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

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.

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.

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:—