Ï€ÎÏ„Ïα νὰ γίνῃ ὠΚωσταντής, λιθάÏι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,πώστειλε τὴν ἈÏÎτω μου, τὴν ἈÏετὼ ’στὰ ξÎνα.
Ï€ÎÏ„Ïα νὰ γίνῃ ὠΚωσταντής, λιθάÏι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,πώστειλε τὴν ἈÏÎτω μου, τὴν ἈÏετὼ ’στὰ ξÎνα.
Ï€ÎÏ„Ïα νὰ γίνῃ ὠΚωσταντής, λιθάÏι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,πώστειλε τὴν ἈÏÎτω μου, τὴν ἈÏετὼ ’στὰ ξÎνα.
Ï€ÎÏ„Ïα νὰ γίνῃ ὠΚωσταντής, λιθάÏι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,
πώστειλε τὴν ἈÏÎτω μου, τὴν ἈÏετὼ ’στὰ ξÎνα.
‘May Constantine become as rock, yea even as stone, and have no loosing (i.e. dissolution), for that he sent my Areto to a strange land.’
‘May Constantine become as rock, yea even as stone, and have no loosing (i.e. dissolution), for that he sent my Areto to a strange land.’
And in another[1035]:
á½Î»Î¿Î¹ μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὠΚώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,á½Ï€â€™ ἔδωκε τὴν ἈÏετὴ πολὺ μακÏÏ…á½° ’στὰ ξÎνα.
á½Î»Î¿Î¹ μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὠΚώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,á½Ï€â€™ ἔδωκε τὴν ἈÏετὴ πολὺ μακÏÏ…á½° ’στὰ ξÎνα.
á½Î»Î¿Î¹ μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὠΚώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,á½Ï€â€™ ἔδωκε τὴν ἈÏετὴ πολὺ μακÏÏ…á½° ’στὰ ξÎνα.
á½Î»Î¿Î¹ μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὠΚώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,
á½Ï€â€™ ἔδωκε τὴν ἈÏετὴ πολὺ μακÏÏ…á½° ’στὰ ξÎνα.
‘May all my other sons have “loosing†and Constantine be not “loosed,†for that he let my Areté be taken afar to a strange country.’
‘May all my other sons have “loosing†and Constantine be not “loosed,†for that he let my Areté be taken afar to a strange country.’
Again, another version[1036]ends, not with the arrival of Areté in time to close her dying mother’s eyes, but with the revoking of the curse upon Constantine in gratitude for the fulfilment of his oath:
‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.
‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.
‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.
‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’
ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.
‘May the earth where thou liest loose thee and thy tomb consume thee.’ Scarce had she finished her speech and he became but a handful of earth.
‘May the earth where thou liest loose thee and thy tomb consume thee.’ Scarce had she finished her speech and he became but a handful of earth.
Clearly then the curse, which in this story is conceived as binding Constantine’s body and driving him forth from the grave and which must be revoked before his body can be loosed by natural decay, is one of that class which we have been considering;but the story confers the further advantage of letting us see such a curse in operation. Constantine is presented as a revenant, but not of the modern type; for what turn must the story have taken if he had been a normalvrykolakas? His first act would have been to devour his nearest of kin—his mother, who was tearing up his grave-stones and cursing him: and his next, if he had troubled to go as far as Babylon, to make a like end of Areté. And what do we actually find? Constantine acts not only as a reasonable man in seeking to allay his sister’s suspicions, but also as a good man in keeping his oath. He is driven forth from the grave on a quest which (in most versions of the story) earns him no thanks from those whom he benefits; he does his weary mission and (in most versions) goes back again to the cold grave from which the curse had raised him. Our sympathy is engaged by Constantine no less than by his mother. He too is a sufferer, first stricken down in his youth by pestilence, and then cursed because his oath remained unfulfilled. He claims our pity, and in this differs fundamentally from the ordinaryvrykolakaswhich could only excite our horror.
Furthermore it is noteworthy that in the many versions of this poem, just as in the popular curses which I have quoted, the wordvrykolakasis nowhere found[1037].
