Greek language would imply its assimilation of Greek thought.

But, quite apart from the evidence of custom and language, the occasional perpetuation of the ancient Greek physical type and the general survival of the ancient Greek character plainly forbid so extreme a supposition as that of Fallmerayer: no traveller familiar with the modern Greek peasantry could entertain for a moment the idea that at any period the whole of Greece became Slavonicized, but, whatever might be the historical arguments for such a theory, would reject it, on the evidence of his own eyes, as ludicrously exaggerated. Fusion of race, no doubt, there has been; but in that fusion the Hellenic element must have been the most vital and persistent; for if the present population of Greece is of mixed descent, in its traditions at least it is almost purely Hellenic.

§ 4. The Survival of Pagan Tradition.

It appears then that notwithstanding the immigration of Slavonic hordes, and notwithstanding also, it may be added, the influences exercised in later periods by ‘Franks,’ Genoese, Venetians, and Turks, the traditions of the inhabitants of Greece still remain singularly pure; and their claim to Hellenic nationality is justified by their language, by their character, and by many secular aspects of their civilisation. But in the domain of religion it might reasonably be expected that a large change would have taken place. There is the obstinate fact, it may be thought, that the Greeks are now and have long been Christian. Did not the new religion dispossess and oust the ancient polytheism? Are we to look for pagan customs in the hallowed usages of the Greek Church? What can the simple Christian peasant of to-day, subject from his youth up to ecclesiastical influence, know of the religion of his distant ancestors,—of those fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life, and inspired their care for the dead?

On the conduct of man towards his fellow-men in this life the influence of Christianity appears to have been as great as that of paganism was small. Duty towards one’s neighbour hardly came within the purview of Hellenic religion. If we look at the supreme acts of worship in ancient times, we cannot fail to be struck by the disunion of the religious and the ethical. A certain purity was no doubt required of those who attended the mysteries of Eleusis; but by that purity was meant physical cleanliness and, strangely enough, a pure use of the Greek language, just as much as any moral temperance or rectitude; and the required condition was largely attained by the use or avoidance of certain foods and by bathing in the sea. Their cleanliness in fact was of the same confused kind, half physical and half moral, as that which the inhabitants of Tenos were formerly wont, and perhaps still continue, to seek on S. John the Baptist’s day (June 24) by leaping thrice through a bonfire and crying ‘Here I leave my sins and my fleas[55]’: and it was acquired by means equally material. There is nothing conspicuously ethical in such a purity as this.

If moreover, as has been well argued[56], a state of ecstasy was the highest manifestation of religious feeling, and this spiritual exaltation was the deliberate aim and end of Bacchic and other orgies, it must be frankly avowed that religion in its highest manifestations was not conducive to what we call morality. The means of inducing the ecstatic condition comprised drunkenness, inhalation of vapours, wild and licentious dancing. With physical surexcitation came, or was intended to come, a spiritual elevation such that the mind could visualise the object of its desire[57] and worship, and enjoy a sense of unity therewith. On the savagery and debauchery which accompanied these religious celebrations there is no need to enlarge. The Bacchae of Euripides, with all its passion for the beauty of holiness, is a standing monument to the excesses of frenzy: and that these were no mere figment of the poet’s imagination nor a transfiguration of rites long obsolete, is proved by a single sentence of a sober enough writer of later times, ‘The things that take place at nocturnal celebrations, however licentious they may be, although known to the company at large, are to some extent condoned by them owing to the drunkenness[58].’

There were of course certain sects, such as the Orphic, who, in strong contrast with the ordinary religion, upheld definite ethical standards, preaching the necessity of purification from sin, and advocating moral and even ascetic rules of life. Yet, in spite of this, we find a certain amalgamation of Orphic and Bacchic mysteries. And why? Simply because both sects alike had a single end in view, a spiritual exaltation in which the soul might transcend the things of ordinary life, and see and commune with its gods. What did it matter if the means to that end differed? The one sect might reduce the passions of the body by rigid abstinence; the other might deaden them with a surfeit of their desire; but, whether by prostration or by surexcitation, the same religious end was sought and gained, and that end justified means which we count immoral.

In effect the morality of a man’s life counted for nothing as compared with his religion. Participation in the mysteries ensured blessings here and hereafter which an evil life would not forfeit nor a good life, without initiation, earn. ‘Thrice blessed they of men, who look upon these rites ere they go to Hades’ home: for them alone is there true life there, and for the others nought but evil[59].’ It was this that made Diogenes scoffingly ask, ‘What, shall the thief Pataecion have a better lot than Epaminondas after death, because he has been initiated[60]?’ Seemingly religion and morality were to the Greek mind divorced, or rather had never been wedded. Religion was concerned only with the intercourse of man and god: the moral character of the man himself and his relations with his fellows were outside the religious sphere.

Indeed it would have been hard for the ancients to regard morality as a religious obligation, when immorality was freely imputed to their gods. This was a real obstacle to the ethical improvement of the people at large, and was recognised as such by many thinkers. Pindar strove to expurgate mythological stories which brought discredit on the morals of Olympus. Plato would have banished the evil records of Homeric theology from his ideal state, and ridicules Musaeus for forming no more lofty conception of future bliss than ‘eternal drunkenness.’ Epicurus defended his own attitude towards the gods on the plea that there was ‘no impiety in doing away with the popular gods, but rather in attaching to the gods the popular ideas of them[61].’ In effect, in order to reconcile religion with the teaching of ethics, the would-be preacher of morality had either openly to discard a large amount of the popular theology or else to have recourse to adaptation and mystical interpretation of so artificial and arbitrary a kind that it could gain no hold upon the simple and spontaneous beliefs of the common-folk. Yet even among the ordinary men of those days there must have been some who, though they did not aspire to instruct their fellow-men, yet in hours of sober reason and cool judgement cannot have viewed unabashed the inconsistencies of a religion whose gods were stained with human vices. But such thoughts, we may suppose, were swept away, as men approached their sanctuaries and their mysteries, by a flood of religious fervour. Passion in such moments defeated reason. Emotion, susceptibility, imagination, impetuosity, powers of visualisation regarded among western nations as the perquisite of the inebriate, powers of ecstasy not easily distinguished from hysteria,—such were the mental conditions essential to the highest acts of worship; by these, and not by sober meditation, the soul attained to the closest communing and fullest union with that god whose glory for the nonce outshone all pale remembrance of mere moral rectitude and alone was able to evoke every supreme emotion of his worshipper.

If then morality was ever to be imposed and sanctioned by religion, a wholly new religion had to be found. This was the opportunity of Christianity. Paganism, in some of its most sacred rites, had availed itself even of immoral means to secure a religious end: Christianity gave to ethics a new and higher status, and was rather in danger of making religion wholly subservient to morality. That it was difficult to bring the first converts to the new point of view, is evident from the rebukes administered by S. Paul to the Corinthians, who seem not only to have indulged in many gross forms of vice in everyday life, but even to have made the most sacred of Christian services an occasion for gluttony and drunkenness[62].

In all then that concerns the ethical standards of the people, our study of modern Greece will contribute little to the understanding of ancient thought or conduct. Christianity has fenced men about with a rigid moral code, and has exerted itself to punish those who break bounds. Duty towards man is now recognised as the complement of duty towards God; and any one who by a notoriously evil life has outraged the moral laws of conduct, is liable to be deprived by excommunication of the established means of worship. The frailties of the Greek character remain indeed such as they always were: but now religion at least enjoins, if it cannot always enforce, the observance of a moral code which includes the eighth commandment, and Pataecion, though he go regularly to church, yet lacks something.

But while the Church had an open field in matters of morality and had no system of ethics based on Hellenic religion to combat in introducing her higher views of man’s duty towards his fellow-men, in the province of pure religion and of all that concerns the relations of man with his God or gods she necessarily encountered competition and opposition. Primarily the contest between paganism and Christianity might have been expected to resolve itself into a struggle between polytheism and monotheism: but as a matter of fact that simple issue became considerably complicated.

The minds of the educated classes had become confused by the subtleties of the Gnostics, who sought to find, in some philosophical basis common to all religions, an intellectual justification for accepting Christianity without wholly discarding earlier religious convictions. This however was a matter of theology rather than of religion, appealing not to the heart but to the head: and so far as the common-folk were concerned we may safely say that such speculations were above their heads.

Yet for them too the issue was confused in two ways. The first disturbing factor was the attitude adopted by each of the two parties, pagan and Christian, towards the object of the other’s worship. The pagans—so catholic are the sympathies of polytheism—were ready enough to welcome Christ into the number of their gods. Tertullian tells us that the emperor Tiberius proposed the apotheosis of Christ[63]. Hadrian is said to have built temples in his honour[64]. Alexander Severus had in his private chapel statues of Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus[65]; and a similar association of Homer, Pythagoras, Christ, and S. Paul is noted by S. Augustine[66]. Since then there is no reason for supposing that the common-folk were more exclusive in their religious sympathies than the upper classes, it may safely be inferred that the average Pagan was willing to admit Christ to a place among the gods of Greece. The Christians on the other hand did not attack paganism by an utter denial of the existence of the old gods. They sought rather to ridicule and discredit them by pointing out the inconsistencies of pagan theology, and by ransacking mythology for every tale of the vices and misdoings of its deities. They even appealed to the testimony of Homer himself to show that the so-called gods (θεοί) of the Greek folk were mere demons (δαίμονες)[67],—for since Homer’s day the latter word had lost caste. Such methods, had they been wholly successful, might have produced similar results to those which followed the conflict of two religions in the early ages of Greece. As the Titanic dynasty of gods had fallen before the Olympian Zeus, and in their defeat had come to be accounted cruel and malicious powers rightly ousted from heaven by a more just and gracious deity, so too in turn might the whole number of the pagan gods have been reduced to the status of devils to act as a foil to the goodness of the Christian God. But this did not happen. One reason perhaps was that Christianity came provided with its own devil or devils, and the pagans were naturally averse from placing the gods whom they had been wont to venerate in the same category with spirits so uncompromisingly evil. The main reason however must be found in the fact that the Church had nothing to offer to the pagans in exchange for the countless gods of the old religion whom she was endeavouring to displace and to degrade. Indeed the real difficulty of the Christian Church was the tolerant spirit of the Greek people. They would not acknowledge that any feud existed. They were ready to worship the Christian God: but they must have felt that it was unreasonable of the Christian missionaries to ask them to give up all their old gods merely because a new god had been introduced. Even if their gods were all that the Christians represented them to be—cruel, licentious, unjust—that was no reason for neglecting them; rather it furnished a stronger motive for propitiating them and averting their wrath by prayer and sacrifice. Tolerant themselves, they must have resented a little the intolerance of the new religion.

Such being the attitude of the two parties, it may be doubted whether the Church would have made much headway in Greece, had it not been for a fresh development in her own conditions. And this development was the second disturbing factor in what should have been the simple struggle between monotheism and polytheism. Christianity, as understood by the masses, became polytheistic on its own account.

It is true that the authorities of the Greek Church have always taught that the angels and saints are not to be worshipped in the same sense as God. Ecclesiastical doctrine concedes to them no power to grant the petitions of men at their own will: they can act as intermediaries only between man and the Almighty; yet while they cannot in their own might fulfil the requests which they hear, their intervention as messengers to the throne of God is deemed to enhance the value of man’s prayers and wellnigh to ensure their acceptance. But such a doctrine is naturally too subtle for the uninstructed common-folk: and just as Christ had been admitted to the ranks of the Greek gods, so were the saints, it would seem, accepted as lesser deities or perhaps heroes. Whatever their precise status may have been, they at any rate became objects of worship; and a religion which admits many objects of worship becomes necessarily a form of polytheism.

Now while the Church did not sanction this state of things by her doctrine, there can be no doubt that she condoned it by the use to which she put it. The attempt to crush paganism had so far failed, and there was no longer any thought of a combat à outrance between the two religions. Violence was to give way to diplomacy; and the chief instrument of the Church’s diplomacy was the worship of the saints. It became her hope to supplant paganism by substituting for the old gods Christian saints of similar names and functions; and the effects of this policy are everywhere in evidence in modern Greece.

Thus Dionysus was displaced by S. Dionysius, as a story still current in Greece testifies. ‘Once upon a time S. Dionysius was on his way to Naxos: and as he went he espied a small plant which excited his wonder. He dug it up, and because the sun was hot sought wherewith to shelter it. As he looked about, he saw the bone of a bird’s leg, and in this he put the plant to keep it safe. To his surprise the plant began to grow, and he sought again a larger covering for it. This time he found the leg-bone of a lion, and as he could not detach the plant from the bird’s leg, he put both together in that of the lion. Yet again it grew and this time he found the leg-bone of an ass and put plant and all into that. And so he came to Naxos. And when he came to plant the vine—for the plant was in fact the first vine—he could not sever it from the bones that sheltered it, but planted them all together. Then the vine grew and bore grapes and men made wine and drank thereof. And first when they drank they sang like birds, and when they drank more they grew strong as lions, and afterwards foolish as asses[68].’

The disguise of the ancient god is thin indeed. His name is changed by an iota, but his character not a jot. S. Dionysius is god of the vine, and even retains his predecessor’s connexion with Naxos. It is perhaps noteworthy too that in Athens the road which skirts the south side of the Acropolis and the theatre of Dionysus is now called the street of S. Dionysius the Areopagite. I was once corrected by a Greek of average education for speaking of the theatre of Dionysus instead of ascribing it to his saintly namesake.

Demeter again, although as we shall see later she still survives as a distinct personality, has been for the most part dispossessed by S. Demetrius. His festival, which falls in October and is therefore remote from harvest-time, is none the less celebrated with special enthusiasm among the agricultural classes; marriages too are especially frequent on that day[69].

Similarly Artemis, though she too is still known to the common-folk in some districts, has in the main handed over her functions to a saint of the other sex, Artemidos. Theodore Bent has recorded a good instance of this from the island of Keos (modern Zea). There is a belief throughout Greece that weakly children who show signs of wasting have been ‘struck by the Nereids,’—by nymphs, that is, of any kind, whether terrestrial or marine. ‘In Keos,’ says Bent, ‘S. Artemidos is the patron of these weaklings, and the church dedicated to him is some little way from the town on the hill-slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say. She then strips off its clothes and puts on new ones, blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite to the Church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank S. Artemidos for the blessing he has vouchsafed, unconscious that by so doing she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis, to whom in classical times were attached the epithets παιδοτρόφος, κουροτρόφος, φιλομείραξ; and now the Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake[70].’ It might have been added that in this custom are reflected not only those general attributes of the tendance of children which Artemis shared with many other deities, but possibly also her power to undo any mischief wrought by her handmaidens, the nymphs[71].

Again there is every reason to suppose that S. Elias[72] whose chapels crown countless hilltops is merely the Christian successor to Helios, the Sun. The two names, which have only a moderate resemblance in the nominative, coincide for modern pronunciation in the genitive; and the frequency with which that case was needed in speaking of the church or the mountain-peak dedicated to one or the other may have facilitated the transition. Besides inheriting the mountain sanctuaries at which the worship of the Sun may have persisted from a very early age, S. Elias has also taken over the chariot of his predecessor, and thunder is sometimes attributed to the rolling of its wheels.

