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

The division of the human entity into the two parts which we call soul and body has been so universally recognised even among the most primitive of mankind that the idea of it must have been first suggested by the observation of some universal phenomenon—most probably the phenomenon of unconsciousness whether in sleep, in fainting, in trance, or in death. If it had been man’s lot to pass in this world a life of activity unbroken by sleep or exhaustion, and thereafter to be translated like Enoch or Ganymede to another world, so that the spectacle of a body lying inert and senseless could never have been forced upon men’s sight, the first impulse to speculation concerning that impalpable something, the loss of which severs men from converse with the waking, active world, might never have been given, and the duality of human nature might never have been conceived. But death above all overtaking each in turn has forced in turn the mourners for each to muse on the future condition of these two elements which, united, make a man, and, disjoined, leave but a corpse. Does neither or does one or do both of them continue? And, continuing, what degree of intelligence and of power has either or have both? Are they for ever separated, or will they be re-united elsewhere? Such are the questions that must have vexed, as they still vex, the minds of many when their eyes were confronted by the spectacle of death.

For some indeed a means of answering or of quieting such searchings of heart has been found in the acceptance of religious dogma. But ancient Greek religion, the faith or superstition in which the Hellenic people, defiant alike of destructive and of constructive philosophy, lived and moved and had their being, was not dogmatic; the very priests were guardians and exponents of ceremonies rather than preachers of doctrine; there was no organised hierarchy committed to one set creed and prepared to assert the divine revelation of a single formulated answer to these questions. The sum total of orthodoxy amounted to little more than a belief in gods; and each man was free to believe what he would, evil as well as good, concerning them, and to find for himself hope or despair. In determining therefore the views to which the mass of the common-folk inclined with regard to the relations of soul and body, little assistance can be obtained in the first instance from those personal opinions which literature has preserved to us, opinions emanating from poets and philosophers who were not of the people but consciously above them, and who set themselves some to expose, others to reform, the popular religion, but few simply to maintain it. The conservative force of the ancient religion lay in the inherited and almost instinctive beliefs of the common-folk; oral tradition weighed more with them than philosophic reasoning, and their tenacity of customs as barbarous even as human sacrifice defied the softening influences of an humaner civilisation.

That these characteristics of the ancient Greek folk are stamped equally upon the people of to-day is a fact which every page of this book has confirmed; and it is therefore by analysis of modern beliefs and customs relative to death that I propose to discover the fundamental ideas held by the Greek people from the beginning concerning the relations between soul and body. For I venture to think that the great teachers of antiquity, whose doctrines dominate ancient literature, were often more widely removed by their genius, than are the modern folk by the lapse of centuries, from the peasants of those early days, and that the oral tradition of a people who have instinctively clung to every ancient belief and custom is even after more than two thousand years a safer guide than the contemporary writings of men who deliberately discarded or arbitrarily modified tradition in favour of the results of their own personal speculations. First then the peasants of modern Greece must furnish our clue to the popular beliefs of antiquity; afterwards we may profitably consider the use and handling of those beliefs in ancient literature.

To this end I shall examine first and necessarily at some length a certain abnormal condition of the dead about which very definite ideas are everywhere held; for the abhorrence and dread with which the abnormal state is regarded will be an accurate measure of the eagerness with which the opposite and normal state is desired; and further in this desire to promote and to secure the normal condition of the departed will be found the motive of various funeral-customs.

This abnormal condition of the dead is a kind of vampirism. It is believed that under certain conditions a dead body is withheld from the normal process of corruption, is re-animated, and revisits the scenes of its former life, sometimes in a harmless or even kindly mood, but far more often bent on mischief and on murder. The superstition as it now stands is by no means wholly Greek or wholly popular. Two extraneous influences, the one Slavonic and the other ecclesiastical, have considerably modified it. But in the present section I shall confine myself to describing the appearance, nature, habits, and proper treatment of the Greek vampire as he is now conceived; the work of analysing the superstition and of separating the pure Hellenic metal from the extraneous alloys with which in its now current form it is contaminated will occupy the next section; and the two which follow will be devoted to showing that the native residue of superstition was in fact well known to the ancient Greeks and was utilised to no small extent in their literature.

