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

The Slavonic and the ecclesiastical elements have now been removed from the modern Greek superstition, and the Hellenic residue is briefly this: the human body sometimes remains incorruptible in the earth, and in this state is liable to resuscitation; persons so affected stand as it were halfway between the living and the dead, resembling the former when they walk the earth, and the latter when they are lying quiet in their graves or, if unburied, elsewhere; during their periods of resuscitation they act as reasonable human beings, but their whole condition is pitiable, and the most humane way of treating them is to burn their bodies; disintegration being thus secured, they return no more to this world, but are numbered among the departed. Further the causes of such a condition are threefold—lack of burial, sudden death, and execration or deadly sin deserving of it. The only question which we have left unsolved is that of the agency by which the body is resuscitated. The Devil is now held responsible; but the Devil is a Christian, not a pagan, conception.

There is, so far as I know, only one story in ancient literature which contains anything like a full account of a revenant. This is related by Phlegon[1071], a freedman of Hadrian; and the narrator professes to have been an eye-witness of the occurrences which he describes. In his story are embodied most of those very ideas which on wholly other grounds have been argued to form the genuine Hellenic element in the modern superstition concerning vrykolakes, and I shall therefore reproduce it at length. Unfortunately however the beginning of the story is lost, and therewith possibly the cause assigned for the strange conduct of the resuscitated corpse which plays the heroine’s part.

Their daughter Philinnion had been dead and buried somewhat less than six months, when one evening she was observed by her old nurse in the guest-chamber, where a young man named Machates was lodged, to all appearances alive. The nurse at once ran to the girl’s parents and bade them come with her and see their child. Charito however was so overcome by the tidings that she first fainted and then wept hysterically for her lost daughter and finally began to abuse the old woman, calling her mad and ordering her out of the room; but the nurse expostulated with spirit, and Charito at last went with her. In the meanwhile however Philinnion and her lover had retired to rest, so that when the mother arrived she could not obtain a good view of her; but from the peep which she got of the girl’s clothes and the shape of her face she thought that she recognised her daughter. Then, feeling that she could not at that hour ascertain the truth of the matter, she decided to keep quiet until morning, and then to rise betimes and surprise the girl if still there, or, failing that, to extort from Machates the whole truth.

But when dawn came the girl had gone away unobserved, and Charito began to take Machates to task, telling him the whole story and imploring him to confess the truth and to keep nothing back. The young man (who seems to have been unaware that Charito had lost a daughter named Philinnion) was much distressed, and at first would only admit that such was indeed the name of the girl whom they had seen; but afterwards he told the whole story of the girl’s visits to him, mentioning that she had said that she came without her parents’ knowledge. To confirm his story, he produced the gold ring which she had given him and her breast-band which she had left behind on the previous night. These were at once recognised by Charito as having belonged to her daughter, and with a loud cry she rent her clothes and loosed her hair and threw herself upon the ground beside the tokens and began making lamentation anew. Her example was soon followed by others of the family as if in preparation for a funeral, and Machates, at his wits’ end how to quiet them, promised to let them see the girl if she should come to him again.

That night accordingly they kept watch, and at the usual hour the girl came, went into Machates’ room, and sat down upon the bed. The young man himself was now anxious to learn the truth; he could not wholly credit the supposition that it was a dead woman who had come so regularly, and who had eaten and drunk with him and lain at his side, and thought rather that the real Philinnion’s tomb had been robbed and the booty sold to the father of the girl, whoever she might be, who visited him. No sooner therefore was she come than he quietly summoned the watchers. The girl’s parents at once entered, and were for a while dumb with astonishment at the sight of her, and then threw their arms round her with loud cries. Then said Philinnion, ‘O my 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 again to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ Scarcely had she spoken when she became a corpse and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all. Confusion and loud lamentation at once ensued, and before long the rumour had got about the town and was reported to the narrator of the story, Phlegon, who appears to have held some official position.

To him at any rate it fell to keep order during the night among the excited townsfolk, and early next morning he was present at a crowded meeting in the theatre, at which it was decided to inspect first of all the family vault in which Philinnion had been laid.

The vault having been opened, on all the shelves, save that appropriated to Philinnion, were found bodies or bones; but on hers there was nothing except an iron ring belonging to Machates and a gilt cup—presents which she had received from him at her first visit. Horror-stricken the party left the vault and went straight to Demostratus’ house, and in the guest-chamber saw the girl stretched upon the floor. Thence they returned to another public assembly as crowded as the first, at which one Hyllus, who was reputed not only the best seer of the place but also a clever diviner[1072] and possessed of a comprehensive knowledge of other branches of the profession, advised that the girl’s body should be taken outside the boundaries of the town and should be burnt to ashes—it was inexpedient, he said, for her to be buried in the town—and that certain propitiatory rites, accompanied by a general purification, should be paid to Hermes Chthonios and the Eumenides.