In other cases, without any resemblance of names, identity of attributes or functions suggested the substitution of saint for pagan deity. Hermes who in old times was the chief ‘angel’ or messenger of the immortals (ἄγγελος ἀθανάτων) was naturally succeeded by the archangel Michael, upon whom therefore devolves the duty of escorting men’s souls to Hades; and to this day the men of Maina tell how the archangel, with drawn sword in his hand instead of the wand of his prototype, may be seen passing to and fro at the mouth of the caves of Taenarus through which Heracles made his ascent with Cerberus from the lower world, and which is still the best-known descent thereto. The supplanting of Hermes by Michael is well illustrated in the sphere of art also by a curious gem. The design is an ordinary type of Hermes with his traditional cap, and at his side a cock, the symbol of vigilance and of gymnastic sport; by a later hand has been engraved the name ‘Michael’; the cock remained to be interpreted doubtless as the Christian symbol of the awakening at the last day of them that sleep[73].

The conversion of pagan temples or of their sites to the purposes of Christianity tells the same tale. The virgin goddess of Athens ceded the Parthenon to the Blessed Virgin of the Christians. The so-called Theseum, whether Theseus or Heracles was its original occupant, was fitly made over to the warrior S. George: but none the less what seems to have been an old pagan festival, known as the ρουσάλια (Latin rosalia)[74], continues to this day to be celebrated with dancing and feasting in its precincts. The Church of the Annunciation at Tenos, so famous throughout the Greek world for its miracles of healing, stands on the foundations of Poseidon’s ancient sanctuary, and includes in its precincts a holy spring (ἅγι̯ασμα) whose healing virtues, we can hardly doubt, were first discovered by the pagans: for Poseidon was worshipped in Tenos under the title of the ‘healer’ (ἰατρός)[75]. Indeed throughout the length and breadth of the land the traveller will find churches built with the material of the old temples or superimposed upon their foundation, and cannot fail to detect therein evidence of a deliberate policy on the part of the Church.

But in her attempts to be conciliatory she became in fact compromised. It was politic no doubt to encourage the weaker brethren by building churches on sites where they had long been wont to worship: it was politic to smooth the path of the common-folk by substituting for the god whom they had worshipped a patron-saint of like name or attributes. But in so doing the Church practically condoned polytheism. She drove out the old gods from their temples made with hands, but did not ensure the obliteration of them from men’s hearts. The saints whom she set up in the place of the old deities were certain to acquire the rank of gods in the estimation of the people and, despite the niceties of ecclesiastical doctrine, to become in fact objects of frank and open worship. The adoption of the old places of worship made it inevitable that the old associations of the pagan cults should survive and blend themselves with the new ideas, and that the churches should more often acquire prestige from their heathen sites than themselves shed a new lustre of sanctity upon them. In effect, paganism was not uprooted to make room for the planting of Christianity, but served rather as an old stock on which a new and vigorous branch, capable indeed of fairer fruit but owing its very vitality to alien sap, might be engrafted.

Bitterly and despondently did the early Fathers of the Church, and above all S. John Chrysostom, complain of the inveteracy of pagan customs within the pale of the Church, while a kind of official recognition was given to many superstitions which were clearly outside that pale, if only by the many forms of exorcism directed against the evil eye or prescribed for the cure of those possessed by pagan powers of evil[76]. For illustration we need not fall back upon the past history of the Greek Church; even to-day she has not succeeded in living down the consequences of her whilom policy of conciliation. The common-folk indeed profess and call themselves Christian; their priesthood is a Christian priesthood; their places of worship are Christian churches; they make the sign of the cross at every turn; and the names of God and Christ and the Virgin are their commonest ejaculations. But with all this external Christianity they are as pagan and as polytheistic in their hearts as were ever their ancestors. By their acceptance of Christianity they have increased rather than diminished their number of gods: in their conception of them and attitude towards them they have made little advance since the Homeric Age: and practically all the religious customs most characteristic of ancient paganism, such as sacrifice, the taking of auspices, and the consultation of oracles, continue with or without the sanction of the Church down to the present day.

These are strong statements to make concerning even the humblest and most ignorant members of the Holy Orthodox Church: but I shall show, I think, that they do not exceed the warranty of facts.

First of all then the peasant believes himself to be ever compassed about by a host of supernatural beings, who have no relation with his Christian faith, and some of whom he unconsciously acknowledges, by the very names that he applies to them, as ‘pagan’ beings and ‘outside’ the Christian fold[77]. To all of these—and they are a motley crew, gods and demons, fairies and dragons—he assigns severally and distinctly their looks, their dispositions, their habitations, and their works. To some of them he prays and makes offerings; against others he arms and fortifies himself in the season of their maleficence; but all of them, whether for good or ill, are to him real existent beings; no phantoms conjured up by trepidation of mind, but persons whose substance is proved by sight and hearing and touch.

Nothing is more amazing in the peasantry of modern Greece than their familiarity with these various beings. More than once I have overheard two peasants comparing notes on the ghostly fauna of their respective districts; and the intimate and detailed character of their knowledge was a revelation in regard to their powers of visualisation. It is the mountaineers and the mariners who excel in this; but even the duller folk of the lowlands see much that is hidden from foreign eyes. Once however I did see a nymph—or what my guide took for one—moving about in an olive-grove near Sparta; and I must confess that had I possessed an initial faith in the existence of nymphs and in the danger of looking upon them, so lifelike was the apparition that I might have sworn as firmly as did my guide that it was a nymph that we had seen, and might have required as strong a dose as he at the next inn to restore my nerves. The initial faith in such things, which the child acquires from its mother, is no doubt an important factor in the visualisation; but it is certainly strange that often in Greece not one man only but several together will see an apparition at the same moment, and even agree afterwards as to what they saw.

These beings then are not the mere fanciful figures of old wives’ fables, but have a real hold upon the peasant’s belief and a firm place in his religion. To the objects of Christian worship or veneration—God and Christ and the Virgin together with the archangels and all the host of saints—have been accorded the highest places and chiefest honours: but beside them, or rather below them, yet feared and honoured too, stand many of the divine personalities of the old faith, recognised and distinguished still. Artemis, Demeter, and Charon, as well as Nymphs and Gorgons, Lamiae and Centaurs, have to be reckoned with in the conduct of life; while in folk-stories the memory at least of other deities still survives. To these remnants of ancient mythology the next chapter will be devoted; the purely pagan element in the modern polytheism may be sufficiently illustrated here by a few curious cases of the use even of the word ‘god’ (θεός) in reference to other than the God of Christendom.

In Athens, down to recent times, there was a fine old formula of blessing in vogue—and who shall say but that among the simpler people it may still be heard?—which combined impartially the one God and the many:—νὰ ς’ ἀξιῶσῃ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ εὐχαριστήσῃς θεοὺς καὶ ἀνθρώπους[78], ‘God fit thee to find favour with gods and men!’ In the island of Syra, according to Bent[79], it was ‘a common belief amongst the peasants that the ghosts of the ancient Greeks come once a year from all parts of Greece to worship at Delos, ... and even to-day they will reverently speak of the “god in Delos.”’ Another writer mentions a similar expression as used in several parts of the mainland, though only it would seem as an ejaculation, θεὲ τῆς Κρήτης or γιὰ τὸ θεὸ τῆς Κρήτης ‘by the god of Crete[80]!’ In the island of Santorini (the ancient Thera) I personally encountered a still more striking case of out-spoken polytheism. I chanced one day upon a very old woman squatting on the extreme edge of the cliff above the great flooded crater which, though too deep for anchorage, serves the main town of the island as harbour—a place more fascinating in its hideousness than any I have seen. Wondering at her dangerous position, I asked her what she was doing; and she replied simply enough that she was making rain. It was two years since any had fallen, and as she had the reputation of being a witch of unusual powers and had procured rain in previous droughts, she had been approached by several of the islanders who were anxious for their vineyards. Moreover she had been prepaid for her work—a fact which spoke most eloquently for the general belief in her; for the Greek is slow enough (as doubtless she knew) to pay for what he has got, and never prepays what he is not sure of getting. True, her profession had its risks, she said; for on one occasion, the only time that her spells had failed, some of her disappointed clients whose money she had not returned tried to burn her house over her one night while she slept. But business was business. Did I want some rain too? To ensure her good will and further conversation, I invested a trifle, and tried to catch the mumbled incantations which followed on my behalf. Of these however beyond a frequent invocation of the Virgin (Παναγία μου) and a few words about water and rain I could catch nothing; but I must acknowledge that her charms were effectual, for before we parted the thunder was already rolling in the distance, and the rain which I had bought spoilt largely the rest of my stay in the island. The incantations being finished, she became more confidential. She would not of course let a stranger know the exact formula which she employed; that would mar its efficacy: she vouchsafed to me however with all humility the information that it was not by her own virtue that she caused the rain, but through knowing ‘the god above and the god below’ (τὸν ἄνω θεὸ καὶ τὸν κάτω θεό). The latter indeed had long since given up watering the land; he had caused shakings of the earth and turned even the sea-water red. The god above also had once rained ashes when she asked for water, but generally he gave her rain, sometimes even in summer-time. One thing she could not make out—who was the god that caused the thunder; did I know? I evaded the question, and our theological discussion went no further, for the god of thunder was making his voice heard more threateningly, and the old witch would not stay to make his acquaintance at closer quarters.

The physical interpretation of these references to the god above and the god below is not difficult. At the present day there are said to be three springs, and three only, in the whole island; nor are they of much use to the inhabitants; indeed the only one which I saw was dry save for a scanty moisture barely sufficient to keep the rock about it green and mossy: and in fact the population depends entirely upon rain-water stored up in large underground cisterns or reservoirs. Clearly the god below no longer gives water; but that there may have been more spring-water prior to the great eruptions of 1866 is very probable; for the people still call certain dry old torrent-beds by which the island is intersected ‘rivers’ (ποταμοί), and real rivers with water in them figure also in several of the local folk-stories. The perversity of the god above in sending ashes on one occasion instead of rain may also be understood in reference to the same eruptions, of which the old woman gave me a vivid description.

But the theology itself is more interesting than its material basis. This witch—a good Christian, they told me, but a little mad, with a madness however of which sane vine-growers were eager enough to avail themselves—acknowledged certainly three gods: the unknown thunder-god was clearly distinct from the god of the rain who was known to her: and there was also the god of the waters under the earth, in whose service she had perhaps followed the calling of a water-finder, and to whom she ascribed, as did the ancients to Poseidon, the shaking of the earth.

Polytheism then even in its purely pagan form is not yet extinct in Greece. In the disguise of Christianity, we shall see, it is everywhere triumphant.

Among the Christian objects of worship—for I have already explained that by the common-folk the saints are worshipped as deities—the Trinity and the Virgin occupy the highest places, rivalled perhaps here and there by some local saint of great repute for miracles, but nowhere surpassed. It is the Virgin indeed who, in Pashley’s opinion, ‘is throughout Greece the chief object of the Christian peasant’s worship[81]’; and certainly, I think, more numerous and more various petitions are addressed to her than to any person of the Trinity or to any saint. But the Trinity, or at any rate God (ὁ Θεός) and Christ (ὁ Χριστός), as the peasants say,—for the Holy Ghost is hardly a personality to them and is rarely named except in doxologies and formal invocations—are of almost equal importance, and are so closely allied with the Virgin that it is difficult to draw distinctions.

But while the Church has thus secured the first place for her most venerated figures, the influence of pagan feeling is clearly seen in the popular conception of this ‘God.’ His position is just such as that of Zeus in the old régime. He is little more than the unnamed ruler among many other divinities. His sway is indeed supreme and he exercises a general control; but his functions are in a certain sense limited none the less, and his special province is the weather only. Ζεὺς ὕει, said the ancients, and the moderns re-echo their thought in words of the same import, βρέχει ὁ Θεός, ‘God is raining,’ or ὁ Θεὸς ῥίχνει νερό, ‘God is throwing water[82].’ So too the coming and going of the daylight is described as an act of God; ἔφεξε, or ἐβράδει̯ασε, ὁ Θεός, say the peasants, ‘God has dawned’ or ‘has darkened.’ When it hails, it is God who ‘is plying his sieve,’ ῥεμμονίζει[83] ὁ Θεός. When it thunders, ‘God is shoeing his horse,’ καλιγώνει τ’ ἄλογό του, or, according to another version[84], ‘the hoofs of God’s horse are ringing,’ βροντοῦν τὰ πέταλα ἀπὸ τ’ ἄλογο τοῦ Θεοῦ. Or again the roll of the thunder sometimes suggests quite another idea; ‘God is rolling his wine-casks,’ ὁ Θεὸς κυλάει τ’ ἀσκιά του[85], or τὰ πιθάρι̯α του. And once again, because a Greek wedding cannot be celebrated without a large expenditure of gunpowder, the booming of the thunder suggests to some that ‘God is marrying his son’ or ‘God is marrying his daughters,’ ὁ Θεὸς παντρεύει τὸν ὑγιό του[86], or ταὶς θυγατέραις του[87].

Such expressions as these[88] are in daily use among the Greek peasantry: and nothing could reveal more frankly the purely pagan and anthropomorphic conception of God which everywhere prevails. The God of Christendom is indistinguishable from the Zeus of Homer. A line from a Cretan distich, in which God is described as ἐκεῖνος ἀποῦ συννεφιᾷ κι’ ἀποβροντᾷ καὶ βρέχει[89], ‘He that gathereth the clouds and thundereth and raineth,’ exhibits a popular conception of the chief deity unchanged since Zeus first received the epithets νεφεληγερέτης and ὑψιβρεμέτης, ‘cloud-gatherer,’ ‘thunderer on high.’

But even in the province of the weather God has not undivided control. The winds are often regarded as persons acting at their own will; and of the north wind in particular men speak with respect as Sir Boreas (ὁ κὺρ Βορε̯άς), for as in Pindar’s time he is still ‘king of the winds[90].’ So too the whirlwind is the passing of the Nereids, and the water-spout marks the path of the Lamia of the sea. Even the thunder is not always the work of God, but some say that the prophet Elias is ‘driving his chariot,’ or ‘pursuing the dragon.’ The more striking and irregular phenomena in short are governed by the caprice of lesser deities—Christian saints or pagan powers—while God directs the more orderly march of nature.

When however we turn from the external world to the life of man, we find the functions of the supreme God even more closely circumscribed or—to put it in another way—more generally delegated to others. The daily course of human life with all its pursuits and passions is under the joint control of the saints and some of the old Hellenic deities. Of the latter, as I have said, another chapter must treat: but it should be remembered that the peasant does not draw a hard and fast line of distinction between the two classes with whom for clearness’ sake I am bound to deal separately. Thus Charon in many of the folk-songs which celebrate his doings is made to represent himself as a messenger of God, charged with the duty of carrying off some man’s soul and unable to grant a respite[91]. He is occasionally addressed even as Saint Charon[92]; and his name constantly occurs in the epitaphs of country churchyards. A story too in Bernhard Schmidt’s collection[93] illustrates well the way in which pagan and Christian elements are thus interwoven:—

‘There was once an old man who had been good his whole life through. In his old age therefore he had the fortune to see his good angel (ὁ καλὸς ἄγγελός του); who said to him—for he loved him well—“I will tell thee how thou mayest be fortunate. In such and such a hill is a cave; go thou in there and ever onward till thou comest to a great castle. Knock at the gate, and when it is opened to thee thou wilt see a tall woman before thee, who will straightway welcome thee and ask thee of thine age and business and estate. Answer only that thou art sent by me: then will she know the rest.” Even so did the old man: and the woman within the earth gave unto him a tablecloth and bade him but spread it out and say “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” and lo! everything that he wished would be found thereon. And thus it came to pass.

