Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study...

The conception of future punishment in these two passages is clearly the same. What then is meant by the fear that even the dead may not be set free? and who is ‘the God of all destruction’ who is named in the first passage as the author of that punishment? The answer has already been found. ‘The all-destroying, God’ (ὁ πανώλεθρος θεὸς) is none other than the ‘all-wasting doom’ (πάμφθαρτος μόρος) of Apollo’s oracle—Death personified instead of death abstract; and Death’s refusal ‘to set free’ the dead is to be interpreted in the light of Apollo’s warning to Orestes that, if he fail in his duty to his murdered sire, he will himself in death be ‘damned to incorruption.’ The language employed is indeed vaguer and more allusive; the word ἐλευθεροῦν, ‘to set free,’ might suggest many ideas besides bodily ‘freeing’ or dissolution; yet it may be noticed that this is the very word which the above-quoted[1092] nomocanon de excommunicatis uses interchangeably with the more common λύειν in this very sense. Only for us, who have not in our hearts the same faiths and fears quick to vibrate in response to each touch of religious awe, is a commentary needed; for a Greek audience the suggestion contained in ἐλευθεροῦν, above all in its implied contrast with πανώλεθρος, fully sufficed.

Thus then we have found two passages of Euripides containing imprecations almost identical in form with the curses that may be heard from the lips of modern Greek peasants; we have found a similar passage in Sophocles which has hitherto proved a difficulty to commentators simply because they have tried to pervert the meaning of the word ἀποικίζω, when its normal sense will make the phrase a parallel to those of Euripides and of modern Greece; and finally in the Choephori of Aeschylus—here again by reading a word in its proper sense—we have found religious sanction claimed for the belief which underlies these imprecations—the belief that the fate to be most dreaded by mankind after death is incorruptibility and resuscitation.

It remains to examine the supposed causes of this dreaded fate, and to see whether the three causes which, when we discussed the modern classes of men liable to become vrykolakes, appeared to be Hellenic—namely, lack of burial, violent death, and parental or other execration or any sin deserving it—actually figure as causes in ancient Greek literature.

An instance of formal execration has already been provided. No better example than the curse called down by Oedipus upon his son could be desired. But it was suggested above that in certain other cases, even where no actual imprecation had been uttered, men were accounted accursed; and indeed it would be an absurdity that a son who acted undutifully towards his father should fall a victim to his curse, but that one, let us say, who slew his father and gave him no time to pronounce the damning words, should go scatheless. From the earliest times, I believe, there were held to be certain deadly sins, sins against the few primitive god-given principles of right and wrong, which brought their own curse. Among these was numbered from the first the murder of a kinsman. To this Hesiod[1093] adds others which were so regarded in his day. ‘Equal is the guilt when one ill treateth the suppliant and the stranger, or goeth up unto his brother’s bed, ... or sinneth against orphan children and heedeth not, or chideth his old father, who hath passed the gloomy gates of age, and raileth upon him with hard words; against such an one verily Zeus himself is wroth, and at the end layeth upon him stern retribution for his unrighteous deeds.’ A more civilised age included all murder in the list; and later again the Church seems to have extended it until ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become ipso facto excommunicate and accursed.

To Aeschylus the chief of such sins was unquestionably the murder of a close kinsman; but other sins also, especially those involving pollution (μίασμα), rendered the perpetrator liable to the same punishment as followed upon a formal imprecation. And this view was not of Aeschylus’ own invention; it must have belonged to the popular religion. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain how the Greek Church in the Middle Ages had come to adopt almost the same views as Aeschylus. For what said the Church? The nomocanon quoted in the last section[1094] teaches that persons who ‘have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law, and have died in the state of excommunication, without amending their ways and receiving forgiveness,’ may be expected to remain whole and incorrupt after death. But another ecclesiastical document[1095] shows clearly that a formal sentence of excommunication was not essential to this result; a distinction is drawn between him whose corpse appears white, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by the divine laws,’ and him whose corpse is black, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by a bishop.’ Clearly then the Church taught that certain ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become automatically excommunicate. Certain deadly sins deserved the ecclesiastical curse and, whether it were pronounced or not, incurred the same punishment after death.

The list of such sins was certainly extended by the Church so as to include, for example, apostasy, omission of baptism, the more reprehensible acts of sorcery, and suicide, which was, and still is sometimes, a bar to Christian burial. But at the same time the number of those sins which were actually left to work out their own curse was probably diminished; the Church constituted herself judge, and in most cases formally sentenced the sinner to that punishment which the sin alone, without her condemnation, was popularly believed to entail. If then we strip this doctrine of its ecclesiastical dress and put out of sight the intervention of an hierarchy arrogating to itself the office of binding and loosing, there remains the simple belief that certain transgressors of the divine law, certain sinners of deadly sins, were ipso facto accursed and condemned to incorruption.