The best accounts of this superstition and of the savage practices to which it led are furnished by writers of the seventeenth century. At the present day, though the superstition is far from extinction, the more violent outbreaks of it are comparatively rare; and, although stories dealing with it may frequently be heard, it might perhaps be difficult to piece together any complete and coherent account of the Greek vampire without a previous knowledge obtained from writers of two or three centuries ago. In such stories as I myself have heard I have found nothing new, and have often missed something with which older narratives had made me familiar. In the seventeenth century some parts of Greece would seem to have been infested by these vampires. The island of Santorini (the ancient Thera) acquired so enduring a notoriety in this respect, that even at the present day ‘to send vampires to Santorini[959]’ is a proverbial expression synonymous with ‘owls to Athens’ or ‘coals to Newcastle’; and the inhabitants of the island enjoyed so wide a reputation as experts in dealing with them, that two stories recently published[960], one from Myconos and the other from Sphakiá in Crete, actually end with the despatch of a vampire’s body to Santorini for effective treatment there. The justice of this reputation will shortly appear; for one of the best accounts of the superstition was written by a Jesuit residing in the island, to whom the resurrection of these vampires seemed an unquestionable, if also inexplicable, phenomenon of by no means rare occurrence.

The most common form of the Greek name for this species of vampire is βρυκόλακας[961], and in order to avoid on the one hand continual qualification of the word ‘vampire’ (which I have used hitherto as the nearest though not exact equivalent) and on the other hand confusion of the Greek with the Slavonic species from which in certain traits it differs, I prefer henceforth to adopt a transliteration of the Greek word, and, save where I have occasion to speak of the purely Slavonic form of vampire, to employ the name vrykólakas (plural vrykólakes[962]).

The first of those writers of the seventeenth century whose accounts deserve attention is one to whose treatise on various Greek superstitions reference has already frequently been made, Leo Allatius. ‘The vrykolakas,’ he writes[963], ‘is the body of a man of evil and immoral life—very often of one who has been excommunicated by his bishop. Such bodies do not like those of other dead men suffer decomposition after burial nor turn to dust, but having, as it appears, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out the same sound; from this circumstance the vrykolakas has received the name τυμπανιαῖος (“drumlike”).’ Into such a body, he continues, the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about, chiefly at night, knocking at doors and calling one of the household. If such an one answer, he dies next day; but a vrykolakas never calls twice, and so the inhabitants of Chios (whence Allatius’ observations and information were chiefly derived) secure themselves by always waiting for a second call at night before replying. ‘This monster is said to be so destructive to men, that appearing actually in the daytime, even at noon—and that not only in houses but in fields and highroads and enclosed vineyards—it advances upon them as they walk along, and by its mere aspect without either speech or touch kills them.’ Hence, when sudden deaths occur without other assignable cause, they open the tombs and often find such a body.

Thereupon ‘it is taken out of the grave, the priests recite prayers, and it is thrown on to a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished the joints of the body gradually fall apart; and all the remains are burnt to ashes....’ ‘This belief,’ he pursues, ‘is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’

‘It is impossible that a dead man become a vrykolakas, save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents, and oft-times at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew before[964] cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.

‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man ... and the dead man—one who has long been dead and buried—appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether....’

Then, after denying the reality of such things, which exist in imagination (κατὰ φαντασίαν) only, the nomocanon with some inconsistency continues: ‘But know that when such remains be found, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral-meats[965].’

Allatius then leaving the nomocanon pronounces his own views. ‘It is the height of folly to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found in the graves incorrupt, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race.’ He therefore advocates the burning of them, always accompanied by prayers.

To the fact of non-decomposition he cites several witnesses—among them Crusius[966] who narrates the case of a Greek’s body being found by Turks in this condition after the man had been two years dead and being burnt by them. Moreover Allatius himself claims to have been an eye-witness of such a scene when he was at school in Chios. A tomb having for some reason been opened at the church of St Antony, ‘on the top of the bones of other men there was found lying a corpse perfectly whole; it was unusually tall of stature; clothes it had none, time or moisture having caused them to perish; the skin was distended, hard, and livid, and so swollen everywhere, that the body had no flat surfaces but was round like a full sack[967]. The face was covered with hair dark and curly; on the head there was little hair, as also on the rest of the body, which appeared smooth all over; the arms by reason of the swelling of the corpse were stretched out on each side like the arms of a cross; the hands were open, the eyelids closed, the mouth gaping, and the teeth white.’ How the body was finally treated or disposed of is not related.