‘Now when the old man had oft made use of it, it came into his heart to bid the king unto his house: who, when he saw the wonder-working cloth, took it from the old man. But because he was no virtuous man, the cloth did not its task in his hands; wherefore he threw it out of the window and straightway it turned to dust. So the old man went again to the woman in the hill, and she gave him this time a hen that laid a golden egg every day. When the king heard thereof, he had the hen too taken away from the old man. Howbeit in his keeping she laid not, and so he threw the hen also out of window, and she likewise turned to dust. So in his anger he bade seize the old man forthwith and cut off his head.

‘But scarce was this done when there appeared before the king the Mistress of the Earth and of the Sea—for she was the woman in the hill—and when she had told him in brief words what awaited him after this life in requital for his wickedness, she stamped with her foot upon the ground, which swallowed up the castle with the king and all that was therein. But the old man that was slain had entered into Paradise.’

In this story the Mistress of the Earth and of the Sea (ἡ κυρὰ τσῆ γῆς καὶ τσῆ θαλάσσης) is, as we shall see later[94], none other than Demeter: but pagan as she is, she works in accord with the good angel (who is evidently her inferior), and orders the old man to invoke the Trinity.

Thus the peasant does not conceive of any antagonism between his pagan and his Christian objects of worship; and both classes are equally deserving of study by those interested in ancient Greek religion. For while every minutest trait or detail of the modern peasant’s conception of those ancient deities, who, though despoiled of temples and organised worship, still survive, may throw some new ray of light on the divine personalities and the myths of old time, yet a more broad and comprehensive view of the outlines of ancient religion may be obtained by contemplating the worship of Christian saints who, though deficient often in personal significance, nevertheless by their possession of dedicated shrines and of all the apparatus of a formal cult occupy more exactly the position of the old gods and heroes.

The saints then, as I have remarked above, have a large share in the control of man’s daily life. The whole religious sense of the people seems to demand a delegation of the powers of one supreme God to many lesser deities, who, for the very reason perhaps that they are lower in the scale of godhead, are more accessible to man. Under the name of saints lies, hardly concealed, the notion of gods. In mere nomenclature Christianity has had its way; but none of the old tendencies of paganism have been checked. The current of worship has been turned towards many new personalities; but the essence of that worship is the same. The Church would have its saints be merely mediators with the one God; but popular feeling has made of them many gods; their locality and scope of action are defined in exactly the old way; vows are made to the patron-saint of such and such a place; invocations are addressed to him in virtue of a designated power or function.

Local titles are often derived merely from the town or district in which the church stands, as Our Lady of Tenos, or S. Gerasimos of Cephalonia. In other cases they have reference to the surroundings of the sanctuary. The chapel of the Virgin in the monastery of Megaspelaeon consists of a large cave at the foot of some towering cliffs, and the dedication is to our Lady of the Golden Cave (Παναγία χρυσοσπηλαιώτισσα). In this case the word ‘golden’ is an imaginative addition, for the interior is peculiarly dark: but the dedication has been borrowed, owing to the repute of the original shrine, by churches which have not even a cave to show. In Amorgos S. George has the title of Balsamites, derived from the balsam which covers the hill-side on which stands his church. In Paros several curious dedications are mentioned by Bent, which he renders as Our Lady of the Lake, Our Lady of the Unwholesome Place, and S. George of the Gooseberry[95]. In Athens there is a church of which the present dedication is said to be due to a fire which blackened the icon of the Virgin, who is known on this account as Our smoke-blackened Lady (Παναγία καπνικαρέα), or, it may be, Our Lady of the smoky head, according as the second half of the compound is connected with the Turkish word for ‘black’ or the now obsolete Greek word κάρα, ‘head[96].’

Titles denoting functions are equally numerous and quaint. In Rhodes the Archangel Michael is invoked as πατητηριώτης, patron of the wine-press[97]. S. Nicolas, who has supplanted Poseidon, often assumes the simple title of ‘sailor’ (ναύτης). S. John the Hunter (κυνηγός) owns a monastery on Mt Hymettus. In Cimolus there is a church of Our Guiding Lady (Παναγία ὁδηγήτρια)[98]. SS. Costas and Damien, the physicians, are known as the Moneyless (ἀνάργυροι), because their services are given gratis. S. George at Argostóli has been dubbed the Drunkard (μεθυστής)[99]—thus furnishing a notable parallel to the hero celebrated in old time at Munychia as ἀκρατοπότης[100]—because on his day, Nov. 3rd, the new wine is commonly tapped and there is much drinking in his honour.

In other cases the actual name of the saint has determined his powers or character without further epithet. S. Therapon is invoked for all kinds of healing (θεραπεύειν): S. Eleutherios (with an echo possibly of Eilythuia) to give deliverance (ἐλευθερία) to women in childbirth: S. James, in Melos, owing to a phonetic corruption of Ἰάκωβος into Ἄκουφος, to cure deafness[101]. S. Elias, the successor of the sun-god (ἥλιος), has power over drought and rain. S. Andrew (Ἀνδρέας) is implored to make weakly children ‘strong’ (ἀνδρειωμένος). S. Maura, in Athens, requires that no sewing be done on her day under pain of warts (locally known as μαύραις), which if incurred can only be cured by an application of oil from her lamp[102]. S. Tryphon resents any twisting (στρήφω) of thread, as in spinning, on his day; and on the festival of S. Symeon expectant mothers must touch no utensil of daily toil, above all nothing black; for S. Symeon ‘makes marks’ (ὁ Ἄϊ Συμεὼν σημειόνει), and a birth-mark would inevitably appear on the child. If however a woman offend unwittingly, she must lay her hands at once on that part of the body where the birth-mark will be least disfiguring to the child.

These are only a small selection of the saints whom the peasant seeks to propitiate, and it may be noted in passing that among them there are some characters, as among the ancient deities, either immoral as S. George the Drunkard, or unamiable as S. Maura, S. Tryphon, and S. Symeon. But a better idea of the multitude of the popular deities may perhaps be conveyed by giving a list of those worshipped in a single island with the functions there ascribed to them. Here is the catalogue given by a native of Cythnos[103]. The Virgin (Παναγία) is invoked on any and every occasion, and the SS. Anargyri (Costas and Damien) in all cases of illness. S. Panteleëmon is a specialist in eye-diseases, S. Eleutherios in obstetrics, S. Modestes in veterinary work, S. Vlasios in ulcers etc. S. Charalampes and S. Varvara (Βαρβάρα) deliver from pestilences, and S. Elias from drought. The power of protecting children from ailments is ascribed to S. Stylianos, and that of saving sailors from the perils of the sea to S. Nicolas, S. Sostes, and the SS. Akindyni (ἀκίνδυνοι). S. Tryphon deals with noxious insects, S. John the Baptist with ague, S. Menas with loss of goods, S. Paraskeve (Friday) with headache: while S. Aekaterine (Catherine) and S. Athanasios assist anxious mothers to marry off their daughters.

As in the multiplicity of the objects of worship, so too in the mental attitude of the worshipper, there is little change since first were written the words δῶρα θεοὺς πείθει, ‘Gifts win the gods.’ There are certain great occasions, it is true, now as in old days, on which religious feeling attains a higher level, and the mercenary expectation of blessings is forgotten in whole-hearted adoration of the blesser. But in general a spirit of bargaining tempers the peasant’s prayer, and a return is required for services rendered. A sketch of the religious sentiments of the Sphakiotes given by the head of a Cretan monastery is worth reproducing, for it is typical of the whole Greek folk. ‘The faith,’ he writes, ‘of these highlanders in Jesus Christ is sincere in every way, reverent, deep-seated, and unshaken, but unfortunately it is not free from superstitious fancies which mar this otherwise great merit. Many of them are fully persuaded that God, Our Lady, and the Saints go to and fro unseen above their heads, watch each man’s actions, and take part in his quarrels, like the gods of Homer. They are under an obligation to work constant miracles, to vindicate and avenge, to listen readily to each man’s requests and petitions, whether they be just or no. Many of the people go off cattle-lifting or on other wrongful enterprises, and at the same time call upon Our Lady, or any other saints of repute as wonder-workers, to assist them, and as payment for success promise them gifts! To some of the Saints they attribute greater power and grace than to the God who glorified them. In the same way they show greater reverence for this or that church or icon, and bring presents from great distances, in the belief that it has miraculous powers, without understanding that Faith works miracles equally in all places[104].’

Such is the verdict of an educated priest of the Greek Church who deplores the polytheism and idolatry of the common-folk among whom he lives, and who in so doing speaks with the authority of intimate knowledge. Nor can the justice of the verdict be questioned by any one who has entered one of the more highly reputed churches of Greece and observed the votive offerings which adorn or disfigure it. For these offerings are of two qualities just as the motives which inspire them are twofold. There are the genuine thank-offerings, selected for their beauty or worth, which commemorate gratefully some blessing received; of such the treasury of the Church of the Annunciation in Tenos is full—gold and silver plate, bibles and service-books in rich bindings studded with jewels, embroideries of Oriental silk unmatched in skill and splendour. But there is another class, the propitiatory offerings designed to place the offerer in a special way under the protection of the saint. Most characteristic among these are the shreds of infected clothing sent by some sick person to the church of the particular saint whose healing power he invokes. Just as in the province of magic the possession of a strip of a man’s clothing gives to the witch a control over his whole person, so in the religious sphere the dedication of some disease-laden rag from the body of the sufferer places him under the special care of the saint. In the church of ‘S. John of the Column’ at Athens the ancient pillar round which the edifice has been built is always garnished with dirty rags affixed by a daub of candle-grease; and if the saint cures those who send these samples of their fevers, he must certainly kill some of those who visit his sanctuary in person. To this class of offerings belong also the bulk of the silver-foil trinkets which are so cheap that the poorest peasant can afford one for his tribute, and so abundant that at Tenos out of this supply of metal alone have been fashioned the massive silver candelabra which light the whole church. These trinkets are models of any object which the worshipper wishes to commend to the special attention of the saint. At Tenos they most frequently represent parts of the human body, for there the Virgin is above all a goddess of healing; but a vast assortment of models of other objects committed to her care may also be seen—horses and mules, agricultural implements, boats, sheaves of corn to represent the harvest, bunches of grapes in emblem of the vintage; there is no limit to the variety; anything for which a man craves the saint’s blessing is thus symbolically confided to her keeping. Doubtless among them there are a number of thank-offerings for mercies already received; I remember in particular a realistic model of a Greek coasting steamer with a list attached giving the names of the captain and crew who dedicated it in gratitude for deliverance from shipwreck. It may even be that some few of the models of eyes and limbs are thank-offerings for cures effected, and in beauty or worth are all that the peasant’s artistic sense desires or his purse affords. But the majority of them, as I have said, are the gifts of those whose prayers are not yet answered and who thus keep before the eyes of the saint the maladies which crave her healing care.

Other offerings again may be dedicated with either motive. Candles and incense are equally suited to win a favour or to repay one. But whether the motive be propitiation or gratitude, the whole system is a legacy of the pagan world and permeated with the spirit of paganism. Everywhere the Christian disguise of the old religion is easily penetrable; the Church for instance has forbidden the use of graven images, and only in one or two places do statues or even reliefs survive: but the painted icons which are provided in their stead satisfy equally well the common-folk’s instinct for idolatry.

Vows conditional upon the answering of some prayer usually conform outwardly at least to Christian requirements. Scores of the small chapels with which the whole country is dotted have been built in payment of such a vow; and often a boy may be seen dressed in a miniature priest’s costume, because in some illness his mother devoted him to the service of God or of some saint for a number of years if only he should recover. But the idea of bargaining by vows is more pagan than Christian, and sometimes indeed an even clearer echo of ancient thought is heard, as when a girl vows to the Virgin a silver girdle if she will lay her in her lover’s arms[105].

Miracles again are expected of the higher powers in return for man’s services to them; for as the proverb runs, ἅγιος ποῦ δὲν θαυματουργεῖ, δὲν δοξάζεται, ‘it is a sorry saint who works no wonders.’ And wonders are worked as the people expect—some in appearance, some in fact.

A sham miracle is annually worked by the priests of a church near Volo in Thessaly. Within the walls, still easily traced, of the old town of Demetrias on a spur of Mount Pelion stands an unfinished church dedicated to the Virgin. Here on the Friday after Easter there is a concourse from all Thessaly to see the miracle. At the east end of the church, on the outside, a square tank has been sunk ten or twelve feet below the level of the church floor, exposing, on the side formed by the church wall, ancient foundations—perhaps of some temple where the same miracle was worked two thousand years ago. The miracle consists in the filling of this tank with water; but seeing that under the floor of the church itself there are cisterns to which a shaft in each aisle descends, and that the tank outside, sunk, as has been said, to a lower level, undisguisedly derives its water from a hole in the foundations of the church, there is less of the marvellous in the fact that the priests by opening some sluice fill the tank than in the simple faith with which the throng from all parts presses to obtain a cupful of the miraculously fertilizing but withal muddy liquid. The women drink it, the men carry it home to sprinkle a few drops on cornfield or vineyard.

Genuine miracles, at any rate of healing, seem to be well established. After personal investigation and enquiry at the great festival of Tenos I concluded that some faith-cures had actually occurred. Some travellers[106] indeed have been inclined to scoff at these miracles and to write them down mere fabrications of interested priests. But in an official ‘Description of some of the miracles of the wonder-working icon of the Annunciation in Tenos’ the total number claimed down to the year 1898 is only forty-four, that is to say not an average even of one a year; and a large majority of the cases detailed—including twelve cases of mental derangement, eleven of blindness, and ten of paralysis, none of them congenital,—might I suppose come under the category of nervous diseases for which a faith-cure is possible; while several of the remainder, such as the case of a man who at first sight of the icon coughed up a fish bone which had stuck in his throat for two years, do not pass the bounds of belief; and even if the priests do sometimes set false or exaggerated rumours afloat, it must be conceded that the peasant, who has faith enough to believe their stories, has also faith enough, if faith-cures ever occur, to render such a cure possible in his case. Indeed no one who has been to the great centres of miraculous healing can fail to be impressed by the unquailing faith of the pilgrims. Year by year they come in their thousands, bringing the maimed and the halt and the blind, and, more pitiful still, the hopelessly deformed, for whose healing a miracle indeed were needed. Year by year these are laid to sleep in the church or in its precincts on the eve of the festival. Year by year they are carried where the shadow of the icon as it passes in procession may perchance fall on them. Year by year they are sprinkled with water from the holy spring. And year by year most of them depart as they came, maimed and halt and blind and horribly misshapen. Yet faith abides undimmed; hope still blossoms; and they go again and again until they earn another release than that which they crave. The very dead, it is said, have ere now been brought from neighbouring islands, but the icon has not raised them up. There are but few indeed whose faith has made them whole; but for my part I do not doubt that a boy’s sight was restored at Tenos in the year that I was there (1899), or that similar occurrences are well established at such shrines as that of the Virgin at Megaspelaeon, of S. George in Scyros, or of S. Gerasimos in Cephalonia.