This story was known to Father Richard of Santorini[1073], who recognised in it an ancient case parallel to some which he himself had witnessed or learnt from other eye-witnesses in his own times. Even the harmless character of Philinnion did not appear to him incompatible with the popular conception of vrykolakes. Indeed, as we saw above, he himself mentions, among the many instances known to him, one in which a shoemaker of Santorini, having turned vrykolakas, manifested no vicious tendencies, but rather the greatest affection and solicitude for his wife and children.

Nor again is the incident of Philinnion’s intercourse with Machates unparalleled in modern times. Many travellers and writers[1074] have concurred in recording the belief that the vrykolakas sometimes revisits his widow, or does violence to other women in their husbands’ absence, or even marries again in some place where he is unknown, and that of such unions children have been born. Indeed in the Middle Ages this belief seems to have spread even beyond the confines of Greece; for a Roman priest, early in the seventeenth century, sums up the views of his Church on the subject as follows[1075]: ‘Devils, though incorporeal and spiritual, can take to themselves the bodies of dead men ... and in such bodies can have intercourse with women, as commonly with striges[1076] and witches, and by such union can even beget children.’ This statement would be a fair ecclesiastical summary of modern Greek belief. In Thessaly I myself was told of a family in the neighbourhood of Domoko, who reckoned a vrykolakas among their ancestors of the second or third generation back, and by virtue of such lineage inherited a special skill (such as is more commonly ascribed to σαββατογεννημένοι, ‘men born on a Saturday,’ when vrykolakes usually rest in their graves, or to ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι[1077], those who are in close touch with a ‘familiar spirit,’) in dealing with those vrykolakes which from time to time troubled the country-side; indeed they had been summoned, I was assured, even to remote districts for consultation as specialists.

The story of Philinnion was not overlooked by Bernhard Schmidt, but he does not appear to have recognised in it anything more relevant than in the ancient ghost-stories (gespenstergeschichten) among which he reckons it[1078]. Most emphatically this is no ghost-story. The distinction between ghosts and Greek revenants is of a primary and universal nature, patent to all who can discriminate between soul and body. In this story Philinnion acts as a revenant and is treated as a revenant; the inspection of the vault in which her body had been laid and the purpose of her nocturnal visits to Machates furnish conclusive evidence of her corporeal resuscitation; and the method of disposing of her corpse is the method generally approved and employed in the case of revenants—cremation. In effect all that remains of the story is in complete accord with what I have claimed on other grounds as the Hellenic element in the modern superstition; only one detail is wanting—the cause of Philinnion’s resuscitation—and if we had the first part of the story, it is not unlikely that in it we should find that her early death had been also sudden or violent. Clearly then the belief in revenants was known in Greece in the age of Hadrian.

A casual allusion to the same superstition occurs also in Lucian[1079]. ‘I know of a man,’ says a doctor named Antigonus, ‘who rose again twenty days after he was buried; I attended him after his resurrection as well as before his death.’ ‘But how was it,’ rejoins another, ‘that in twenty days the body did not decompose or in any case the man perish of hunger?’ Unfortunately no answer is given and the subject drops, but the man in question was clearly a corporeal revenant and not a mere ghost.

The fixity of popular phrases of imprecation has been amply demonstrated in the last section[1081]. A large selection of curses, all conceived in the same spirit, furnished, by their contrast with some features of the now contaminated superstition, a clue for the detection of the Slavonic elements therein. These imprecations, we learnt, were based upon the purely Hellenic belief, and had remained unaffected by the foreign influence which had modified and in some respects almost transformed it. Spoken often in a moment of passion, springing spontaneously and familiarly to the lips, too hasty to be informed by conscious thought, such curses have been handed down from generation to generation as fixed expressions subject to none of the changes which come of deliberate reflection. Though the old beliefs have been altered by the infusion of alien doctrines, the old curses stand fast in bold antagonism to all foreign lore, true records of a superstition now garbled, coins stamped with the effigy and superscription of by-gone thought, but current still.

As the simplest types of these old-established curses may be taken the two phrases, νὰ μὴν τὸν δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him,’ and νὰ τὸν βγάλῃ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth cast him out.’ The one is negative in form, the other positive, but both equally suggest, in the peasant’s mind, both the incorruptibility of the body and its resuscitation. Can a prototype of these curses be found in ancient literature? If so, in view of the general continuity of Greek belief and custom, we shall be justified in concluding that, as those ancient curses are identical with the modern, so the superstition which suggested them in old time is identical with that part of the modern superstition on which they are now based.