The next writer whose testimony deserves notice and respect is Father François Richard, a Jesuit priest of the island of Santorini, to whose work on that island reference has above been made[968]. Agreeing with Allatius in his description of the appearance of vrykolakes, he adds thereto many instances of their unpleasantly active habits. His whole narrative bears the stamp of good faith, but is too long to translate in full; and I must therefore content myself with a précis of it, indicating by inverted commas such phrases and sentences as are literally rendered.

The Devil, he says[969], works by means of dead bodies as well as by living sorcerers. ‘These bodies he animates and preserves for a long time in their entirety; he appears with the face of the dead, traversing now the streets and anon the open country; he enters men’s houses, leaving some horror-stricken, others deprived of speech, and others again lifeless; here he inflicts violence, there loss, and everywhere terror.’ At first I believed these apparitions to be merely the souls of the dead returning to ask help to escape the sooner from Purgatory; but such souls never commit such excesses—assault, destruction of property, death, and so forth. It is clearly then a form of diabolical possession; for indeed the priests with the bishop’s permission employ forms of exorcism. They assemble on Saturday (the only day on which vrykolakes rest in the grave and cannot stir abroad) and exhume the body which is suspected. ‘And when they find it whole, fresh, and full of blood, they take it as certain that it was serving as an instrument of the Devil.’ They accordingly continue their exorcisms until with the departure of the Devil the body begins to decompose and gradually to lose ‘its colour and its embonpoint, and is left a noisome and ghastly lump.’ So rapid was the decomposition in the case of a Greek priest’s daughter, Caliste by name, that no one could remain in the church, and the body was hastily re-interred; from that time she ceased to appear.

At Stampalia (Astypalaea), he proceeds, a short time before my arrival (about the middle of the seventeenth century) five bodies were so treated, those of three married men, a Greek monk, and a girl. In Nio (Ios) a woman who was confessing to me affirmed that she had seen her husband again fifty days after burial, though already his grave had been once changed and the ordinary rites performed to lay him. He began however again to torment the people, killing actually some four or five; so his body was exhumed for the second time and was publicly burnt. Only two years ago they burnt two bodies in the island of Siphanto for the same reason; ‘and rarely does a year pass in which people do not speak with dread of these false resuscitations.’ In Santorini a shoemaker named Alexander living at Pyrgos became a vrykolakas; he used to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.... In Amorgos these vrykolakes have been seen not only at night but in open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.

I heard, continues the holy father, from the Abbé of the famous monastery of Amorgos, that a certain merchant of Patmos, having gone abroad on business, died. His widow sent a boat to bring his body home. Now it so happened that one of the sailors sat down by accident upon the coffin and to his horror felt the body move. They opened the coffin therefore and found the body intact. Their fears being thus confirmed, they nailed up the coffin again and handed it over to the widow without a word and it was buried. But soon the dead man began to appear at night in the houses, violent and turbulent to such a degree that more than fifteen persons died of fright or of injuries inflicted by it. The exorcisms of priests and monks proved useless, and they thought best to send back the body whence it had been brought. The sailors however unshipped it at the first desert island[970] and burnt it there, after which it was seen no more.

The Abbé considered this possession by the devil to be a proof of the truth of the Greek persuasion, alleging that no Mohammedan or Roman Catholic ever became a vrykolakas[971]. This however is not strictly accurate, for in Santorini a Roman priest, who had apostatized and turned Mohammedan and who for his many crimes was finally hanged, appeared after death and was only disposed of by burning.

Another case was that of Iannetis Anapliotis of the same island, an usurer who about a year before his death repented of his misdeeds and made what amends he could; he also left his wife an order to pay anything else justly reclaimed from him. She however though giving much in charity did not pay his debts. It was just six weeks after his death when she refused to satisfy some just claim for repayment, and immediately he began to appear in the streets and to molest above all his own wife and relatives. Also he woke up priests early in the morning, telling them it was time for matins, pulled coverlets off people as they slept, shook their beds, left the taps of wine-barrels running, and so on. One woman was so frightened in broad day-light as to lose the power of speech for three days, and another whose bed he shook suffered a miscarriage. Then at length his name was published—for as a man of some position he had till then been spared. Exorcism was tried in vain by the Greek priests. Then by my advice the widow paid off all her husband’s debts and made due restitution. Also she had the body exhumed and exorcised a second time. On this occasion I saw it, but it did not look like a real vrykolakas; for, though the hands were whole and parchment-like, the head and the entrails were to some extent decomposed. At the end of the ceremony of exorcism the priests hacked the body to pieces and buried it in a new grave. From this time the vrykolakas never re-appeared, but this was due, in my opinion, to the restitution made, not to the treatment of the body.

