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

In my account of the Nereids properly so-called, reference was made to certain beings known in the Cyclades as ἀγιελοῦδες or γιαλοῦδες and reckoned by several writers[462] among the nymphs of the sea. In this they certainly have the support of popular etymology; for in Amorgos Theodore Bent[463] heard that ‘an evil spirit lived close by, which now and again rises out of the sea and seizes infants; hence it is called Gialoù (from γιαλός[464], the sea (sic)).’ But it is, I think, only an erroneous association by the inhabitants of the Cyclades of two like-sounding words which has caused the Ἀγιελοῦδες to be regarded as marine demons; Bent’s information transposes cause and effect. Elsewhere in Greece there are known certain beings called Γελλοῦδες or Γιλλοῦδες, female demons with a propensity to carry off young children and to devour them; and it is strange that so careful an authority on Greek folk-lore as Bernhard Schmidt should not have recognised that the name ἀγιελοῦδες employed in some of the Cyclades is only a dialectic form of the commoner γελλοῦδες[465] with an euphonetic ἀ prefixed as in the case of νεράϊδες and ἀνεράϊδες. Enquiry in Tenos revealed to me the fact, not mentioned, though perhaps implied, in the statement of Bent, that the ἀγιελοῦδες are there believed to feed upon the children whom they carry off. This trait at once confirms their identity with the γελλοῦδες, and renders it impossible to class them as a form of nymph.

It is of course believed that nymphs of the sea or of rivers, when they carry off human children to their watery habitations, do incidentally drown them, but by an oversight and not of malice prepense. But savagely to prey upon human flesh—for all the nymphs’ wantonness and cruelty, that is a thing abhorrent from their nature and inconceivable in them. This horrid propensity proves the γελλοῦδες or ἀγιελοῦδες to be a separate class of female demons.

The chief authority on these malignant beings is Leo Allatius[466], who both quotes a series of passages which enable us to trace the development of the belief in them, and also tells a story which is the only source of evidence concerning other of their characteristics than their appetite for the flesh of infants.

The individuality of this Gello continued to be recognised to some extent as late as the tenth century[468]; for Ignatius, a deacon of Constantinople, in his life of the Patriarch Tarasius named her as a single demon, though he added that the crime of killing children in the same way was also imputed to a whole class of witches. ‘Hence,’ comments Allatius, ‘it has come about that at the present day Striges (i.e. the witches of whom Ignatius speaks), because they practise evil arts upon infants and by sucking their blood or in other ways cause their death, are called Gellones[469].’ In the story also which exhibits the chief qualities of this demon, her name (in the form Γυλοῦ) appears still as a proper name.

But the multiplication of the single demon into a whole class dates from long before the time of Allatius. John of Damascus in the eighth century used the plural γελοῦδες as a popular word, the meaning of which he took to be the same as that of Striges (στρίγγαι); and Michael Psellus too in the eleventh century evidently regarded these two words as interchangeable designations of a class of beings (whether of demons or of witches, he leaves uncertain); for after an exact account of the Striges and their thirst for children’s blood, he says that new-born infants who waste away (as if from the draining of their blood by these Striges) are called Γιλλόβρωτα[470], ‘Gello-eaten.’

The story of Leo Allatius[471], which sets forth the chief qualities of Gello, is a legend of which the Saints Sisynios and Synidoros are the heroes. The children of their sister Melitene had been devoured by this demon, and they set themselves to capture her. She, to effect her escape, at once changed her shape, and became first a swallow and then a fish; but, for all her slippery and elusive transformations, they finally caught her in the form of a goat’s hair adhering to the king’s beard. Then addressing to her the words ‘Cease, foul Gello, from slaying the babes of Christians,’ they worked upon her fears until they extorted from her a confession of her twelve and a half names, the knowledge of which was a safeguard against her assaults.

It is this list of names in which the various aspects of her activity appear. The first is Γυλοῦ, one of the forms of the name Gello; the second Μωρά[472], the name of a kind of Lamia; the third Βυζοῦ or ‘blood-sucker’; the fourth Μαρμαροῦ, probably ‘stony-hearted’; the fifth Πετασία, for she can fly as a bird in the air; the sixth Πελαγία, for she can swim as a fish in the sea; the seventh Βορδόνα[473], probably meaning ‘stooping like a kite on her prey’; the eighth Ἀπλετοῦ, ‘insatiable’; the ninth Χαμοδράκαινα, for she can lurk like a snake in the earth; the tenth Ἀναβαρδαλαία[474], possibly ‘soaring like a lark in the air’; the eleventh Ψυχανασπάστρια[475], ‘snatcher of souls’; the twelfth Παιδοπνίκτρια, ‘strangler of children’; and the half-name Στρίγλα, the kind of witch whereof the next section treats.

Whether these names are anywhere still remembered as a mystic incantation, or all the qualities which they imply still imputed to the Gelloudes, I cannot say. But a modern cure for such of the demon’s injuries as are not immediately fatal has been recorded from Amorgos. ‘If a child has been afflicted by it, the mother first sends for the priest to curse the demon, and scratches her child with her nails; if these plans do not succeed, she has to go down at sunset to the shore, and select forty round stones brought up by forty different waves; these she must take home and boil in vinegar, and when the cock crows the evil phantom will disappear and leave the child whole[476].’