Two examples of these curses are furnished by Euripides. In a scene where Orestes conjures his comrade Pylades to leave him and not to involve himself in the meditated act of vengeance, the latter replies[1082], ‘Never may the fruitful earth receive my blood, nor yet the gleaming air, if ever I turn traitor to thee and save myself and forsake thee!’ In like tone rings out Hippolytus’ assertion of his innocence toward his father[1083]: ‘Now by Zeus the judge of oaths and by the earth beneath our feet, I swear that never have I touched thy marriage-bed, nor would have willed it nor conceived the thought. May I verily perish without glory and without name, cityless and homeless, an outcast and wanderer upon the earth, yea and in death may neither sea nor earth receive my flesh, if I have proved false!’

‘May the earth not receive my flesh!’ Such is the common burden of the two oaths; such the final chord struck by Hippolytus in that symphony of imprecations with which he vindicates his innocence; such too would be the strongest oath by which any peasant of to-day might bind himself. The very words have scarcely varied in a score of centuries; who then will venture to claim that their purport is changed? Is it not clear that just as in later times the Church, by incorporating the popular curse in her formula of excommunication, seized the weapons of paganism and turned them against those rebels and infidels whom her own direst fulminations had no power to dismay, so Euripides, conscious that no imaginings of his own art could suffice to excite in his hearers that horror which the climax of self-execration demanded, did not disdain ‘the touchings of things common,’ but turned to tragic use a popular curse which then, as now, pierced home to every heart? It would be strange indeed if words, which since early in the Christian era have continuously implied a belief in the indissolubility and resuscitation of those who die accursed, should be held to have borne some other meaning a few centuries earlier.

Thus then Euripides, by the identity of his language with that of to-day, discovers most conspicuously his knowledge of that which on other grounds I have shown to be the Hellenic element in the superstition concerning vrykolakes. But he was not alone in employing it for dramatic purposes. In the pages of Sophocles too and of Aeschylus there are passages which only a knowledge of this superstition can adequately explain. First among these is the climax of that speech in which Oedipus, blind and outcast, denounces his undutiful son:

‘Begone, abhorred and renounced of me thy father, thou basest villain, and take with thee these curses that I call down upon thee, that thou win not with thy spear that land of thine own kin, nor yet return ever again to the vale of Argos, but that thou and he that drave thee forth, smiting and smitten, fall each by a brother’s hand. Such is my curse; yea, and I call on Tartarus, in whose hated gloom my father lies, to drive thee from his home[1084].’

is that with which I am concerned. It is an old-established difficulty. Commentators have translated variously ‘to remove thee from thy home,’ ‘to take thee away to his home,’ ‘to give thee another home’; but in effect they are all agreed in trying to make the words refer to removal from this to the nether world, or, in one word, to death. Now even if the word ἀποικίζω could in this context bear any of the meanings ascribed to it, such an euphemism following upon the explicit threat that Polynices should be slain by his own brother’s hand would be an imbecile anticlimax; but I question the very possibility of the supposed usage. It is true that an emigrant from one place becomes an immigrant into another; but that cannot justify the interchange of the two terms. Tartarus is here besought, as plainly as language can express it, to drive Polynices out, not to take him in. There can be only one explanation of that prayer. Polynices’ death has already been foretold; but his father’s curse pursues him beyond death. Tartarus, in whose keeping the dead should lie, is conjured to drive him forth from the home of the dead, even as the peasants now pray that the earth may cast out those whom they hate.

And the context shows clearly that the curse was so understood by Polynices. Turning to Antigone and Ismene with impassioned entreaty he implores them—them at least, though all others forsake him and turn against him—if so be his father’s cruel imprecations come to fulfilment and they, his sisters, ever return to their home, not to leave him dishonoured, but to lay him in the grave and to grant him the guerdons of the dead[1085]. Why then this insistence, unless the father’s curse had extended beyond death? Merely to introduce a reference to the plot of the Antigone? Clearly more than that. Polynices was to die bound by his father’s curse, slain by his brother’s hand, doubly debarred, if modern beliefs be a key to ancient, from dissolution and from reception into the nether world. The words of his father’s invocation of Tartarus had conveyed to his mind the certainty of a doom outlasting death, that Tartarus should not receive him, but reject him from the home of the dead. Only one faint gleam of hope was left, that by the fulfilment of those last offices of love toward the departed, which were for all men a passport to the lower world, he, burdened and bound with a father’s curse, both slayer and slain of his own brother, might yet be not debarred from his last home, but free to enter into rest.

Thus Sophocles in language less popular, but hardly less clear, than that of Euripides proclaims that the belief in the non-dissolution or rejection of the body by the earth and the powers under the earth was a terror as potent then as it is now, and an ever effective weapon of malediction. Aeschylus had gone even further, and, by enlisting this terror among the threats uttered on behalf of a dead man by a god in his most holy sanctuary, had claimed as it were for the popular superstition the highest religious sanction.