Is not this precisely the Aeschylean doctrine? Pelasgus, if he should consent unto the violence of those suitors who sought the daughters of Danaus in unhallowed wedlock, if he should defy Zeus the God of suppliants and set at naught those other deities at whose altar his kinswomen sat—would not he indeed be a transgressor of the divine law? He acknowledges it himself, and, conformably to the doctrine enunciated, anticipates that Death himself will turn Avenger and free him not when dead. Orestes, owing to his murdered father the sacred duty of vengeance and expressly urged by Apollo to perform it—would not he too be a transgressor of the divine law, if he should fail or flag in his enterprise of blood? Fitly then did Apollo threaten him that after manifold troubles in life he should die damned to incorruption. The same Orestes, viewed now not from Apollo’s standpoint but from that of the Erinyes, bloodguilty with his mother’s murder—had he not perpetrated a deadly sin, was he not a transgressor of the divine law? Rightly then may his foes exult that he shall not escape, but, though he be fled from them beneath the earth, still ‘hath he no freeing.’ In fine, Aeschylus agrees, save for the mediaeval multiplication of deadly sins, with the doctrine of the Church; and this agreement is proof that in the popular creed of Greece, from which both Aeschylus and the Church must have borrowed, the commission of certain sins has always involved the penalty of incorruptibility, whether the curse which those sins merited had been formally pronounced or no.

The other two causes, lack of burial and violent death, may be considered together; for the whole trend of ancient literature in regard to both these calamities is the same, namely, that they caused the return of the dead man’s spirit—of his spirit only, be it noted, and not of his body. It is the ghost of Patroclus which in the Iliad[1096] appears to Achilles and demands the funeral-rites due to his body; it is the ghost of Elpenor which in the Odyssey[1097] makes the same claim upon Odysseus; it is the ghost of Polydorus which in the Hecuba[1098] of Euripides bemoans his body cast away in the sea. Again it is the ghost of Clytemnestra which in the Eumenides[1099] of Aeschylus comes seeking vengeance for her violent death; and Lucian in the Philopseudes[1100] gives special prominence to this cause of the soul’s unrest. ‘Perhaps, Eucrates,’ says one of the speakers in the dialogue, ‘what Tychiades means is this, that the only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but that the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander; if that is his theory, it cannot be lightly dismissed.’ It is needless to multiply examples[1101]; literary tradition, from Homer down to Lucian, is all in favour of the re-appearance of the soul, and not of the body, as the result of either lack of burial or violent death.

It is perfectly clear then that there is a considerable discrepancy between the ancient literary view and the modern popular creed. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the subject of bodily resuscitation occasioned solely by a violent death[1102] or by lack of burial. In Phlegon’s story it is indeed probable that the cause of Philinnion’s re-appearance was a violent death; but the first part of the narrative is missing, and no such statement is actually made.

In modern beliefs, on the contrary, there is little or no trace of the idea that the dead return for these causes in purely spiritual form. The very conception of ghosts is weak and indefinite among the peasantry. I have certainly been told by peasants of cases in which a person at the point of death has appeared, presumably in spiritual form, to friends at a distance; and there is a fairly common belief, seemingly derived from the Bible, that at Easter many of the graves are opened and release for a time the spirits of the dead. But it is a significant fact that there is not even a name for ghosts which cannot be equally well applied to any supernatural apparitions. The thought of them in general seems to be nothing more definite than a vague uneasiness in the minds of timid women and children at that hour when

But, while ancient literature and modern superstition are thus in direct conflict on one point, they are agreed in making lack of burial and violent death the causes of a certain unrest on the part of the dead; and though the one usually attributes that unrest to the ghost, and the other to the corpse, their agreement in all else could not surely be a mere casual coincidence; there must be a connexion to be discovered between them.

The consistency of the popular view which has obtained practically throughout the Christian era has already been established. The Church found the Greek people already firmly convinced that the two causes which we are considering, no less than formal execration or execrable sin, led to bodily incorruption and resuscitation. The only moot point is what agency was held to produce the resuscitation before the Church taught that it was the work of the Devil. But can equal consistency be claimed for ancient literature? It has just now been shown that the tragedians recognised that a curse or a deadly sin led to the resuscitation of the body; and yet they make lack of burial and violent death lead rather to the re-appearance of a ghost. Why then this discrimination between the effects produced by causes all of which in more recent popular belief produce the same effect? My answer is that popular belief in antiquity was the same as popular belief now in respect of all the causes, but that literary propriety forbade more than a mere verbal reference to so gross a superstition as bodily resuscitation. When a dead man was required in literature to re-appear, he was conventionally pourtrayed as a ghost, not as a walking corpse; and the convention was, I think, right and necessary.