Closely bound up with these miraculous cures is the old pagan practice of ἐγκοίμησις, sleeping in the sanctuary of the god whose healing touch is sought. At Tenos the majority of the pilgrims who come for the festival of Lady-day can only afford to stop for the one night which precedes it. The sight then is strange indeed. The whole floor of the church and a great part of the courtyard outside is covered with recumbent worshippers. With them they have brought mattresses and blankets for those of the sick for whom a stone floor is too hard; by their side is piled baggage of all descriptions, cooking utensils, loaves of bread, jars of wine or water, everything in fact necessary for a long night’s watch or slumber. And on this mass of close-packed suffering worshippers the doors of the church are locked from nine in the evening till early next morning. Shortly before the closing-hour I picked my way with difficulty in the dim light over prostrate forms from the south to the north door. The atmosphere was suffocating and reeked with the smoke of wax tapers which all day long the pilgrims had been burning before the icon. Every malady and affliction seemed to be represented; the moaning and coughing never stopped: and I wondered, not whether there would be any miraculous cures, but how many deaths there would be in the six or seven hours of confinement before even the doors were again opened.

But this is the practice at its worst. Where there is more time available, there is nothing insanitary in it. In the list of cures at Tenos, to which I have alluded, there are many cases in which the patient spent not one night only but several months in the church. As a typical case I may take that of a sailor who while keeping look-out on a steamer in the harbour of Patras had some kind of paralytic seizure. He was taken to Tenos and for four months suffered terribly. Then about midday at Easter he had fallen asleep and heard a voice bidding him rise. He woke up and asked those about him who had called him; they said no one; so he slept again. This happened twice. The third time on hearing the voice he opened his eyes and saw entering the church a woman of unspeakable beauty and brilliance, and at the shock he rose to his feet and began to walk; and the same day accompanied the festival procession round the town to the astonishment of all the people.

When I was in Scyros I heard of an equally curious case of a long-deferred cure which had recently taken place and was the talk of the town. For seven consecutive years a man from Euboea had brought his wife, who was mad, to the church of S. George to ‘sleep in’ for forty days. Shortly before I arrived the last of these periods was just drawing to a close, when one night both the man and his wife saw a vision of S. George who came and laid his hand on her head; and in the morning she woke sane. Of her sanity when I saw her—for they were still in the island, paying, I think, some vow which the man had made—I had no doubt; and the evidence of the people of the place who for seven years previously had seen her mad seemed irrefragable.

The instances which I have cited are from the records of churches which have succeeded to the reputation possessed by Epidaurus in antiquity. These owing to the enthusiasm which their fame inspires are probably the scenes of more faith-cures than humbler and less known sanctuaries. But in every church throughout the land the observance of the custom may occasionally be seen; for in the less civilised districts at any rate it is among the commonest remedies for childish ailments for a mother to pass the night with her child in the village church.

We shall notice in later chapters the remnants of other pagan institutions which the Greek Church has harboured—an oracle established in a Christian chapel and served by a priest—a church-festival at which sacrifice is done and omens are read—the survival of ancient ‘mysteries’ in the dramatic celebration of Good Friday and Easter. For the present enough has been said to show that, even within the domain of what is nominally Christian worship, the peasant of to-day in his conception of the higher powers and in his whole attitude towards them remains a polytheist and a pagan. And as in this aspect of religion, so in that other which concerns men’s care for the dead and their conception of the future life, the persistence of pagan beliefs and customs is constantly manifest. The ancient funeral usages are undisturbed; and in the dirges which form part of them the heaven and the hell of Christianity seem almost unknown: ‘the lower world’ (ὁ κάτω κόσμος), over which rules neither God nor the Devil but Charon, is the land to which all men alike are sped.

But there is no need to dilate upon these matters yet. It is clear enough already, I hope, that the fact of Greece being nominally a Christian country should not preclude the hope of finding there instructive survivals of paganism. The Church did not oust her predecessor. By a policy of conciliation and compromise she succeeded indeed in imposing upon Hellenic religion the name of Christianity and the Christian code of morality and all the external appanages of Christian worship: but in the essentials of religion proper she deferred largely to the traditional sentiments of the race. She utilised the sanctuaries which other associations had rendered holy; she permitted or adopted as her own the methods by which men had approached and entreated other gods than hers; she condoned polytheism by appropriating the shrines of gods whom men had been wont to worship to the service of saints whom they inevitably would worship as gods instead; and even so she failed to suppress altogether the ejected deities. The result is that for the peasant Christianity is only a part of a larger scheme of religion. To the outside observer it may appear that there are two distinct departments of popular religion, the one nominally Christian, devoted to the service of God and the Saints, provided with sanctuaries and all the apparatus of worship, served by a regular priesthood, limited by dogma and system; the other concerned with those surviving deities of pre-Christian Greece to whom we must next turn, free in respect of its worship alike from the intervention of persons and the limitations of place, obedient only to a traditional lore which each may interpret by his own feelings and augment by his own experience. But the peasant seems hardly sensible of any such contrast. His Christian and his pagan deities consort amicably together; prayer and vow and offering are made to both, now to avert their wrath, now to cajole them into kindness; the professed prophets of either sort, the priests and the witches, are endowed with kindred powers; everywhere there is overlapping and intertwining. And when the very authorities of the Greek Church have adopted or connived at so much of pagan belief and custom, how should the common-folk distinguish any longer the twin elements in their blended faith? Their Christianity has become homogeneous with their paganism, and it is the religious spirit inherited from their pagan ancestors by which both alike are animated.

CHAPTER II.
THE SURVIVAL OF PAGAN DEITIES.

§ 1. The Range of Modern Polytheism.

Thus far we have considered paganism in its bearing and influence upon modern Greek Christianity. We have seen how the Church, in endeavouring to widen her influence, countenanced many practices and conciliated many prejudices of a people whose temperament needed a multitude of gods and whose piety could pay homage to them all, a people moreover to whom the criterion of divinity was neither moral perfection nor omnipotence. From the ethical standpoint some of the ancient gods were better, some worse than men: in point of power they were superhuman but not almighty. Some indeed claimed that there was no difference in origin between mankind and its deities. ‘One is the race of men’ sang Pindar ‘with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath of life: yet sundered are they by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[107].’ One in origin, they are diverse in might. The test of godhead is power sufficing to defy death. Rightly therefore did Homer make ‘deathless’ and ‘everbeing’ his constant epithets for the gods. Immortality alone is the quality which distinguishes them in kind and not merely in degree from men, and makes them worthy of worship.

A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad—broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.

So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word ‘Christian’ has become a popular synonym for ‘Greek’ in contradistinction not only with ‘Mohammedan,’ but even sometimes with ‘Western’ or ‘Catholic’ or with ‘Protestant,’ and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[108]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.

The origin of the non-Christian deities, even if we were unable to identify any of them with the gods of classical Greece, would be clearly enough proved by some of the general terms under which all of them are included. Those who use these terms indeed no longer appreciate their significance; for all sense of antagonism between the pagan and Christian elements in the popular religion has, as we have seen, long been lost. But the words themselves are a relic of the early days in which the combat of Christianity with the heathen world was still stern. Among the most widespread of these terms is the word ξωτικά[109] (i.e. ἐξωτικά), the ‘extraneous’ powers, clearly an invention of the early Christians. The phrase ‘those that are without’ (οἱ ἔξω or οἱ ἔξωθεν) was used by S. Paul first[110] and afterwards generally by the Fathers of the Church to denote men of all other persuasions. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea employed the adjective ἐξωτικός also in a corresponding sense[111]. This word no doubt became popular, and hence τὰ ἐξωτικά, ‘the extraneous ones,’ became a convenient term by which to denote comprehensively all those old divinities whose worship the Church disallowed but even among her own adherents could not wholly suppress. Another comprehensive term equally significant, if not so commonly used, is τὰ παγανά[112], ‘the pagan ones.’ This is in use in the Ionian islands and some parts of the mainland, but I have not met with it nor found it understood in the Peloponnese or in the islands of the Aegean Sea[113]. In Cephalonia it is chiefly, though not exclusively, applied to a species of supernatural beings usually called callicántzari (καλλικάντζαροι) of whom more anon: the reason of this restriction may be either the fact that these monsters—to judge from the folk-stories of the island—so far outnumber there all other kinds of ‘pagan’ beings that this one species has almost appropriated to itself the generic name, or that in old time, when the word παγανά, ‘pagan,’ was still understood in the sense which we attribute to it, these monsters were deemed specially ‘pagan’ because, as we shall see later, they delight in disturbing a season of Christian gladness. But elsewhere the term, still employed in what must have been its original meaning, comprises all kinds of non-Christian deities; and in earlier times ‘the pagan ones’ was probably as frequent an expression as its synonym ‘the extraneous ones.’ To these may perhaps be added the rare appellation recorded by Schmidt[114], τσίνια: for if the derivation from τζίνα, ‘fraud,’ ‘deceit,’ be right, it will mean ‘the false gods.’

Besides these three names, which indicate the pre-Christian origin of these deities, there are several others—some in universal usage, others local and dialectic,—which represent them in various aspects. As a class of ‘divinities’ they are called δαιμόνια: as ‘apparitions,’ whose precise nature often cannot be further determined, φάσματα or φαντάσματα and, in Crete, σφανταχτά[115]: as swift and ‘sudden’ in their coming and going, ξαφνικά[116]: as ghostly and passing like a vision, εἰδωλικά: as denizens, for the most part, of the air, ἀερικά: and from their similarity to angels, ἀγγελικά.

It may seem strange that the first and the last of these terms, δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά, should be practically interchangeable; for the Church at any rate did her best in early days to make the former understood in the sense of ‘demons’ or ‘devils’ rather than ‘deities.’ But the attempted change of meaning seems to have failed to make much impression on a people who did not view goodness as an essential of godhead; and in later times the Church herself, or many of her less educated clergy at any rate, surrendered to the popular ideas. Father Richard[117], a Jesuit resident during the seventeenth century in the island of Santorini, mentions the case of an old Greek priest who had long made a speciality of exorcism and was prepared to expel angels and demons alike from the bodies of those who were afflicted by them. The priest when questioned by the Jesuit as to what distinction he drew between demons and angels, replied that the demons came from hell, while the angels were ἀερικόν τι, a species of aërial being; but while he maintained a theoretical difference between them, his practice betrayed a belief that both were equally harmful. Exorcism had to be employed in cases of ‘angelic’ as well as of ‘demoniacal’ possession; and Father Richard details the cruelties and tortures inflicted upon a woman suspected of the former in order to make the pernicious angelic spirit within her confess its name. The characters of δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά are in fact the same, and the subtle theological distinctions which might be drawn between them are naturally lost on a people who see them treated even by the priests as equally baneful.

A few other local or dialectic names remain to be noticed. Two of them, στοιχει̯ά and τελώνια, denote properly two several species of supernatural beings—the former being the genii of fixed places[118], and the latter aërial beings chiefly concerned with the passage of men from this world to the next[119]—and are only loosely and locally employed in a more comprehensive sense. The name σμερδάκια, recorded from Philiatrá in Messenia, is apparently a diminutive form from a root meaning ‘terrible[120].’ A Cretan word καντανικά is of less certain etymology, but if, as has been surmised, it has any relation with the verb καντανεύω, ‘to go down to the underworld,’ and hence ‘to fall into a trance,’ (‘entranced’ spirits being thought temporarily to have departed thither,) it may denote either denizens of the lower world or beings who frighten men into a senseless and trance-like state[121]. Next come the two words ζούμπιρα and ζωντόβολα, of which I believe the interpretation is one and the same. Bernhard Schmidt[122], whose work I have constantly consulted in this and later chapters, would derive the former from a middle-Greek word ζόμβρος[123], equivalent to the ancient τραγέλαφος, a fantastic animal of Aristophanic fame; but it was explained to me in Scyros to be a jocose euphemism as applied to supernatural beings and to denote properly parasitic insects. The implied combination of superstitious awe in avoiding the name of supernatural things with a certain broad humour in substituting what is, to the peasant, one of the lesser annoyances of life is certainly characteristic of the Greek folk; and the accuracy of the explanation given to me is confirmed by the fact that in the island of Cythnos the other word, ζωντόβολα, is recorded to bear also the meaning of ‘insects[124].’ The joke, if such it be, must date from a long time back and in its prime must have enjoyed a widespread popularity; for at Aráchova on the slopes of Parnassus, a place far distant from Scyros, the word ζούμπιρα is employed in the sense of supernatural beings by persons who apparently are quite ignorant of its original meaning[125]. To these difficult terms must be added a few euphemisms of a simple nature—τὰ πίζηλα (i.e. ἐπίζηλα) ‘the enviable ones’ in one village of Tenos[126], and in many places such general terms as οἱ καλοί ‘the noble,’—οἱ ἀδερφοί μας ‘our brothers,’—οἱ καλορίζικοι ‘the fortunate ones,’—οἱ χαρούμενοι ‘the joyful ones.’ These evasions of a more direct nomenclature are very frequent, and, since the choice of epithet is practically at the discretion of the speaker, it would be impossible to compile a complete list of them.

How far each of these names may be applied in general to all the classes of pagan gods and demons and monsters whom I am about to describe is a question which I cannot determine. On the one hand many of the names, as we have seen, are purely local, confined to a few villages or districts or islands and unknown and unintelligible elsewhere: and on the other hand some of these supernatural beings themselves are equally local, and my information concerning them has been gathered from widely separated regions of the Greek world. Hence it follows that while the several terms which I have explained are comprehensive in local usage and include all the supernatural beings locally recognised, it is impossible to say whether the users of them would think fit to extend them to the deities of other districts. Probably they would do so; but only for the most widely current terms, δαιμόνια and ἐξωτικά, can I claim with assurance anything like universal application.

The surviving pagan deities fall naturally into two classes. There are the solitary and individual figures such as Demeter, and there is the gregarious and generic class to which belong for example the Nymphs. An exceptional case may occur in which some originally single personality has been multiplied into a whole class. The Lesbian maiden Gello, who, according to a superstition known to Sappho[127], in revenge for her untimely death haunted her old abodes preying upon the babes of women whose motherhood she envied, is no longer one but many; the place of a maiden, whom death carried off ere she had known the love of husband and children, has been taken by withered witch-like beings who none the less bear her name and resemble her in that they light, like Harpies, upon young children and suck out their humours[128]. But in the main the division holds; there are single gods and there are groups of gods. Of the former, in several cases, there is very little to record. Such memory of them as still lingers among the people is confined perhaps to a single folk-story out of the many that have been preserved. In such cases I do not feel entire confidence that the reference is a piece of genuine tradition; in spite of the popular form in which the stories are cast, it is always possible that, owing to the spread of education, some scholastic smatterings of ancient mythology have been introduced by the story-teller. There are certainly plenty of tales to be heard about Alexander the Great which are drawn from literary sources; and it is possible that two stories published by Schmidt which contain apparent reminiscences of Poseidon and of Pan are vitiated, from the point of view of folklore, in the same way. Fortunately the cases in which this reserve must be felt are few and in the nature of things unimportant: for, though proof of genuine tradition would be interesting, yet a single modern allusion is not likely to throw any light on the ancient conception of a deity or his cult. Where on the other hand modern folklore is more abundant—and in the case of the groups of lesser deities above all there is ample store of information—it is possible that study of the popular conceptions of to-day may illumine our understanding of ancient religion.

§ 2. Zeus.

Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα.