Hence I am inclined to believe that the original poem, from which have come so many modern versions, differing widely in many respects, but agreeing completely in the exclusion both of the Slavonic wordvrykolakasand of all the suggestions of horror which surround it, was composed in a period anterior to the intrusion of Slavonic ideas; and that the modern versions therefore, which prove their fidelity to the spirit of the original precisely by having refused admittance to anything Slavonic, furnish that which we are seeking, the purely and genuinely Greek element in the now composite superstition. That Greek element then is the conception of therevenantas a sufferer deserving even of pity, the very antithesis in character of the Slavonic vampire, an aggressor exciting only loathing and horror.
In the composite modern Greek superstition, as described in the last chapter, the Slavonic element is clearly predominant.But the conclusion to which my analysis of the superstition has now led, explains what would otherwise have been almost inexplicable, the existence of a few stories in which therevenant, though calledvrykolakas, is none the less represented as harmless or even amiable.
One such case is mentioned in Father Richard’s narrative[1038]—the case of a shoemaker in Santorini, who having turnedvrykolakascontinued to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; and though it is added that the people became frightened and exhumed and burned him, this was only a measure of precaution dictated by their experience of othervrykolakes; no charge was brought against this particularrevenant. It might also be supposed that thevrykolakesof Amorgos, mentioned next in the same narrative, who were seen in open day five or six together in a field feeding apparently on green beans, were of the less noxious kind; but they may of course have been carnivorous also.
Another story, recently published[1039], records how a native of Maina, also a shoemaker by trade, having turnedvrykolakasissued from his grave every night except Saturday, resumed his work, and continued to live with his wife, whose pregnancy forced her to reveal the truth to her neighbours. When once this was known, many accusations, it is true, were brought against thevrykolakas; but the story at least recognises some domestic and human traits in his character.
But a much more remarkable tale[1040]is told of a field-labourer of Samos who was so devoted to the farmer for whom he worked, that when he died he became avrykolakasand continued secretly to give his services. At night he would go to the farm-buildings, take out the oxen from their stall, yoke them, and plough three acres while his master slept; in the daytime an equal piece of work was done by the master—so that incidentally the oxen were nearly killed. The neighbours however having had their suspicions aroused by the rapidity of the work, which the farmer himself could in no wise explain, kept watch one night, and having detected thevrykolakasopened his grave, found him, as would be expected, whole and incorrupt, and burned him.
Such stories as these testify that the old and purely Greek conception ofrevenantsis not quite extinct even in places where the only name for them is the Slavonic wordvrykolakes.
The Slavonic element in the modern superstition having been now removed, it remains to consider what was the attitude of the Church towards the Greek belief inrevenantsand what effect her teaching had upon it.
I have already pointed out that the Jesuit, Father Richard, discriminated betweenvrykolakesand certain bodies called ‘drums,’ which were found incorrupt after many years of burial. This distinction he had no doubt learnt from clergy of the Greek Church; for, while the common-folk held that those whom the earth did not receive and consume were necessarily ejected by her, or, in other words, that a dead man whose body did not decay was necessarily also arevenant, the Church distinguished, as we shall see, between belief in incorruptibility and belief in resuscitation, inculcating the former, and varying between condonation and condemnation of the latter. These two ideas must therefore be handled separately.
The incorruptibility of the body of any person bound by a curse was made a definite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. In an ecclesiastical manuscript, seen by Father Richard, were specifications of the discoloration and other unpleasant symptoms by which the precise quality of that curse—parental, episcopal, and so forth—which had arrested the decay of a corpse might be diagnosed; and in one of the forms of absolution which may be read over any corpse found in such a condition there is a clause which provides for all possible cases without requiring expert diagnosis: ‘Yea, O Lord our God, let Thy great mercy and marvellous compassion prevail; and, whether this Thy servant lieth under curse of father or mother, or under his own imprecation, or did provoke one of Thy holy ministers and sustained at his hands a bond that hath not been loosed, or did incur the most grievous ban of excommunication by a bishop, and through heedlessness and sloth obtained not pardon, pardon Thou him by the hand of me Thy sinful and unworthy servant; resolve Thou his body into that from which it was made; and stablish his soul in the tabernacle of saints[1041].’ But the curse to which the Church naturally gavemost prominence and attached most weight was the ban of excommunication; and therefore, consistently with the accepted doctrine, the formula of excommunication ended by sentencing the offender to remain whole and undissolved after death—a condition from which the body was not freed unless and until absolution was read over it and the decree of excommunication thereby rescinded.