In the Choephori[1086] Orestes is made to review in a speech as difficult as it is powerful the motives which are urging him on to the requital of blood with blood. Most cogent among these motives is the explicit command issued from Apollo’s Delphic shrine, bidding him not spare his father’s murderess, mother though she be, and foretelling the direst penalties for disobedience. And what are these penalties? First, the physical torment of ‘blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour’; second, the mental horror of coming madness, ‘the arrow that flieth in darkness winged by the powers of hell with the curse of fallen kindred, even raving and vain terror born of the night’; third, banishment from home and city, with no place at friendly board, no part in drink-offering and sacrifice; and yet one penalty more wherein should culminate the threatened agonies, ‘to die at last with none to honour, none to love him, damned, even in the doom that wastes all, to know no corruption.’

It has generally been held that ταριχευθέντα is here metaphorically used of the wasting or withering of the body through physical suffering, the first penalty, or, it may be, through mental distress, the second. In other words, the last line of the passage merely sums up in a concise expression a penalty, or penalties, previously detailed. On the same view it is but consistent to regard πάντων ἄτιμον κἄφιλον as a similar summary of the third penalty. Stripped of these recapitulations and vain repetitions Apollo’s final threat amounts to—what? θνήσκειν χρόνῳ, ‘to die in course of time.’ A blood-curdling and unique climax of human suffering in very truth! And this a last threat after leprosy and madness and outcast loneliness? Surely rather a promise of release and rest.

But let the anti-climax pass. Whence comes the alleged metaphorical meaning of ταριχεύεσθαι, so foreign to its normal use? How comes it to denote the wasting of disease, and what authority has this supposed use? Its mainstay apparently is a single passage in a pseudo-Demosthenic speech, which, in describing the cowardly assault of a young man upon an old, depicts the aggressor as νεαλὴς καὶ πρόσφατος and his victim as τεταριχευμένου καὶ πολὺν χρόνον συμπεπτωκότος[1088]. But here the metaphor, whatever may be thought of its elegance or of its likelihood to excite mirth rather than indignation, is at least clearly explained both by its antithesis and by its context; νεαλὴς and πρόσφατος are terms properly applied to ‘fresh’ fish or meat, τεταριχευμένος to the same commodities ‘preserved’ by drying or pickling, and we understand at once that the old man is represented to be dried and shrivelled in appearance. Such is the support for the alleged Aeschylean usage of ταριχευθέντα without the same antithesis to illuminate its meaning. Are we then to understand that all the fulminations and thunderings of Apollo’s oracle dwindle away into an appeal to Orestes’ pride in his personal appearance and a warning that leprosy will render him as unattractive as a bloater? Or, if it be claimed that the slow painful process of wasting is suggested rather than its ultimate effect, is it reasonable that a word which properly denotes artificial preservation should be used metaphorically of natural decay? This is not metaphor, but metamorphosis.

Let us then abandon far-fetched explanations; let us conceive it possible that Aeschylus used the word in the sense which it normally bore in relation to the human body—‘preserved from corruption,’ like the mummies of Egypt—and further that he placed the word παμφθάρτῳ in immediate juxtaposition with it in order to emphasise the more strikingly the contrast between the threatened ‘non-corruption’ and the ordinary ‘wasting’ powers of death. So understood, the final penalty presents a true climax. As the victim is to be excluded in his lifetime from all intercourse with the living, so in his death, by the withholding of that dissolution without which there is no entrance to the lower world, he is to be cut off from communion with the dead. He is to die with none to honour him with the rites due to the dead, none to love him and shed the tears that are their just meed, but even in that last doom which consumes all others is damned to be withheld from corruption. As ‘Euripides the human’ uses the common phrase of to-day ‘May the earth not receive,’ so Aeschylus the divine anticipates the ecclesiastical formula, ‘and after death thou shalt be indissoluble.’

In the Supplices the king of the Pelasgians, who is beset by the daughters of Danaus with the twofold claim of kinsfolk and suppliants, and besought to deliver them from the lust and violence of their pursuers, acknowledges himself in a sore strait. If he rescue his suppliants, he may involve his people in war; if he refuse to hearken, he fears that, as a tacit accomplice in the violence and pollution[1089] threatened, he may make to himself ‘the God of all destruction a stern Avenger ever present, an Avenger that sets not free the dead even in Hades’ home[1090].’

Again in the Eumenides, when Orestes having slain his mother is no longer seeking for vengeance but flying therefrom with no hope of safety save in the promises of Apollo whose will he has done, the band of pursuing Furies, like to be presently thwarted by that god, yet comfort their black hearts with the assurance of future retribution. ‘Yea,’ cries one, ‘me doth Apollo vex, but Orestes shall he not redeem; though he flee from me beneath the earth, there is no freeing for him, but because of his blood-guiltiness he shall find another in my stead to visit his pollution on his head[1091].’