To Zeus, the ancient father of gods and men, belongs precedence; but there is in truth little room for him in the modern scheme of popular religion. His functions have been transferred to the Christian God, and his personality merged in that of the Father whom the Church acknowledges. But though he is no longer a deity, the ancient conception of him has imposed narrow limitations upon the character of his successor. We have noted already that the God now recognised exercises the same general control, as did formerly Zeus, over all the changes and chances of this mortal life, but has, again resembling Zeus, for his special province only the regulation of the more monotonous phases of nature and the weather. The more unusual phenomena, and among them sometimes even the thunder, to which S. Elias has pretensions, are delegated to saints or to non-Christian deities; but for the most part the thunder remains the possession of God, as it was always that of Zeus; and its more important concomitant, the lightning, is never, I think, attributed to S. Elias, but is wielded by God alone.

The very name of this weapon which the Christian God has inherited is suggestive of the Olympian régime. Much has been heard lately of the double-headed axe as a religious symbol which seems to have been constantly associated, especially in Crete, with the worship of Zeus. The modern Greek word for what we call the thunderbolt is ἀστροπελέκι (a syncopated form of ἀστραποπελέκι by loss of one of two concurrent syllables beginning with the same consonant), and means literally a ‘lightning-axe.’ The weapon therefore which the supreme God wields is conceived as an axe-shaped missile; and, though in the ancient literature which has come down to us we may nowhere find the word πέλεκυς used of the thunderbolt, there is no reason why the modern word should not be the expression of a conception inherited from antiquity and so furnish a clue to what in itself seems a simple and suitable explanation of the much-canvassed symbol.

Again the divine associations of the thunderbolt now as in the reign of Zeus are attested by the awe in which men and cattle, trees and houses, which have been struck by lightning, are universally held—awe of that primitive kind which does not distinguish between the sacred and the accursed. It is sufficient that particular persons or objects have come into close contact with divine power; that contact sets them apart; they must not do common work or be put to common uses. In old days any place which had been struck was distinguished by the erection of an altar and the performance of sacrifice, but at the same time it was left unoccupied and, save for sacrificial purposes, untrodden[129]; it was both honoured and avoided. In the case of persons however the sense of awe verged on esteem. ‘No one,’ says Artemidorus, ‘who has been struck by lightning is excluded from citizenship; indeed such an one is honoured even as a god[130].’ The same feeling is still exhibited. The peasant makes the sign of the cross as he passes any scorched and blackened tree-trunk; but if a man has the fortune to be struck and not killed, he may indulge a taste for idleness for the rest of his life—his neighbours will support him—and enjoy at the same time the reputation of being something more than human.

But in spite of the reverent awe which the victim of the lightning excites, the thunderbolt is often viewed now, as in old time, as the instrument of divine vengeance. The people of Aráchova, when they see a flash, explain the occurrence in the phrase κάποιον διάβολον ἔκαψε, ‘He has burnt up some devil,’ and the implied subject of the verb, as in most phrases describing the weather, is undoubtedly God[131]. The same idea, in yet more frankly pagan garb, is well exhibited in a story from Zacynthos[132], which is nothing but the old myth of the war of the Titans against Zeus with the names of the actors omitted. The gist of it is as follows.

The giants once rebelled against God. First they climbed a mountain and hurled rocks at him; but he grasped his thunderbolts (τσακώνει τὰ ἀστροπελέκι̯α του) and threw them at the giants, and they all fell down from the mountain and many were killed. Then one whose courage was still unshaken tied reeds together and tried to reach to heaven with them (for what purpose, does not appear in the story; but folk-tales are often somewhat inconsequent, and this vague incident is probably an imperfect reminiscence of the legend of Prometheus); but the lightning burnt him to ashes. Then his remaining companions made a last assault, but the lightning again slew many of them, and the rest were condemned to live all their life long shut in beneath a mountain.

This story is one of those which in themselves might be suspected of scholastic origin or influence; but it so happens that practically the same story has been recorded from Chios also, with the slight addition that there the leader of the giants’ assault has usurped the name of Samson. Such corroboration from the other end of the Greek world goes far to establish the genuine nature of the tradition.

Thus though Zeus has been generally superseded by the Christian God, his character and mythic attributes have left a strong and indelible mark upon the religion of to-day. The present conception of God is practically identical with the ancient conception of the deity who was indeed one among many gods and yet in thought and often also in speech the god par excellence. Christianity has effected little here beyond the suppression of the personal name Zeus.

All this, no doubt, illustrates the fusion of paganism with Christianity rather than the independent co-existence of deities of the separate systems. But there are two small facts in virtue of which I have given to Zeus a place among the pagan deities whose distinct personality is not yet wholly sunk in oblivion. The men of Aráchova, as we have noticed above, still swear by the ‘god of Crete,’ who can be no other than Zeus; and in Crete itself there was recently, and may still be, in use the invocation ἠκοῦτε μου Ζῶνε θεέ, ‘Hearken to me, O god Zeus[133].’ Such expressions, though their original force is no longer known by those who use them, are none the less indications that perhaps not many generations ago Zeus was still locally recognised and reverenced as a deity distinct from the Christian God, to whom indeed everywhere he can only gradually have ceded his position and his attributes.

§ 3. Poseidon.

For the survival of any god of the sea in the imagination of the Greek people I cannot personally vouch. Though I have been among the seafaring population in many parts, I have never heard mention of other than female deities. That which I here set down rests entirely on the authority of Bernhard Schmidt.

In his collection of folk-stories there is one from Zacynthos, entitled ‘Captain Thirteen,’ which runs as follows[134]:—A king who was the strongest man of his time made war on a neighbour. His strength lay in three hairs on his breast. He was on the point of crushing his foes when his wife was bribed to cut off the hairs, and he with thirteen companions was taken prisoner. But the hairs began to grow again, and so his enemies threw him and his companions into a pit. The others were killed by the fall, but he being thrown in last, fell upon them and was unhurt. Over the pit his enemies then raised a mound. He found however in the pit a dead bird, and having fastened its wings to his hands flew up and carried away mound and all with him. Then he soared high in the air until a storm of rain washed away the clay that held the feathers to his hands, and he fell into the sea. ‘Then from out the sea came the god thereof (ὁ δαίμονας τῆς θάλασσας) and struck him with a three-pronged fork (μία πειροῦνα μὲ τρία διχάλια)’ and changed him into a dolphin until such time as he should find a maiden ready to be his wife. The dolphin after some time saved a ship-wrecked king and his daughter, and the princess by way of reward took him for her husband and the spell was broken.

Other characteristics of this trident-bearing sea-god are, according to the same authority[135], that he is in form half human and half fish; that his wealth, consisting of all treasures lost in the sea, is so great that he sleeps on a couch of gold; and that he rides upon dolphins. Thus Poseidon, it appears, (or it may be Nereus,) has survived locally in the remembrance of the Greek people as a deity unconnected with Christianity. Far more generally however his functions have been transferred to S. Nicolas, whose aid is invariably invoked by seamen in time of peril, and who has acquired the byname of ‘sailor’ (ναύτης)[136].

The allusion to the sea-god and his trident in the story which I have repeated must, I think, be accepted with some reserve as being possibly a scholastic interpolation. I cannot find confirmation of it in any other folk-story, and moreover the latter part of the tale is familiar to me in another form. The hero is usually a young prince who goes out to seek adventures in the world, not a king who has already a wife at home; and his transformation into a dolphin is effected by some malicious witch into whose toils he falls. But while for these reasons I do not put the story forward as certain evidence of the survival of Poseidon in the popular memory, I have recounted it at some length because it is an excellent type of current folk-tales, and from a study of it, if we may now leave Poseidon and make a brief digression, we may appreciate the relation existing between such stories and the myths of antiquity.

The king who was the strongest man of his time has a classical prototype in the Messenian leader Aristomenes. He too was thrown with his comrades into a pit by his enemies, the Spartans, and alone escaped death from the fall, being borne up on the wings of eagles. Again, the idea of a man’s strength residing in a certain hair or hairs is well known in ancient mythology; and although it is by no means peculiar to the Greeks, but is common to many peoples of the world, we may fairly suppose that the modern Greek has not borrowed it from outside, but has inherited it from those ancestors among whose myths was the story of Scylla and Nisus. Lastly, in the incident of the hero fastening wings to his arms with clay and his subsequent fall into the sea there are all the essentials of the legend of Icarus.

Here then combined in one modern folk-story we find the motifs of three separate ancient myths. And from it and others of like nature—for in the collection from which I have borrowed it there are several stories in which such figures as Midas, the Sphinx, and the Cyclopes are easily recognised—an inference may be drawn as to the real relation of ancient mythology to modern folk-stories. Certain themes must have existed from time immemorial, and these have been worked up into tales by successive generations of raconteurs with ever-varying settings. Fresh combinations of motifs have been and are still being tried; fresh embroidery of detail may be added by each artist; only the theme in its plainest form, the mere groundwork of story, remains immutable. This at the same time explains the wide variations of the same myth even among the ancients themselves, and warns us not to judge of the value of a modern folk-story or folk-song by the closeness of its resemblance to any ancient myth which may have been preserved to us in literature. It was naturally the most finished and artistic presentment of the story which appealed to the taste of educated men and thus became the orthodox classical version; but there is every likelihood that before the story reached the stage of acknowledged perfection much that was primitive had been suppressed as inartistic, and much that was not traditional had been added by the poet’s imagination. The unlettered story-teller, endowed with less fancy and ignorant of the conventions of art, is a far trustier vehicle of pure tradition; for though he feels himself at liberty to compose variations of the original theme, he certainly has less power and generally less inclination to do so; for it is on exactness of memory and even verbal fidelity to the traditional form of the story that the modern story-teller chiefly prides himself. Hence the modern folk-story, straight from the peasant’s lips in a form almost verbally identical with that in which successive generations of peasants before him narrated it, may contain more genuinely primitive material than a literary version of it which dates from perhaps two thousand years or more ago.

§ 4. Pan.

A story, again from the same collection[137], runs in brief as follows:—Once upon a time a priest had a good son who tended goats. One day ‘Panos’ gave him a kid with a skin of gold. He at once offered it as a burnt-offering to God, and in answer an angel promised him whatsoever he should ask. He chose a magic pipe which should make all hearers dance. So no enemy could come near to touch him. The king however sent for him, and the goatherd, after making the envoys dance more than once, voluntarily let himself be taken. The king then threw him into prison, but he had his flute still with him, and when he played even houses and rocks danced, and fell and crushed all save him and his. ‘The whole business,’ concludes the story, ‘was arranged by Panos to cleanse the world somewhat of evil men.’

Here the pastoral scene and the gift of the magic pipe (not by Panos himself, it is true, but indirectly thanks to him) suggest a genuine remembrance of Pan. It was from him that ‘bonus Daphnis’ learnt the art of music. The form which the name has assumed is the chief difficulty. The modern nominative, if formed in the same way as in other words of the same declension, would naturally be Panas (Πάνας), and the unusual termination arouses some suspicion that the narrator of the story had heard of Pan from some literary source and, as often happens in such cases, had got the name a little wrong. But if the tale be a piece of genuine tradition, the conclusion of it is remarkable. The moral purpose ascribed to the deity seems to indicate a loftier conception of him than that which is commonly found in ancient art and literature. But the popular tradition embodied in the legend is not therefore necessarily at fault; indeed it may be more true to the conception of Pan which prevailed among the common-folk in old days than were the portraits drawn and handed down by the more educated of their contemporaries. The patron-god of Arcadian shepherd-life would naturally have seemed a rude being to the cultured Athenians of the fifth century, who but for his miraculous intervention in the battle of Marathon would never have honoured him with a temple. But among his original worshippers it may well be that, besides presiding over the increase of their flocks, as did Demeter over the increase of their fields, he was deemed to resemble her also in the possession of more exalted attributes, so that there was cause indeed for lamentation over that strange message ‘Great Pan is dead[138].’

But perchance Pan is not dead yet, or if dead not forgotten. And as this solitary modern story, if it be genuine, testifies to a longlived remembrance of his better qualities, so in the demonology of the middle ages a sterner aspect of his ancient character still secured to him men’s awe. Theocritus[139] gave voice to a well-known superstition when he made the goat-herd say: ‘Nay, shepherd, it may not be; in the noontide we may not pipe; ’tis Pan that we fear’; for in his rage if roused from his midday slumber he was believed to strike the intruder with ‘panic’ terror: and it was this superstition which influenced the translators of the Septuagint when they rendered the phrase, which in our Bible version of the Psalms[140] appears as ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday,’ by the words σύμπτωμα καὶ δαιμόνιον μεσημβρινόν. By the latter half of this phrase the memory of Pan was undoubtedly perpetuated; for in certain forms of prayer quoted by Leo Allatius[141] in the seventeenth century, among the perils from which divine deliverance is sought is mentioned more than once this ‘midday demon’; and a corresponding ‘daemon meridianus[142]’ found a place of equal dignity among the ghostly enemies of Roman Catholics.

Perhaps even yet in the pastoral uplands of Greece some traveller will hear news of Pan.

§ 5. Demeter and Persephone.

Of few ancient deities has popular memory been more tenacious than of Demeter; but in different districts the reminiscences take very different forms. There are many traces of her name and cult, and of the legends concerning both her and her daughter; but in one place they have been Christianised, in another they have remained pagan.

In so far as she has affected the traditions of the Church, a male deity, S. Demetrius, has in general superseded her. Under the title of στερεανός, ‘belonging to the dry land,’ he has in most districts taken over the patronage of agriculture; while his inherited interest in marriage receives testimony from the number of weddings celebrated, especially in the agricultural districts, on his day. But at Eleusis, the old home of Demeter’s most sacred rites, the people, it seems, would not brook the substitution of a male saint for their goddess, and yielded to ecclesiastical influence only so far as to create for themselves a saint Demetra (ἡ ἁγία Δήμητρα) entirely unknown elsewhere and never canonised. Further, in open defiance of an iconoclastic Church, they retained an old statue of Demeter, and merely prefixing the title ‘saint’ to the name of their cherished goddess, continued to worship her as before. The statue was regularly crowned with garlands of flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests, and without doubt prayer was made before it as now before the pictures of canonical saints. This state of things continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1801, two Englishmen, named Clarke and Cripps, armed by the Turkish authorities with a license to plunder, perpetrated an act unenviably like that of Verres at Enna, and in spite of a riot among the peasants of Eleusis removed by force the venerable marble; and that which was the visible form of the great goddess on whose presence and goodwill had depended from immemorial ages the fertility of the Thriasian plain is now a little-regarded object catalogued as ‘No. XIV, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, (much mutilated)[143].’

Saint Demetra however, though lost to sight, was yet dear to the memory of the village-folk; and in spite of the devastation of old beliefs and legends which the much-vaunted progress and education of Greece have committed in the more civilised districts without conferring any sensible compensation, the antiquarian Lenormant found in 1860 an old Albanian[144] priest who when once reassured that no ridicule was intended, recited to him the following remarkable legend[145]: ‘S. Demetra was an old woman of Athens, kind and good, who devoted all her little means to feeding the poor. She had a daughter who was beautiful past all imagining; since “lady Aphrodite” (κυρὰ ’φροδίτη) none had been seen so lovely. A Turkish lord of the neighbourhood of Souli, who was a wicked man and versed in magic, saw her one day combing her hair, which was of golden hue and reached to the very ground, and became passionately enamoured of her. He bided his time, and having found his chance of speaking with her tried to seduce her. But she being as prudent as she was beautiful, repulsed all the miscreant’s advances. Thereupon he resolved to carry her off and put her in his harem. One Christmas night, while Demetra was at church, the Turk (ὁ ἀγᾶς) forced the door of her house, seized the girl who was at home alone, carried her off in spite of her cries of distress, and holding her in his arms leapt upon his horse. The horse was a wonderful one; it was black in colour; from its nostrils it breathed out flames, and in one bound could pass from the East unto the West. In an instant it had carried ravisher and victim right to the mountains of Epirus.