This doctrine was held to have the authority of Christ’s own teaching[1042]. The power which was conferred upon the apostles in the words, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1043],’ was believed to have been so transmitted to their successors, the bishops[1044]of the Church, that they too had the faculty of binding and loosing men’s bodies—that is, of arresting or promoting their decomposition after death. Such an interpretation of the text was facilitated by the very simplicity of its wording; forλÏω, in modern Greekλυόνω, ‘loose,’ expresses equally well the ideas of dissolution and of absolution, whileδÎω, in modern GreekδÎνω, ‘bind,’ embraces their respective opposites. Anomocanon de excommunicatis[1045], promulgated in explanation of the fact that excommunication sometimes failed to produce its expected result, presents clearly the authorised doctrine and at the same time illustrates effectively the twofold usage of the words ‘loosing’ and ‘binding.’
‘Concerning excommunicated persons, the which suffer excommunication by their bishops and after death are found with their bodies “not loosed†(ἄλυτα).
‘Certain persons 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, and have been buried, and in a short time their bodies have been found “loosed†(λελυμÎνα) and sundered bone from bone....
‘Now this is exceeding marvellous that he who hath beenlawfully excommunicated should after his death be found with his body “loosed†(λελυμÎνος τὸ σῶμα) and the joints thereof sundered....’
This ‘exceeding marvellous’ occurrence was therefore submitted to the consideration of learned divines, whose verdict was to the effect that any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more hope of salvation, because he was no longer in a state to be ‘loosed’ and forgiven by the bishop who had excommunicated him[1046], but had become already ‘an inheritor of everlasting torment.’
‘But,’ continues thenomocanonformulated by these theologians, ‘they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole and “not loosed†(ἄλυτα), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order that the body may attain unto freedom from the “bond†(δεσμόν) of excommunication. For even as the body is found “bound†(δεδεμÎνον) in the earth, so is the soul “bound†(δεδεμÎνη) and tormented in the hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be “loosed†(λυθῇ) from excommunication, by power of God the soul likewise is freed from the hands of the Devil, and receiveth the life eternal, the light that hath no evening, and the joy ineffable.’
The whole doctrine of the physical results both of excommunication and of absolution appeared to Leo Allatius to be indisputable, and he mentions[1047]several notable cases in which the truth of it was demonstrated. Athanasius, Metropolitan of Imbros, is quoted as recording how at the request of citizens of Thasos he read the absolution over several incorrupt bodies, ‘and before the absolution was even finished all the corpses were dissolved into dust.’ A similar case was that of a converted Turk who was subsequently excommunicated at Naples, and had been dead some years before he obtained absolution and dissolution at the hands of two Metropolitans. More remarkable still was a case in which a priest, whohad pronounced a sentence of excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained ‘bound.’ The matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian’s body, and towards the end of the reading, ‘the swelling of the body went down, and it turned completely to dust.’ The Turk thereupon embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.
Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1048]. The Sultan having been informed—among other evidences of the power of Christianity—that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest’s widow who had been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.
Exhumed at the Sultan’s instance the body was found to be still sound and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time under the Sultan’s seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could be heard from within the coffin. It wasthen again kept for a few days under the Sultan’s seal, and when finally the coffin was opened the body was found ‘dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained mercy.’ And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is recorded to have exclaimed, ‘Certainly the Christian religion is true beyond all question.’
Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and thenomocanonabove quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear later[1049], the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a challenge to repentance.
The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person whose body was thus ‘bound’ by excommunication, was one which has already been explained,τυμπανιαῖος[1050]or, in another form,τυμπανίτης[1051]—swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius’ reference to it, was certainly less common than the wordvrykolakas, had probably at one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect, borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being ‘bound’ and withheld from corruption by a curse.
At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely felt; for, when once the Greekrevenanthad acquired the baneful characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely never have claimed as a new thing the power to ‘bind’ the dead by excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling too) believed that persons so ‘bound’ becamerampant and raveningvrykolakes. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the incorrupt dead asτυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ and conceived of them as reasonablerevenants.