There are in Greek cemeteries dead bodies of another kind which after fifteen or sixteen years—sometimes even twenty or thirty—are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums; for this reason they have the name ντουπί[972] (drum).... The common opinion of the Greeks is that this inflation is a sure sign that the man had suffered excommunication; and indeed Greek priests and bishops add always to the formula of excommunication the curse, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death to remain indissoluble[973].’

From this account it is manifest that Father Richard, with the experience acquired by residence in Santorini, drew a distinction not known to Leo Allatius between two classes of dead persons. Those, who though not subject to the natural law of decomposition lay quiescent in their graves, were merely τυμπανιαῖοι or ‘drum-like’; while vrykolakes proper were addicted also to periodical resurrection. And the extract with which he concludes his description shows that the authorities of the rival Church pretended to powers of even more subtle discrimination between different species of incorrupt corpses. The importance of Father Richard’s distinction will appear later; there was originally a difference in the usage of the two words, although not precisely the difference which he makes; but by the middle of the seventeenth century popular speech rarely discriminated between them. To the common-folk, whose views Leo Allatius fairly presents, any body which was withheld from decomposition for any cause was at least a potential vrykolakas, even if its power of resurrection was not known to have been exerted and no act of violence had been traced to it.

For further attestation of the prevalence and the violence of this superstition it would be easy to quote many graphic accounts by other writers, such as Robert Sauger[975], another Jesuit of Santorini, or the traveller Tournefort[976]. But it will suffice to call as witness Paul Lucas, whose observations concern a part of the Greek world remote enough from either Chios or Santorini, the island of Corfu. ‘Some persons,’ he says, ‘who seem possessed of sound good sense speak of a curious thing which often happens in this place, as also in the island of Santorini. According to their account dead persons return and show themselves in open day, going even into the houses and inspiring great terror in those who see them. In consequence of this, whenever one of these apparitions is seen, the people go at once to the cemetery to exhume the corpse, which is then cut in pieces and finally is burnt by sentence of the Governors and Magistrates. This done, these quasi-dead return no more. Monsieur Angelo Edme, Warden and Governor of the island, assured me that he himself had pronounced a sentence of this kind in a case where upwards of fifty reasonable persons were found to testify to the occurrence[977].’

The superstition, which had so firm a grip upon the Greeks of two or three centuries ago, has by no means relaxed its hold at the present day, in spite of the efforts made by the higher authorities civil and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, to suppress those savage and gruesome ceremonies to which it leads. The horrible scenes of old time, when the suspected body was dragged from its grave and dismembered by a panic-stricken and desperate mob, when the heart, as sometimes happened, was torn out and boiled to shreds in vinegar, or when the ghastly remains were burnt on a public bonfire, have certainly become rarer. The administrative action of the Venetians in the Ionian Islands in requiring proof to be furnished of the vrykolakas’ resuscitation, and official sanction to be obtained for exhuming and burning the body; the more vigorous suppression of such acts by the Turks in the Aegean Islands[978] and probably also on the mainland; the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners, hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief fruit of which is a desire to appear ‘civilised’ in the eyes of Europe; all these influences combined

have certainly succeeded in reducing the proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent upon it. Thus in some places the old practice of burning corpses which fail to decompose within the normal period—and it must be remembered that exhumation after three years’ burial is an established rite of the Church in Greece—has been definitely superseded by milder expedients. In Scyros the body is carried round to forty churches in turn and is then re-interred, while in parts of Crete, in Cythnos[979], and, I believe, in some other Aegean Islands the custom is to transfer the body to a grave in some uninhabited islet, whence its return is barred by the intervening salt water.

None the less the superstition itself still holds a firm place among the traditional beliefs of modern Greece. Witness the following account of it from a history[980] of the district of Sphakiá in Crete written by the head of a monastery there and published in 1888:

‘It is popularly believed that most of the dead, those who have lived bad lives or who have been excommunicated by some priest (or, worse still, by seven priests together, τὸ ἑπταπάπαδον[981]) become vrykolakes[982]; that is to say, after the separation of the soul from the body there enters into the latter an evil spirit, which takes the place of the soul and assumes the shape of the dead man and so is transformed into a vrykolakas or man-demon.