When the aged Demetra came back from church, she found her house broken into and her daughter gone; great was her despair. She asked her neighbours if they knew what had become of her daughter; but they dared not tell her aught, for they feared the Turks and their vengeance. She turned her enquiries to the tree that grew before her house; but the tree could tell her nothing. She asked the sun, but the sun could give her no help; she asked the moon and the stars, but from them too she learnt nothing. Finally the stork that nested on the house-top said to her: “Long time now we have lived side by side; thou art as old as I. Listen; thou hast always been good to me, thou hast never disturbed my nest, and once thou didst help me to drive away the bird of prey that would have carried off my nestlings. In recompense I will tell thee what I know of the fate of thy daughter; she was carried off by a Turk mounted on a black horse, who took her towards the West. Come, I will set out with thee and we will search for her together.”

Accompanied by the stork, Demetra started; the time was winter; it was cold, and snow covered the mountains. The poor old woman was frozen and could hardly walk; she kept asking of all those whom she met, whether they had seen her daughter, but they laughed at her or did not answer; doors were shut in her face and entrance denied her, for men love not misery; and she went weeping and lamenting. In this manner however she dragged her limbs as far as Lepsína (the modern form of the name Eleusis); but, arriving there, she succumbed to cold and weariness and threw herself down by the roadside. There she would have died, but that by good luck there passed by the wife of the khodja-bachi (or head man of the village), who had been to look after her flocks and was returning. Marigo—such was her name—took pity on the old woman, helped her to rise and brought her to her husband, who was named Nicolas[146]. The khodja-bachi was as kind as his wife; both welcomed as best they could the poor sorrow-stricken woman, tended her and sought to console her. To reward them S. Demetra blessed their fields and gave them fertility.

Nicolas, the khodja-bachi, had a son handsome, strong, brave, and practised, in a word the finest pallikar of all the country side. Seeing that Demetra was in no condition to continue her journey, he offered to set to work to recover her daughter, asking only her hand in recompense. The offer was accepted, and he set out accompanied by the faithful stork who would not abandon the undertaking.

The young man walked for many days without finding anything. At last one night, when he was in a forest right among the mountains, he caught sight of a great bright light at some distance. Towards this he hastily bent his steps, but the point from which the light came was much further off than he had at first imagined; the darkness had deceived him. Eventually however he arrived there, and to his great astonishment found forty dragons lying on the ground and watching an enormous cauldron that was boiling on the fire. Undismayed by the sight, he lifted the cauldron with one hand, lit a torch, and replaced the vessel on the fire. Astounded by such a display of strength, the dragons crowded round him and said to him, “You who can lift with one hand a cauldron which we by our united efforts can scarcely carry, you alone are capable of carrying off a maiden whom we have long been trying to lay our hands on, and whom we cannot seize because of the height of the tower wherein a magician keeps her shut up.” The son of the khodja-bachi of Lepsína perceived the impossibility of escape from these monsters. Accompanied by the forty dragons, he approached the tower, and after having examined it, he asked for some large nails, which he took and drove into the wall, so as to form a kind of ladder, and which he kept pulling out again as he ascended to prevent the dragons from following him. Having arrived at the top and with some difficulty entered at a small window there, he invited the dragons to ascend as he had done, one by one, which they did, thus giving him time to kill each as it arrived while the next was climbing up, and to throw it over the other side of the tower, where there were a large court, a splendid garden, and a fine castle. Thus rid of his dangerous guardians, he went down into the interior of the tower and found there S. Demetra’s daughter, whose beauty at once inspired him with the most ardent love.

He was kneeling at her feet when suddenly the magician appeared, and in a fury of anger threw himself upon the young man, who met him bravely. The former was of superhuman strength, but Nicolas’ son was not inferior to him. The magician had the power to transform himself into any thing he might choose; he changed successively into a lion, into a serpent, into a bird of prey, into fire—hoping under some one of these forms to wear his adversary out; but nothing could shake the courage of the young man. For three days the combat continued. The first day the magician seemed beaten, but the next he regained his advantage; at the end of the day’s struggle he killed his young opponent, and cut his body into four quarters, which he hung on the four sides of the tower. Then elated by his victory, he did violence to Demetra’s daughter, whose chastity he had hitherto respected. But in the night the stork flew away to a great distance to fetch a magic herb which it knew, brought it back in its beak, and rubbed with it the young man’s lips. At once the pieces of his body came together again and he revived. Great was his despair when he learnt what had taken place after his defeat; but he only threw himself upon the magician with the greater fury the third day, to punish him for his crime.

Once again the young man, it seemed, was on the point of being vanquished, when suddenly he conceived the happy idea of invoking the Panagia, vowing that if victorious he would become a monk at the monastery of Phaneroméne[147]. The divine protection which he had invoked gave him strength and he succeeded in throwing his adversary: the stork, who had aided him so much, at once attacked the fallen magician and picked out his eyes; then with its beak pulled out a white hair noticeable among the black curls that covered his head. On this hair depended the life of the Turkish magician, who immediately expired.

His conqueror, taking with him the girl, brought her back to Lepsína, just at the season when spring was coming and the flowers were beginning to appear in the fields. Then he went, as he had vowed, and shut himself up in the monastery. S. Demetra, having received back her daughter, went away with her. What became of them afterwards, no one knows; but since that time the fields of Lepsína, thanks to the blessing of the Saint, have not ceased to be fertile.’

It would be superfluous to point out the numerous details of this legend which accord explicitly with the account of the rape of Persephone in the Homeric hymn. The interspersion of Christian ideas and reminiscences of Turkish domination and stories of fabulous monsters may strike oddly on the ear unacquainted with the vagaries of Greek folk-stories. Yet the most sceptical could not doubt that the tradition which forms the groundwork of the legend is none other than the old myth, or that the four chief actors in the drama are none other than Demeter and Core, Pluto and Triptolemus. Pluto, masked as a Turkish agha, is perhaps the least readily recognisable; yet in one way as a relic of ancient tradition the part he plays is the most remarkable in the whole legend. It is to Souli in Epirus that he carries off the maiden. Now this is the district of the ancient Cocytus and Acheron; here was one of the descents to the lower world; here Aidoneus held sway; and here, in one version of the myth[148], was laid the scene of the rape of Persephone by that god. Hence the claims of two separate localities to the same mythological distinction seem by some means to have become incorporated in the single modern legend.

In the same part of Epirus, according to Lenormant, a similar story to that which he heard at Eleusis concerning S. Demetra’s daughter, is told, mutatis mutandis, of S. Demetrius: but since either a sense of propriety or a want of knowledge prevented him from publishing the details of it, the mere statement that it existed is of no great value. But the legend which he narrates in full may I think be accepted as genuine without corroboration on the grounds of its own structure. Lenormant has indeed been accused of mala fides in his own department of archaeology and of tampering with some of the inscriptions which he published; but even if this charge could be substantiated, I should doubt whether he had either the inclination to invent a legend which he only mentions in a cumbrous foot-note, or the ability to fuse ancient and modern ideas into so good an imitation of the genuine folk-story. In my judgement the construction of the legend is practically proof of its genuinely popular origin.

Thus Eleusis and, in a lesser degree, the many places where S. Demetrius has succeeded to the chief functions of Demeter have hardly yet lost touch with the ancient worship of the goddess, Christianised in form though it may be. But Arcadia too, where alone of all the Peloponnese the indigenous population were secure from the Achaean and Dorian immigrations and maintained in seclusion the holiest of Pelasgian cults, preserves to the present day in story and in custom some vestiges of the old religion; and here they are less tinged with Christian colour.

Near the city of Pheneos, which according to Pausanias[149] was the scene of mysteries similar to those enacted at Eleusis, there are some underground channels by which the waters of Lake Pheneos are carried off, soon to reappear as the river Ladon. These channels were believed by Pausanias himself to be artificial—the work of Heracles, it was said, who also constructed a canal close by, traces of which are still visible: but according to another authority[150] they were the passage by which Pluto carried off Persephone to the infernal regions. Some memory of the latter belief seems still to linger among the people of Phoniá (the modern form of Pheneós), who call these subterranean vents ἡ τρούπαις τοῦ διαβόλου, ‘the holes of the devil,’ and who further believe that it is through them that the spirits of the dead pass to the lower world. My guide informed me also that the rise or fall of the waters of the lake—the level varies to an extraordinary degree—furnishes an augury as to what rate of mortality may be expected in the village. If the water is high, the lower world is for the time being congested and requires no more inhabitants; if it sinks, the lower world is empty, and thirsts for fresh victims. The connexion of such beliefs with the cult of Persephone, though vague, is probably real; but how general they may be among the present villagers I cannot say; Dodwell[151] apparently heard nothing of them except the name of ‘the devil’s holes,’ and the explanation of this name which was given to him took the form of a story about a conflict between the devil and a king of Phoniá, in which the former hurled explosive balls of grease at his adversary, one of which set him on fire and drove his body right through the base of the mountain which rises from the lake’s edge, leaving thereafter an escape for the waters. There is certainly nothing in common between this story, which Leake also heard in a slightly different version[152], and the beliefs communicated to me; and I suspect that it is a comparatively modern aetiological fable designed perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of children concerning the name. The belief that the subterranean channel is a descent to the lower world is more clearly a vestige of the old local cult of Kore.

Again in the neighbourhood of Phigalia there is current among the peasantry a curious story which I tried in vain to hear recited in full, but only obtained in outline at second-hand. I cannot consequently vouch for its accuracy, but such as it is I give it. There once were a brother and sister, of whom the former was very wicked and a magician, while the latter was very virtuous and beautiful. Her beauty was indeed so wonderful, that her brother became enamoured of her. In her distress she fled to a cave near Phigalia, hoping to elude his pursuit; but the magician straightway discovered her. Then being at her wits’ end how to save herself from the unholy passion which her beauty inspired, she prayed to be turned into some beast. Her prayer was straightway granted, but the wicked magician had power to change himself likewise. So when they had both been changed into several shapes he at length overcame her. But no sooner was the infamous deed done, than the Panagia caused an earthquake, and the roof of the cave fell and destroyed both brother and sister together.

A story of incest necessarily ends at the present day among the highly moral countryfolk of Greece with punishment inflicted by some Christian deity: but for the rest the story is practically the same as that which Pausanias heard concerning Poseidon and his sister Demeter in the same district[153]. In the old version, which Pausanias gives very briefly, there is only one transformation mentioned, that of Demeter into a mare and of Poseidon into a horse; but it is at least noteworthy that the statue of horse-headed Demeter which commemorated this incident is said to have had ‘figures of snakes and other wild animals’ fixed on its head; and possibly, if Pausanias had given a fuller version of the myth, we should find that these figures related to other transformations which Demeter had tried in vain before in equine form she was finally forced to yield. The mention of the cave in the modern story is also significant; for though the cave in the ancient version is not the scene of the rape, it was there that Demeter hid herself in her anger afterwards and there too that the statue of horse-headed Demeter was set up. It would be interesting to know whether the horse is one of the forms assumed in the modern story; perhaps some other traveller will be fortunate enough to hear the tale in full.

In northern Arcadia I also learnt that the flesh of the pig, in respect of which the ordinary Graeculus fully deserves the epithet esuriens, is taboo; and the result of eating it is believed to be leprosy. It might be supposed that this superstition has resulted from contact with Mohammedans; but such an explanation would not account for the confinement of it to one locality—and that a mountainous and unprofitable district where intercourse with the Turks must have been small; and further the Greek would surely have found a malicious pleasure, the most piquant of sauces, in eating that which offended the two peoples whom he most abhors, Turks and Jews. On the other hand, if we suppose this fear of swine’s flesh to be a piece of native tradition, its origin may well be sought in the ritual observances of the old cult of Demeter and her daughter, to whom the pig was sacred and in whose honour it was sacrificed once only in each year, at the festival of the Thesmophoria[154]. There are many instances among different peoples of the belief that skin diseases, especially leprosy, are the punishment visited upon those who eat of the sacred or unclean animal; for the distinction between sacred and unclean is not made until a primitive sense of awe is inclined by conscious reasoning in the direction either of reverence or of abhorrence[155]. Thus in Egypt, the land from which the Pelasgians, if Herodotus[156] might be believed, derived the worship of Demeter, it was held that the drinker of pig’s milk incurred leprosy[157]; and we may reasonably suppose that the same punishment threatened those Egyptians who tasted of pig’s flesh save at their one annual festival when this was enjoined[158]. Now the Thesmophoria resembled this Egyptian festival in that it was an annual occasion for sacrificing pigs and for partaking therefore of their flesh; if then the worshippers of Demeter, like the Egyptians, were forbidden to use the pig for food at other times, and if the penalty for disobedience in Greece too was believed to be leprosy, the present case of taboo in Arcadia—the only one known to me in modern Greece—may be a survival from the ancient cult.

But apart from these traces of the worship of Demeter and Kore in Christian worship, in folk-story, and in custom, traces which constitute in themselves cogent proof of the firm hold on the popular mind which the goddesses twain must long have kept, there exists in the belief of the Greek peasantry a personal Power, a living non-Christian deity, who still inspires awe in many simple hearts and who may reasonably be identified with one or rather perhaps with both of them.

For it must not be forgotten that the mother and the daughter were in origin and symbolism one. The idea of life’s ebb and flow, of nature’s sleeping and waking, is expressed in them severally as well as conjointly. It would be impossible to analyse the complete myth and, even if a purely physical interpretation were sought, to express in physiological terms the two persons and the parts which they play: for certain ideas find duplicate expression. Either Demeter’s retirement to some dark cave or the descent of Persephone to the underworld might have represented alone and unaided the temporary abeyance of earth’s productive powers. Yet it was with good reason that the myth expanded as it were spontaneously until the spirit of life, that pervades not only the cornfield but all that is animal and human too, was pourtrayed in double form; not because the mere physical fact of the decay and the revival of vegetation needed larger symbolism for its due expression, but because in the tie of mother and daughter and all that it connotes was fitly represented that by which the life-spirit works among the higher orders of created things, that which goes before life’s manifestations and outlasts its vanishings, the spirit of love.

Of all such ideas as these the modern peasant, needless to say, is wholly innocent. He has learnt from his ancestors of a woman beautiful, reverend, deathless, who dwells within a mountain of his land, and who by her dealings with mankind has proved her real and divine puissance. Her name is no more uttered, perchance because it is too holy for men of impure lips; they speak only of ‘the Mistress.’ She is a real person, not the personification of any natural force. The tiller of the land foresees his yearly gain from cornfield and vineyard; the shepherd on the mountain-side expects the yearly increase of his flock; but by neither is any principle inferred therefrom, much less is such a principle personified; the blessing which rests on field and fold is the work of a living goddess’ hands. Flesh and blood she is, even as they themselves, but immortal and very mighty, nobler than many of whom the priests preach, stronger to help the good and to punish the wicked. Simple people they are, who still believe such things, and ignorant; yet less truly ignorant than some half-educated pedants of the towns who vaunt their learning in chattering of ‘Ceres’ rather than of ‘Demeter’ and, misled by Roman versifiers who at least had an excuse in the exigencies of metre, misinterpret the name as a mere synonym for corn. Happily however the influence of the schools—for it is amongst the schoolmasters that the worst offenders in this respect are to be found—is not yet all-reaching, and in the remoter villages tradition is still untainted. There without fear of ridicule men may still confess their faith in the great compassionate goddess.