The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the wordsλÏω, ‘loose,’ andδÎω, ‘bind,’ may well have been the starting-point. If, on the one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated certain sins as ‘having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the world to come,’ and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo Allatius records,καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαÏάλυτος, ‘and after death never to be “loosedâ€â€™ (meaning thereby ‘absolved’); while, on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse were not ‘loosed’ (in the sense of ‘dissolved’); then the common-folk for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical curse as a sentence of ‘non-dissolution’; while the clergy would have been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and by adding to their accustomed formula (μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος, ‘after death never to be “loosedâ€â€™) such apparently innocent words asá½¥ÏƒÏ€ÎµÏ Î±á¼± Ï€ÎÏ„Ïαι καὶ Ï„á½° σίδηÏα[1052], ‘even as stone and iron,’ substituted the idea of ‘dissolution’ for that of ‘absolution’ and definitely committed the Church to the old pagan doctrine.
If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word ‘loosing’ was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the words of Christ, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1053].’ Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, theyare remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained[1054]� This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some time borrowed from paganism.
The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose bodies were ‘bound’ by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth did not ‘receive,’ were ejected by her and re-appeared asrevenants, caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray, and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.
Leo Allatius[1055]reflects both these views and shows their effect upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance of such bodies, which gained for them the nameτυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is exhumed, ‘the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.’ Yet shortly afterwards he states, ‘This belief 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.’ There is a clear contrast between the conduct of ‘the priests’ in one passage and that of the ‘men of piety’ in the other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent attitude towards the popular superstition.
Similar inconsistency marks thenomocanonconcerningvrykolakes, from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo’s account in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are here repeated:
‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they callvrykolakas...
‘It is impossible that a dead man become avrykolakassave 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 nightcauseth men to imaginethat the dead man whom they knew before 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 themto 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 again the reality of such things which existκατὰ φαντασίαν,in imagination only, thenomocanoncontinues:
‘But know thatwhen 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, ... andto perform memorial services for the deadwith funeral meats.’
The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services for his repose[1056]are required, the theory of hallucination is untenable. But this very inconsistency of thenomocanon, though according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as I will show, a very valuable document of the Church’s traditional teaching on this matter.
S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died in 599, refers torevenantsin a passage which, literally rendered, runs as follows[1057]: ‘Again it appears that devils, by means of false prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in imagination (á¼Î½ φαντασίᾳ). For a devil enters into the dead body of the man, and moves it, presentingthe dead man risen again as it were in answer to the foolish prayer of the deceiver. And the evil spirit talks as it were in the person of the dead man with him whom he is deluding, telling him such things as he himself wishes to tell and answering also further questions....’
In this passage Anastasius is clearly thinking ofrevenantscalled up by sorcerers; in his time, when the first Slavonic invaders had only just entered Greece and anything like friendly intercourse between the two races was still a thing of the future, the conception of a real vampire was not yet known to the Greeks of Greece proper, much less to those of Antioch; and it is easy therefore to believe that the calling up of harmlessrevenantswas then a recognised department of witchcraft, which afterwards lost its attractions. The particular circumstances however to which Anastasius refers are of minor importance; the interest of the passage lies in its inconsistency of thought, which results indeed in a certain confusion of language; for to say that ‘it appears that devils ... present even a dead man as risen again, and talk with the living in imagination,’ would be not a little obscure, if the context did not throw light upon the meaning. More lucidly expressed the ideas are these: men see a dead person apparently risen from his grave and able to talk with them; the raising of the dead is the work of a devil (whosemodus operandiis described in the second sentence); the talking is also done by the devil (as explained in the third sentence); and finally the whole thing is an hallucination.
Here then are the same contradictory doctrines as in thenomocanon; the resuscitation of the dead man is the work of a devil who enters into the corpse and moves it and raises it from the grave; and yet it is the ‘imagination’ of the men who see it which is at fault. But it can be no casual coincidence that S. Anastasius in the sixth century and anomocanonwhich was quoted as authoritative in the seventeenth attempted to combine two incompatible doctrines concerning the re-appearance of the dead. Rather is it proof that from a very early age the Church remained halting between two opinions; and the attitude adopted towards the superstition by the clergy, some of whom, according to Leo Allatius, had long tried to root it out of the popular mind, while others rendered aid in absolving suspected corpses, naturallyvaried according as they personally believed thatrevenants(includingvrykolakes) were a figment of the people’s imagination or a real work of the Devil.
Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite of the efforts of the ‘men of piety who received the confessions of Christians[1058]’ to extirpate the superstition, it remains vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even educated men were convinced of it. ‘It is the height of folly,’ says Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, ‘to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race’; and similarly Father Richard opens his account ofvrykolakeswith the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates. As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the diabolical characteristics of thevrykolakasthat they could hardly have failed to accept it.