For let it be granted for a moment that the popular belief of to-day dates from the earliest times, and that then as now the revenant was popularly pictured as a monster ‘swollen and distended all over so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin being stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck giving out the same sound.’ Could even Homer have re-animated the dead Patroclus, with this unearthly ghastliness added to his wounds and to his mangling by the chariot, and have brought him to Achilles in the darkness of the night, without exciting in his breast horror instead of pity and loathing for love? Euripides again was greatly daring when he assigned the prologue of a tragedy to Polydorus’ ghost; but even he could not have restrained the unquenchable mirth of his audience, if his play had opened with a soliloquy by an agitated corpse. Epic and dramatic propriety must have demanded some refinement of so grossly material a conception. The canons of drama, we know, would not allow the enactment of a murder on the stage before the eyes of the spectators; would it then have been compatible with the restraint of Greek art to represent the murdered body as a revenant? Aeschylus himself, the lover of weird misbegotten shapes, would have recoiled from such an enterprise. But those same canons did permit a verbal description of the murder; and similarly the tragedians permitted themselves to refer, in imprecations and suchlike, to the horror of bodily resuscitation.

The case then stands thus. References are, as we have seen, made by the tragedians to the possibility of men becoming revenants, whereas they shrank from presenting the actuality. But the references to the possibility occur, chiefly at any rate, in imprecations, with the result that at first sight a curse would seem to have been the only recognised cause of bodily resuscitation in ancient times; whereas the most famous literary examples of the actual re-appearance of the dead—Clytemnestra and Polydorus in tragedy, or, if we go back to Homer, Patroclus and Elpenor—happen to be cases in which the cause was lack of burial or a violent death, with the result that literary tradition inclined to substitute ghosts for the corporeal revenants of the popular creed in these two cases.

Such is my explanation of the discrepancy; and the probability of it is warranted by three considerations—first, that Greek Tragedy does contain one or two references to the possible resuscitation of other than the accursed—second, that Plato modifies the popular notions concerning the accursed in almost the same way that the tragedians modified the fate of the unburied and of those slain by violence—third, that the literary tradition concerning ghosts is in itself inconsistent and bears the marks of arbitrary modification.

The most important reference in Tragedy occurs in the Choephori, where Orestes and Electra pray their murdered father to rise from the grave in bodily form[1103]. This passage, together with a close parallel from Sophocles, will be fully discussed later[1104]. Here I need only point out the justification by Aeschylus of my theory that the substitution of ghost for revenant is a necessary literary convention. He suggests verbally the possible uprising of the murdered Agamemnon as a revenant; but, when it comes to an actual presentation of the murdered Clytemnestra on the stage, his dramatis persona is a ghost.

Next, Plato, in a well-known passage of the Phaedo[1105], speaks of the souls of dead men having actually been seen in the form of shadowy apparitions haunting the neighbourhood of tombs—souls, he explains, which have not been fully cleansed and freed from the visible material world, but still have some part therein and hence are themselves visible; and, he adds, these are the souls of the wicked, which are compelled to wander thus in punishment for their former evil life. Naturally Plato of all men—and of all his works in the Phaedo—could not accept the notion that the body under any conditions remained incorruptible; his whole doctrine is imbued with his belief that the gross and material perishes, and only the pure and spiritual endures. When therefore he came to utilise the popular doctrine, which the tragedians had endorsed, that certain sinners were condemned to incorruption, some modification of the idea was necessary; and accordingly he makes the wicked to wander as ghosts, not as corporeal revenants, just as Homer and the tragedians seem to have done in the case of the unburied and those who had met their death by violence. Plato’s extension of the literary tradition suggests that its earlier development had been such as I have indicated.

Lastly, the literary tradition, as represented by earlier writers than Plato, is by no means uniform. If it had been a definite religious doctrine, and not merely a literary convention, that the unburied returned as ghosts, the presentment of Patroclus and of Polydorus should have been in all respects similar. But what do we find? Each certainly appears as a ghost and asks for burial; but there the resemblance ends. According to Homer[1106] the spirit of Patroclus, in craving burial of his body, declares that, ere that rite be performed, the spirit itself cannot pass the gates of Hades but is held aloof by the spirits of the other dead, and moreover that having once passed it can no more return to this world. According to Euripides[1107], familiar though he must have been with Homer’s teaching, the spirit of Polydorus had passed within the gates of Hades and by permission of the nether gods had returned to demand the burial of his body. Homer’s reason for the soul’s anxiety about the body’s burial is none too convincing in itself; for it only raises a further question: if death means the final separation of soul from body, and the lower world is tenanted by souls only—for so Homer at any rate teaches—why should the denizens of that world make the admission of a newly-sped soul conditional upon the burial of the body which it had finally quitted?