It was in Aetolia that I first recognised the popular belief in this deity. There I heard tell of one who was called ἡ κυρὰ τοῦ κόσμου, ‘the mistress of the world.’ Her dwelling was in the heart of a mountain, the means of access to it a cave, but where situated, the peasants either did not know or feared to tell. Her character indeed was ever gracious and kindly, but it may be they thought she would resent a foreigner’s approach. In her power was the granting of many boons, but her special care was the fertility of the flocks and the abundance of the crops, including in that district tobacco.

This revelation convinced me of the accuracy of what I had previously suspected only in North Arcadia and in Messenia. In both those regions I had heard occasional mention among the peasants of one whose title was simply ἡ δέσποινα, ‘the Mistress.’ The word had always struck me as curious, for in ordinary usage it is obsolete and the mistress of a house or whatever it may be is always ἡ κυρά (i.e. κυρία). Knowing however that the Church had preserved the title ἡ δέσποινα among those under which the Virgin may be invoked, I was disposed at first to think that the dedication of some church in the neighbourhood had influenced the people to use the rare name ἡ δέσποινα instead of the ordinary ‘Panagia.’ But when I enquired where the church of ‘the Mistress’ was, the answer was ‘she has none’: and yet, on making subsequent enquiries of other persons, I found that there was a church of the Panagia close by. Clearly then it was not in the ecclesiastical sense that the title ἡ δέσποινα was being used. More than this I failed to elicit—the peasants of the Peloponnese are on the whole more suspicious and secretive than those of northern Greece—but I have little doubt that this goddess is the same as she who in Aetolia bears a title more colloquial in form but identical in meaning.

The existence of this deity among the survivals of the old religion has never, I think, been observed by any writer on the subject of Greek folk-lore. But in Bernhard Schmidt’s collection of popular stories and songs there is evidence, whose value he himself did not recognise, to corroborate it. One of the songs[159] from Zacynthos contains the lines:

Ἔκαμ’ ὁ Θεὸς κι’ ἡ Παναγι̯ὰ κι’ ἡ Δέσποινα τοῦ κόσμου,

καὶ ἐπολέμησα με Τούρκους, μ’ Ἀρβανίταις·

χίλιους ἔκοψα, χίλιους καὶ δυ̯ὸ χιλιάδες.

‘They wrought in me, even God and the Virgin and the Mistress of the world, and I fought with Turks and with Albanians: a thousand I slew, a thousand yea and two thousand.’

The editor of this song omits from his translation and does not even mention in his notes the last phrase of the first line, assuming, I suppose, that the Virgin is mentioned twice over under two different titles; but it is at least possible that three persons are intended. God and the Virgin belong to the category of Christian deities; the third may be the pagan goddess already discovered in Messenia, Arcadia, and Aetolia; if so, the collocation of her name along with those of the highest Christian powers is strong testimony to the reverence with which the people of Zacynthos too were wont, and perhaps still continue, to regard her.

In Schmidt’s stories again yet another variation of the title occurs. In one, which has already been narrated in full[160], ‘the Mistress of the earth and of the sea’ (ἡ κυρὰ τσῆ γῆς και τσῆ θάλασσας) rewards a poor man, on the recommendation of his good angel, with miraculous gifts, and when he is slain by an envious king, herself appears and sends down the tyrant quick into the pit where punishment for his wickedness awaits him. Another, in which the same ample appellation is used, runs in brief as follows[161]:

‘Once upon a time a king on his return from a journey gave to his eldest son as a present a picture of “the Mistress of the earth and of the sea.” The prince was so dazzled by her beauty that he resolved to seek her out and make her his wife. He accordingly consulted a witch who told him how to find the palace where the Mistress of earth and sea lived, and warned him also that before he could secure the fulfilment of his desire two tasks would be set him, the first to shatter a small phial carried by a dove in its beak without injuring the bird, the second to obtain the skin of a three-headed dragon. She also provided him with a magic bow wherewith to perform the first labour, and with two hairs from the dragon’s head, by means of which he would be magically guided to the monster’s lair. Arrived there he should glut it with a meal of earth which he was to carry with him, and then slay it as it slept.

Thus forewarned and forearmed the prince set out and passing through a cave, of which the witch had told him, came to the palace. The Mistress having enquired of him his errand at once set him to perform the two tasks. These he accomplished, and she returned with him as his wife to his own land. But they did not live peaceably together, and one day the Mistress of earth and sea in her anger bade the waters overflow the whole land, so that all mankind was drowned while she herself hovered above in the air and looked on. Then when the waters subsided, she descended to the earth and made new men by sowing stones; and thereafter she ruled again as before over the whole world.’

Both these stories hail, as does the song of which a few lines are cited above, from Zacynthos, and there is therefore good reason for believing that in that island the same ‘Mistress’ was recently acknowledged as at this very day is venerated in those parts of the mainland which I have mentioned.

Taking the common factors in these several traditions and beliefs, we are led at once to identify the goddess to whom they relate with Demeter.

First, the simplest form of her title, ἡ δέσποινα, of which the others are merely elaborations, is that which Demeter commonly shared with Persephone in old time; and that the title has been handed down from antiquity is shown clearly by the fact that the word is in ordinary usage obsolete. Since then it is unlikely that in the course of tradition such a title should be transferred (save, owing to Christian influence, in the case of the Virgin, who has locally no doubt superseded one of the goddesses twain and appropriated her byname), the word itself declares in favour of the identification of this still living deity with Demeter.

Secondly, her dwelling-place is consistently in the modern accounts the heart of a mountain, and the passage to it a cave. Such precisely, according to Pausanias, was the habitation of Demeter in Mt Elaïon[162]; and the same idea is reflected in her whole cult; for, though in the classical period she had temples built like those of other deities, yet her holy of holies, as befitted a Chthonian deity, was always a subterranean hall (μέγαρον) or palace (ἀνάκτορον), an artificial and glorified cavern.

Thirdly, the modern deity is in character benevolent, therein differing markedly from many of the pagan powers whom we have yet to consider and also from several of the Christian saints. Once only, in the second of the stories from Zacynthos, does she appear in angry mood, when she destroys all mankind by a flood. To the actual means of destruction employed too much importance must not be attached. The motif of the flood is common in modern Greek folk-tales. In the islands of the Aegean I encountered it several times, the fullest version being one which I heard in Scyros. The story as told there was exactly that of Deucalion, save that in deference to biblical tradition he was named Noah and, by a slight anachronism, it was the Panagia instead of Themis who counselled him to create fresh men by throwing stones over his shoulder. I was also taken to see the place where the flood was at its highest, a narrow glen through which runs a small stream, whose high sloping banks are certainly a mass of half-fossilised animal and vegetable matter; and I was escorted to the hill-top on which Noah’s caïque finally rested. Such a theme is easily worked into a story of the deity, usually benevolent though she be, who is ‘Mistress of the earth and of the sea’; and apart from the means of punishment so appropriately adopted by a goddess who rules the sea, this single outburst of somewhat unreasonable anger on the part of the modern deity against all mankind is singularly like the old-time Demeter’s resentful retirement into the depths of her cave, until ‘all the produce of earth was failing and the human race was perishing fast from famine[163].’ Yet otherwise the ancient goddess too was benevolent and gracious to man.

Fourthly, in Aetolia at any rate and probably also in the Peloponnese, where however I failed to extract definite information, the modern goddess is the quickener of all the fruits of the earth, and in functions therefore corresponds once more with the ancient conception of Demeter. On these grounds the identification seems to me certain.

This being granted, the permanence of tradition concerning the dwelling-place of Demeter raises a question which I approach with diffidence, feeling that an answer to it must rest with others more competent than myself in matters archaeological. First, is the tradition as old as that of the personality of the goddess? It is hard to suppose otherwise; for the primitive mind would scarcely conceive of a person without assigning also an habitation; and the habitation actually assigned is of primitive enough character—a cave in a mountain-side. Where then was Demeter worshipped by the Pelasgians in the Mycenaean age? That she was a deity much reverenced by the dwellers in the Argive plain is certain; small idols believed to represent Demeter Kourotrophos have been found at Mycenae[164]; others, of which the identification is more certain, at Tiryns[165]; and at Argos, in later times, Demeter continued to be worshipped under the title Pelasgian[166]. Was a mere cavern then her only home? Or did Mycenae lavish some of its gold on building her a more worthy temple? May not the famous bee-hive structures which have passed successively for treasuries and for tombs of princes prove to be μέγαρα, temples of Chthonian deities such as Demeter?

It is true that in some humbler structures of the same type, such as those at Menídi and Thoricus, clear evidences of inhumation have been found; but I question whether it is permissible to draw from this fact the inference that those magnificent structures also, the so-called Treasuries of Atreus and of Minyas, were in reality tombs. It would seem reasonable to suppose that dwelling-places for the dead beneath the earth and for earth-deities may have been constructed on the same plan, but that the abodes dedicated to immortals were more imposing than those destined for dead men. This hypothesis appears to me more consistent with the evidence of the actual sites at Mycenae and Orchomenos than the commonly accepted view that the inner chamber of the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ was a place of burial. ‘In the centre of the Mycenaean chamber,’ says Schuchhardt[167], ‘there is an almost circular depression three feet in diameter and two feet in depth, cut into the rocky ground. In spite of its unusual shape, we must recognise in it the actual site of the grave.’ Was it a royal posture to lie curled up like a cat? And if so, what of a similar depression in the floor of the ‘Treasury of Minyas’ at Orchomenos? ‘Almost in the centre of the treasure-room’—I again quote Schuchhardt[168]—‘was a long hole in the level rock, nine inches deep, fifteen inches broad and nineteen inches long, which’—must be recognised as the sepulchre of a royal baby? No, our faith is not to be so severely taxed;—‘which must have served to secure some monument.’ May we not, with more consistency, extend the same explanation to Mycenae? And what then were the monuments? May they not have been images of the deity set up in the most natural place, the centre of the outer or the inner sanctuary?

Again, the actual shape of the buildings is important. Ethnologists tell us that it is ultimately derived from a type of dwelling commonly occupied by primitive man, a circular wattle-hut with conical top; or even more directly, as some would have it, from a similarly shaped abode which the ancient Phrygians used to excavate in the ground, constructing the top of withies laced over beams converging to the apex and covered over with earth, while they tunnelled out an approach from one side where the ground sloped conveniently away[169]. From this it is argued that the domed chambers of Mycenae must be tombs, on the ground that ‘men in all ages have fashioned the dwellings of the dead in accordance with those of the living; but the dead are conservative, and long after a new generation has sought a new home and a new pattern for its houses, the habitations of the dead are still constructed in ancestral fashion[170].’ I readily admit conservatism in all religious matters; but how does the argument touch Mycenae? Archaeologists, and among them Schuchhardt himself[171], are agreed that the shaft-graves in the citadel are earlier in date than the bee-hive structures of the lower town. There was therefore a breach in the continuity of the ancestral fashion. Reversion to a disused fashion is a very different thing from conservatism in upholding an unbroken usage.

But even supposing that there were good evidence of the uninterrupted continuity of this type of sepulchre, may not the temples of Chthonian deities have been built on the same plan? The use of the old word μέγαρον suggests that the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, though subterranean, was modelled on the dwellings of men, and, to borrow an argument, religious conservatism may well have preserved for the gods’ abodes the hut-like shape of primitive man’s dwellings long after a new type of house had become general among mortals. Concrete instances of this actually existed in much later times[172]. In Rome the temple of Vesta was of this primitive shape, and so also most probably was the Prytaneum of Athens, which, though not a temple, contained the sacred hearth of the whole community and a statue of Hestia[173]. Demeter then, as one of the deities of primitive Greece, might well have been provided with a temple constructed on the same primitive pattern as that of Vesta, but subterranean, as would befit a Chthonian deity, and thus analogous to the cave wherein she had been wont to dwell. The large domed chamber would be her megaron, wherein her worshippers assembled just as guests assembled in the megaron of a prince. The small square apartment, where such exists, opening on one side of the main room, might be the παστάς or ‘bedchamber,’ an inner sanctuary which temples of later ages also possessed. The approach or ‘dromos’ would represent the natural cave which had given access to her fabled palace in the bowels of the earth.

Finally, on such a view of these buildings, it would not be difficult to explain Pausanias’ belief that they were treasuries[174]. Treasuries only, we may be sure, they were not; for they would not have been built outside the walls of the citadel. But temples in later times were used as depositories for treasure; the would-be thief shrank apparently from the further crime of sacrilege; and it is not unlikely that in a more primitive age, when superstitious awe was certainly no less strong, while robbery far from being a crime was an honourable calling, men should have secured their treasure by storing it in some inviolable sanctuary. Indeed it may be to such a custom that Homer alludes in speaking of ‘all that the stone threshold of the archer, even Phoebus Apollo, doth enclose within at rocky Pytho[175].’ If then this practice prevailed in Mycenaean, as it did in later, times, Pausanias would be recording a tradition which was partially right; and it is not hard to see how, when Mycenae’s greatness had suddenly, as it seems, declined and her population perhaps had migrated for the most part to Argos, later generations, familiar in their new settlements with that different type of temple only which afterwards became general, might have forgotten the sacred character of the bee-hive structures and have remembered only the proverbial wealth once stored by the kings of Mycenae within them.

There remains one point to which I may for the moment direct attention here, reserving the development of the religious idea contained in it for a later chapter. The main theme of the second of the stories from Zacynthos was the seeking of the Mistress in marriage by a young prince. Now if this story stood alone, it would not be right to lay much stress upon it; for the adventures of a young prince in search of some far-famed bride form the plot of numerous Greek folk-tales; and it would be possible to suppose that the real divine personality of the Mistress had been partially obscured in the popular memory before such a story became connected with her name. But the same motif as it happens is repeated in two stories, one Greek and the other Albanian, in von Hahn’s collection[176]. The name of ‘the Mistress’ does not indeed occur; the deity is called in both ‘the beautiful one of the earth[177].’ But her identity is made quite clear in the Albanian story, which evidently must have been borrowed from the Greek and is therefore admissible as good evidence, by the mention of ‘a three-headed dog that sleeps not day nor night’ by which she is guarded. This is undoubtedly the same monster as the hero of the Zacynthian story was required to kill—the three-headed snake; and while the Albanian story, in making the beast a guardian of the subterranean abode whom the adventurer must slay before he can reach ‘the beautiful one,’ is better in construction and, incidentally, more faithful to old tradition[178] than the Greek version which makes the slaying an useless task arbitrarily imposed, yet in both portraits of the monster we can recognise Cerberus—half dog, half snake. But of him more anon; ‘the beautiful one of the earth’ whom he guards can be none other than Persephone.