The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the so-called custom of ‘Charon’s obol.’ I have shown that the practice of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not been forgotten, and is combined with the belief invrykolakes. In the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the sameplace by marking on it the sign of the cross and the letters I. X. N. K. (Ἰησοῦς ΧÏιστὸς νικᾷ, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’), both of them with the avowed purpose of preventing any evil spirit from entering the dead body and making of it avrykolakas[1059]. In Rhodes a piece of ancient pottery, inscribed with the same words but marked with the pentacle[1060]instead of the cross, is placed in the mouth of the dead for the same purpose[1061]. Clearly then in these two islands this ecclesiastical view has been fully accepted by the people; and what I can illustrate by customs in these cases I know to be equally true of Greece in general. Whenever an explanation is sought of the resuscitation of the dead, the answer, if any be forthcoming, lays the responsibility for it on the Devil.
This opinion, as I have said, is abundantly justified by the conduct of modernvrykolakes; but I am inclined to think that it was held also, by the Church at any rate, in the pre-Slavonic age whenrevenantswere of a less diabolical character. The actual practice of excommunication was thought to have been instituted by St Paul[1062], who twice speaks of ‘delivering persons unto Satan[1063].’ The early ecclesiastical interpretation of this phrase is clearly given by Theodoretus[1064]; commenting upon the sentence, “To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,†he draws special attention to the fact that the body, and not the soul, is to be subjected to diabolic affliction, and then adds, ‘We are taught by this, that those who are excommunicated, that is to say, severed from the body of the Church, will be assailed by the devil when he finds them void of grace.’ In other words, the bodily punishment inflicted by the act of excommunication was ‘possession’ by the devil.
Now Theodoretus, it is true, says nothing in this passage as to the continuance of the punishment after death. But clearly if demoniacal possession was the effect of excommunication, and if also, as we have seen, the sentence of excommunication remained valid after death, it must have followed that the dead body no lessthan the living body was possessed of the devil; and if the devil in possession of the corpse chose to agitate it and drive it out of the grave, the dead demoniac was at once arevenant.
There is therefore some probability that, though the Church never threatened the excommunicated with resuscitation but only with incorruptibility, she may at a very early date have offered this explanation of their alleged re-appearance; and the theory of diabolical agency may have gained popular approval from the first; for resuscitation was originally viewed by the Greek people as a calamity befalling the dead man, not as a source of danger to the living; and therefore an ecclesiastical doctrine, that it was by delivering an offender unto Satan that the curse of the Church rendered him arevenant, would have been felt to be a perfectly satisfactory, if novel, explanation of the process by which a known cause, imprecation, produced its known effect, resuscitation.
But, whatever the date at which the theory of diabolical possession was first developed and disseminated, the Church, and the Church only, was responsible for it. The Devil is a Christian conception, just as the vampire is Slavonic. Both must go, if the modern superstition is to be stripped of its accretions, and the genuinely Hellenic elements discovered. What then remains? Simply the belief that the bodies of certain classes of persons did not decay away in their graves but returned therefrom, and the feeling that such persons were sufferers deserving of pity. What then were the classes of persons so affected, according to the original Greek superstition?
The classes now regarded as liable to becomevrykolakeswere enumerated at the end of the last section. But both Slavonic and Christian influences have been felt here, as in the rest of the superstition. I must therefore take those classes one by one, and indicate the origin of each. None of them will require long discussion; theirprovenanceis in many cases self-evident.
(1) Those who have not received the full and due rites of burial.
Here there can be no reason for supposing any alien influence; on the contrary, the high importance attached by the ancient Greeks to funeral-rites is everywhere apparent. It was these which Patroclus’ spirit returned to implore; these which Antigone risked her life to give. The sin of Clytemnestra culminated inthat she ‘dared to bury her husband without mourning or lamentation[1065]’—an essential part of the Greek funeral; and again in historical times Lysander’s honour was tarnished not so much because he put to death some prisoners of war, but because ‘he did not throw earth even upon their dead bodies[1066].’ What effect such neglect was anciently believed to have upon the dead is a question to be considered later; but the general idea is plainly Hellenic.
(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those who having been murdered remain unavenged.