But, what is more important, Homer’s reason, such as it is, is flatly disavowed by Euripides, who yet advances no reason of his own why the spirit of Polydorus, having once passed into Hades’ halls, should have any further interest in its old carnal tenement. This disagreement can only mean that Homer and Euripides were not following an acknowledged doctrine of popular religion in representing Patroclus and Polydorus in the form of ghosts; for in that case they would surely have agreed with the popular doctrine, and therefore also with each other, in assigning a reason for the ghost’s interest in the burial of its discarded body. Either then there was no popular belief on the whole subject—which is incredible—or else it was such as literary propriety forbade them to follow. Now if the popular belief was that the unburied appeared as corporeal revenants, their eagerness for burial is intelligible; but if a ghost be substituted by literary convention for the revenant, a good reason for such eagerness becomes hard to find. Hence the inconsequence of Homer’s reason; hence the silence of Euripides.

But if, as now seems likely, the substitution of mere ghost for bodily revenant was a literary convention, it by no means follows that that convention is valueless as a guide to the popular beliefs of the time. It may represent a part of those beliefs, though not the whole. The established doctrines on this whole subject were not remodelled by the tragedians save in obedience to the laws of their art. This we definitely know; for the causes which they assign for the unrest of the dead are numbered among the popularly received causes which remain to this day; and even the idea of physical resuscitation was retained and effectively utilised by them within certain limitations. Clearly then they kept what they could, and only changed what they must. Judicious selection rather than arbitrary invention was the method by which the literary tradition was established. Since then that tradition uniformly speaks of the soul’s return, while discrepancies only arise in accounting for the soul’s interest in the corpse, was it perhaps only in the latter respect that literary tradition parted company with popular belief? Did the spirit as well as the body of the dead play some part in the popular superstition? Did the common-folk too hold that, after the separation of soul from body at death, the soul itself under certain conditions returned from its flight towards the house of Hades—returned however not to appear alone in ghostly guise, but to re-animate the dead body and raise it up as a revenant?

The hypothesis commends itself as providing at the same time an answer to the one question which remained unanswered in the last section. We saw that, through ecclesiastical influence, Christian Greece has long assigned the work of resuscitating the dead to the Devil. But to whom or to what did pagan Greece previously assign it? Surely in the whole range of Greek mythology it were hard to find any supernatural being either specially suited or probably condemned to such a task. The soul is, prima facie, the most appropriate and likely agent.

But there is even stronger evidence than this. The probable becomes proven when we turn back to the only full pagan account of a bodily revenant, the story of Philinnion. What are her words, when she is discovered by her parents? ‘Mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ And how is her threat of going away fulfilled? ‘Scarce had she spoken when she became a corpse, and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all.’ The words ‘I shall go away’ were therefore intended by the writer to mean ‘My soul will go away’; for the body remained. Clearly then, in the belief of that age, resuscitation of the dead meant the re-animation of the body by the soul which had been temporarily separated from it.

In the light of this fact Plato’s reference to the wandering of the souls of the wicked is found to approximate more nearly to the popular superstition. Such souls, he says, have been seen in the neighbourhood of tombs; and they are visible because they are not cleansed and freed from the visible and material world[1108], but participate therein. What then is the particular material thing in which they participate and which keeps them near the tombs? Evidently the body whose impurities they contracted in life, the body from which they are not cleansed and freed. Plato admits only participation, not re-animation; but in all else he adheres to the genuine popular belief.

The same idea furnishes also what I believe to be the true explanation of the custom of the so-called ‘Charon’s obol.’ The coin or other object placed in the mouth of the dead was originally, I have argued[1109], a charm to prevent the entry of some evil spirit or the re-entry of the soul into the corpse. In Chios and in Rhodes, as we have seen, this is the popular explanation still given—the particular spirit against whom the precaution is taken being, owing to Christian influence, a devil. But if, as is likely, a devil has merely been substituted for the soul, while the rest of the superstition has remained unchanged, it follows that the precaution was originally directed against the return of the soul, and so was a means of ensuring bodily dissolution; for, though I cannot actually prove it, it is natural to suppose that re-animation was not the result, but the cause, of incorruption.

To sum up, the conclusions which have been reached stand thus:—Death, according to the popular religion of ancient Greece, was not a final separation of body and soul; in certain cases the body remained incorrupt and the soul re-animated it. This condition, in which the dead belonged neither to this nor to the nether world, was one of misery; and bodily dissolution was to be desired. Dissolution could in no case be properly effected without the rite of interment or cremation. The unburied therefore formed one class of revenants. But even due interment did not necessarily produce dissolution; a sudden or violent death rendered the body incorruptible, presumably because the proper hour had not yet come for the soul to leave it; an imprecation withheld the body from decay by its own ‘binding’ power; and finally, the commission of a deadly sin, above all of murder, rendered the sinner subject to the same dire fate as if the curse which his sin merited had actually been pronounced. The only unfailing method of dissolution was cremation.