Thus there are three modern stories which record the winning of Demeter or Persephone in marriage by a mortal lover. Is this a relic of ancient tradition? There was the attempt of Pirithous to seize Persephone for his wife; but that failed, and moreover was judged an impious deed for which he must suffer punishment. Yet there is also the story of Iasion who was deemed worthy of Demeter’s love. Wedlock then even with so great a deity as Demeter or her daughter was not beyond mortals’ dream or reach. Thus much I may notice now; when I come to examine more closely the ancient worship of these goddesses, I shall argue that the idea of a marriage-union between them and human kind was the most intimate secret of the mysteries, and that in such folk-tales as those which I have here mentioned is contained the germ of a religious conception from which was once evolved the holiest of ancient sacraments.

§ 6. Charon.

There is no ancient deity whose name is so frequently on the lips of the modern peasant as that of Charon. The forms which it has now assumed are two, Χάρος and Χάροντας, analogous to the formations γέρος and γέροντας from the ancient γέρων: for in late Greek at any rate the declension of Χάρων followed that of γέρων[179]. The two forms do not seem to belong to different modern dialects, for they often appear in close juxtaposition in the same folk-song. The shorter form however is the commoner in every-day speech, and I shall therefore employ it.

About Charos the peasants will always, according to my experience, converse freely. Neither superstitious awe nor fear of ridicule imposes any restraint. They feel perhaps that the existence of Charos is one of the stern facts which men must face; and even the more educated classes retain sometimes, I think, an instinctive fear of making light of his name, lest he should assert his reality. For Charos is Death. He is not now, what classical literature would have him to be, merely the ferryman of the Styx. He is the god of death and of the lower world.

Hades is no longer a person but a place, the realm over which Charos rules. But the change which has befallen the old monarch’s name is the only change in the Greek conception of that realm. It is still called ‘the lower world’ (ὁ κάτω κόσμος or ἡ κάτω γῆ), and even the name Tartarus (now τὰ Τάρταρα, with the addition frequently of τῆς γῆς) still may be heard. Nor is the character of the place altered. Its epithet ‘icy-cold,’ κρυοπαγωμένος, is well-nigh as constant in modern folk-songs as was the equivalent κρυερός in Homer’s allusions to Hades’ house, while the picturesque word ἀραχνιασμένος, ‘thick with spiders’-webs,’ repeats in thought the Homeric εὐρωείς, ‘mouldering.’ Such is Charos’ kingdom, and hither he conveys men’s souls which he has snatched away from earth.

Here with him dwells his mother, a being, as one folk-song tells[180], more pitiful than he, who entreats him sometimes, when he is setting out to the chase, to spare mothers with young children and not to part lovers new-wed. He has also a wife, Charóntissa or Chárissa, who as the name itself implies is merely a feminine counterpart of himself without any distinct character of her own. A son of Charos is also mentioned in song, for whose wedding-feast ‘he slays children instead of lambs and brides as fatlings[181],’ and to whose keeping are entrusted the counter-keys of Hades[182]. Adopted children are also counted among his family, but these are of those whom he has carried from this world to his own home[183]. The household is completed by the three-headed watch-dog, of whom however remembrance is very rare. Yet in two stories in the last section we recognised Cerberus, and even the less convincing of the embodiments there presented, that which represented him as a three-headed snake rather than dog, is not devoid of traces of ancient tradition. The hero who would slay the monster has to cross a piece of water—the sea instead of the river Styx—in order to reach an island where is the monster’s lair; and there arrived, he sees ‘looking out from a hole three heads with eyes that flash fire and jaws that breathe flames[184].’ This is Cerberus without doubt; and if the story calls him ‘serpent’ rather than ‘dog,’ ancient mythology and art alike justify in part the description; for his mother was said to be Echidna, and he himself is found pourtrayed with the tail of a serpent and a ring of snakes about his neck. Schmidt himself appears to have overlooked the testimony of this story and of that also from the collection of von Hahn in which, as I have pointed out, we have a modern picture of Cerberus guarding the realm of Persephone; for he speaks of some remarkable lines from a song which he himself heard in Zacynthos as an unique mention of Cerberus, and questions the genuine nature of the tradition. All doubt is however removed by the corroborative evidence contained in the two stories already mentioned and by the fact that a three-headed dog belonging to Charos was recently heard of by a traveller in Macedonia[185]. The lines themselves are put in the mouth of Charos:—

Ἔχω ὀχτρὸ ἐγὼ σκυλὶ, π’ ούλους μας μᾶς φυλάει,

κῂ ἄντας με ἰδῇ ταράζεταικὴ καὶ θέλει νά με φάῃ.

εἶναι σκυλὶ τρικέφαλο, ποῦ καίει σὰ φωτία,

ἔχει τὰ νύχια πουντερὰ καὶ τὴν ὠρὰ μακρύα.

βγάνει φωτιὰ ’φ’ τὰ μάτια του, ἀπὸ τὸ στόμα λάβρα,

ἡ γλῶσσα του εἶναι μακρυά, τὰ δόντια του εἶναι μαῦρα[186].

‘A savage dog have I, who guards us all, and when he sees me he rages and fain would devour me. A three-headed dog is he, and he burns like fire; his claws are sharp and his tail is long; from his eyes he gives forth flame and from his mouth burning heat; long is his tongue and grim his teeth.’

Here at least recognition of Cerberus must be immediate; every detail of the description, save for the characteristically modern touch which makes Charos afraid of his own dog, is in accord with classical tradition.

Such is the household of Charos, so far as a description may be compiled from a few scattered allusions; his own portrait varies more, in proportion as there are more numerous attempts in every part of Greece to draw it. Sometimes he is depicted as an old man, tall and spare, white of hair and harsh of feature; but more often he is a lusty warrior, with locks of raven-black or gleaming gold—just as Hades in old time was sometimes κυανοχαίτης, sometimes ξανθός,—who rides forth on his black steed by highway or lonely path to slay and to ravage: ‘his glance is as lightning and his face as fire, his shoulders are like twin mountains and his head like a tower[187].’ His raiment is usually black as befits the lord of death, but anon it is depicted bright as his sunlit hair[188], for though he brings death he is a god and glorious.

His functions are clearly defined. He visits this upper world to carry off those whose allotted time has run, and guards them in the lower world as in a prison whose keys they vainly essay to steal and to escape therefrom. But the spirit in which he performs those duties varies according as he is conceived to be a free agent responsible to none or merely a minister of the supreme God. Which of these is the true conception is a question to which the common-folk as a whole have given no final answer; and the character of Charos consequently depends upon the view locally preferred.

Those who regard him as simply the servant and messenger of God, find no difficulty in accommodating him to his Christian surroundings; for, as I have said, the peasant does not distinguish between the Christian and the pagan elements in his faith which together make his polytheism so luxuriant. We have already seen Charos’ name with the prefix of ‘saint[189]’; and though this Christian title is not often accorded him, yet his name appears commonly on tomb-stones in Christian churchyards. At Leonídi, on the east coast of the Peloponnese, I noted the couplet:

καὶ μένα δὲν λυπήθηκε ὁ Χάρος νά με πάρῃ,

ποῦ εἴμουνα τοῦ οἴκου μου μονάκριβο βλαστάρι.

‘Me too Charos pitied not but took, even me the fondly-cherished flower of my home.’

So too in popular story and song he is represented as working in concord with the Angels and Archangels, to whom sometimes falls the task of carrying children to his realm[190]. Indeed one of the archangels, Michael, who as we saw above has ousted Hermes, the escorter of souls, and assumed his functions, is charged with exactly the same duties as Charos in the conveyance of men’s souls to the nether world, so that in popular parlance the phrases ‘he is wrestling with Charos’ (παλεύει μὲ τὸ Χάρο)[191] and ‘he is struggling with an angel’ (ἀγγελομαχεῖ)[192] are both alike used of a man in his death-agony.

This Christianised conception of Charos has not been without influence in softening the lines of the character popularly ascribed to him. The duties imposed upon him by the will of God are sometimes repugnant to him, and he would willingly spare those whom he is sent to slay. One folk-story related to me exhibits him even as a friend of man:—

‘Once upon a time there were a man and wife who had had seven children all of whom died in infancy. When an eighth was born, the father betook himself to a witch and enquired of her how he might best secure the boy’s life. She told him that the others had died because he had chosen unsuitable godparents, and bade him on this occasion ask the first man whom he should meet on his way home to stand sponsor for the child. He accordingly departed, and straightway met a stranger riding on a black horse, and made his request to him. The stranger consented, and the baptism at once took place; but no sooner was it over than he was gone without so much as telling his name.

Ten years passed, and the child was growing up strong and healthy. Then at last the father again encountered the unknown stranger, and reproached him with having been absent so long without ever making enquiry after his godson. Then the stranger answered, “Better for thee if I had not now come and if thou neededst not now learn my name. I am Charos, and because I am thy friend[193], am come to warn thee that thy days are well-nigh spent.” Thereupon Charos led him away to a cave in the mountain-side, and they entered and came to a chamber where were many candles burning. Then said Charos, “See, these candles are the lives of men, and yonder are thine and thy son’s.” Then the man looked, and of his own candle there were but two inches left, but his son’s was tall and burnt but slowly. Then he besought Charos to light yet another candle for him ere his own were burnt away, but Charos made answer that that could not be. Then again he besought him to give him ten years from the life of his son, for he was a poor man, and if he died ere his son were grown to manhood, his widow and orphan would be in want. But Charos answered, “In no way can the decreed length of life be changed. Yet will I show thee how in the two years that yet remain to thee thou mayest enrich thyself and leave abundant store for thy wife and child. Thou shalt become a physician. It matters not that thou knowest nought of medicine, for I will give thee a better knowledge than of drugs. Thine eyes shall ever be open to see me; and when thou goest to a sick man’s couch, if thou dost see me standing at the bed-head, know then that he must die, and say to them that summoned thee that no skill can save him; but if thou dost see me at the foot of the bed, know that he will recover; give him therefore but pills of bread if thou wilt, and promise to restore him.” Then did the man thank Charos, and went away to his home.

Now it chanced that the only daughter of the king lay grievously sick, and all the doctors and magicians had been called to heal her, but they availed nothing. Then came the poor man whom Charos had taught, and went into the room where the princess lay, and lo! Charos stood at the foot of her bed. Then he bade the king send away the other physicians, for that he alone could heal her. So he himself went home and mixed flour and water and came again and gave it to the king’s daughter, and soon she was recovered of her sickness. Then the king gave him a great present, and his fame was spread abroad, and many resorted to him, and soon he was rich.

Thus two years passed, and at the end thereof he himself lay sick. And he looked and saw Charos standing at the head of his bed. Then he bade his wife turn the bed about, but it availed nothing; for Charos again stood at his head, and caught him by the hair, and he opened his mouth to cry out, and Charos drew forth his soul[194].’

Again the unwillingness of Charos to execute the harsh decrees of God is illustrated in numerous folk-songs. Most often it is some brave youth, shepherd or warrior, a lover of the open air, who excites his compassion; for the same notes of regret which Sophocles made melodious in the farewell of Ajax to the sunlight, to his house in Salamis, even to the streams and springs of the Trojan land which brought his death, ring clear and true in modern folk-song too from the lips of dying warriors. Such were the last words of the outlaw-patriot (κλέφτης) Zedros:

‘Farewell, Olympus, now farewell, and all the mountain-summits,

Farewell, my strongholds desolate, and plane-trees rich in shadow,

Ye fountains with your waters cool, and level plains low-lying.

Farewell I bid the swift-winged hawks[195], farewell the royal eagles,

Farewell for me the sun I love and the bright-glancing moonlight,

That lighted up my path wherein to walk a warrior worthy[196].’

Such laments are not lost upon Charos, the servant of God, but he must needs turn a deaf ear to prayers for a respite. Clear and final comes his answer, almost in the same words in every ballad[197],

δὲν ἠμπορῶ, λεβέντη μου, γιατ’ εἶμαι προσταμμένος,

ἐμένα μ’ ἔστειλ’ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ πάρω τὴ ψυχή σου.

‘No respite can I give, brave sir, for I am straitly chargèd;

’Tis God that sent me here to thee, sent me to take thy spirit.’

Sometimes then the doomed man will seek to tempt Charos with meat and drink, that he may grant a few hours’ delay, but against offers of hospitality he is obdurate. Or again his victim refuses to yield to death ‘without weakness or sickness’ and challenges him to a trial of athletic skill, in wrestling or leaping, whereon each shall stake his own soul. And to this Charos sometimes gives consent, for he knows that he will win. So they make their way to the ‘marble-paved threshing-floor,’ the arena of all manly pursuits; and there the man perchance leaps forty cubits, yet Charos surpasses him by five; or they wrestle together from morn till eve, but at the last bout Charos is victor. One hero indeed is known to fame, whose exploits make him the Heracles of modern Greece, Digenes the Cyprian, who wrestled with Charos for three nights and days and was not vanquished. But then ‘there came a voice from God and from the Archangels, “Charos, I sent thee not to engage in wrestlings, but that thou should’st carry off souls for me[198].”’ And at that rebuke Charos transformed himself into an eagle and alighted on the hero’s head and plucked out his soul.

The other and more pagan conception of Charos excludes all traits of kindness and mercy; and men do not stint the expression of their hatred of him. He is ‘black,’ ‘bitter,’ ‘hateful’ (μαῦρος[199], πικρός, στυγερός). He is the merciless potentate of the nether world, independent of the God of heaven, equally powerful in his own domain, but more terrible, more inexorable: for his work is death and his abode is Hades. Thence he issues forth at will, as a hunter to the chase. ‘Against the wounds that Charos deals herbs avail not, physicians give no cure, nor saints protection[200].’ His quarry is the soul of man; ‘where he finds three, he takes two of them, and where he finds two, takes one, and where he finds but one alone, him too he takes[201].’ Sometimes he is enlarging his palace, and he takes the young and strong to be its pillars; sometimes he is repairing the tent in which he dwells, and uses the stout arms of heroes for tent-pegs and the tresses of bright-haired maidens for the ropes; sometimes he is laying out a garden, and he gathers children from the earth to be the flowers of it and young men to be its tall slim cypresses; more rarely he is a vintager, and tramples men in his vat that their blood may be his red wine, or again he carries a sickle and reaps a human harvest.

But most commonly he is the warrior preëminent in all manner of prowess—archer, wrestler, horseman. Once a bride boasted that she had no fear of Charos, for that her brothers were men of valour and her husband a hero; then came Charos and shot an arrow at her, and her beauty faded; a second and a third arrow, and he stretched her on her death-bed[202]. Often in the pride of strength have young warriors laughed Charos to scorn; then has he come to seize the strongest of them, and though the warrior strain and struggle as in a wrestling-match, yet Charos wearies not but wins the contest by fair means or foul: for he is no honourable foe, but dishonest above thieves, more deceitful than women[203]: he seizes his adversary by the hair and drags him down to Hades. Even more striking is the picture of Charos as horseman riding forth on his black steed to the foray, and it is this conception which has inspired one of the finest achievements of the popular muse:—

Why stand the mountains black and sad, their brows enwrapped in darkness?

Is it a wind that buffets them? is it a storm that lashes?

No, ’tis no wind that buffets them, nor ’tis no storm that lashes;

But ’tis great Charos passing by, and the dead passing with him.

He drives the young men on before, he drags the old behind him,

And at his saddle-bow are ranged the helpless little children.

The children cling and cry to him, the old men call beseeching,

“Good Charos, at some hamlet halt, halt at some cooling fountain;