The most important element in this class is formed by those who have been murdered, especially when, as in Maina, they are believed to return from the grave with the purpose of seeking revenge upon their murderers. Such an idea, as will be shown later, is thoroughly consonant with ancient views of bloodguilt. But it appears also from a passage of Lucian[1067]that any ‘violent’ or ‘sudden,’ as opposed to ‘natural,’ death was commonly held to debar the victim from rest no less effectually than actual murder. The whole class may therefore be accepted as Hellenic, and may probably be considered to have always comprised all persons whose lives were cut short suddenly before their proper hour had come.
(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals, and children still-born.
The first division of this class may be variously explained; either the child may be supposed to suffer for the sin committed by its parents on a day when the Church enjoins continence, or else the notion, that children born between Christmas and Epiphany are subject to lycanthropy[1068]and therefore also, according to Slavonic views, to vampirism, has become associated with other church-festivals also. Children still-born are probably to be numbered among victims of ‘sudden’ death. Thus the first division, being of ecclesiastical or Slavonic origin, is to be set aside; the second may probably be included in a larger Hellenic class already considered; neither therefore requires any further discussion.
(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.
The dread which a curse, above all a parent’s curse, excited in the ancient Greeks is well known. No one can have read Aeschylus’ story of the house of Atreus, nor followed with Sophocles the fortunes of Oedipus and his children, without perceiving therein the working of a curse that claims fulfilment and cannot be averted. The idea therefore here involved is purely Hellenic.
(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.
This class is an ecclesiastical variety of the last.
(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate.
The apostate is of courseipso factoexcommunicate, even though no formal sentence have been pronounced against him. The unbaptised have probably been included by priestcraft for purposes of intimidation; baptism is commonly held to prevent children from becoming were-wolves, and therefore alsovrykolakesat death.
(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.
Clerical influence is clearly discernible here, but is not, I think, responsible for the whole idea. A story from Zacynthos[1069]records how the treacherous murderer of a good man was first smitten by a thunderbolt so that he lost both his sight and his reason, and after his death was turned by God into avrykolakasas a punishment for his crime, and has so remained for a thousand years. Here, in spite of the wordvrykolakasbeing used, therevenantis represented, like Constantine in the popular ballad, as a sufferer. This idea has been shown to be pre-Slavonic—and incidentally it is not a little curious that the story itself claims to date from a thousand years ago, when this idea was only beginning to be ousted by Slavonic superstition. But if the idea of ‘punishment’ is old, the idea that the punishment was merited by a crime must be equally old. For this reason, and for others which will be developed later, I hold that the perpetrators of certain deadly sins were from early times regarded as accursed and subject to thesame punishment as befell those on whom a curse had actually been called down. The Church, I think, merely added to the number of those sins, and at the same time undertook the task of pronouncing in many cases the curse which they had earned.
(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.
This class is purely Slavonic in origin. To become a were-wolf in consequence of having eaten flesh which a wolf’s fangs have infected with madness is to a simple mind rational enough; and a were-wolf becomes after death a vampire. Further the belief, so far as I know, belongs only to Elis, one of the districts where Slavonic ascendancy was most complete and continued longest.
(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.
This class also is Slavonic. The jumping of a cat over a dead body is still believed by some Slavonic peoples to be a cause of vampirism[1070], while in Greece the idea is rare and local only.
Thus out of the many conditions by which, in modern belief, a man is predisposed to turnvrykolakas, only three can be genuinely Hellenic: first, lack of burial; second, a sudden or violent death; and third, a parental or other curse, or such sin as renders a man accursed. Therevenanttherefore was regarded, as we inferred also from the story of Constantine and Areté, as a sufferer. His suffering might be the result of pure mischance, as in the case of sudden death, or of neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to lament and to bury him, or again of some sin of his own which had merited a curse. But whether he was the victim of sheer misfortune or of punishment, he was still a sufferer, an object to excite the pity of mankind in general, although in special cases, as when he had been murdered or had not received the last offices of love at the hands of his kinsfolk, he might reasonably be feared by those who had injured him as an avenger.
Since then in the pre-Slavonic period the general feeling towardsrevenantswas a feeling of pity, the treatment of them in that period requires investigation.
Starting once more from the modern superstition, we find that the treatment ofvrykolakesby the Greeks differs widely from that accorded by the Slavs to vampires. The Slavonic method isgenerally to pierce the suspected corpse with a stake of aspen or whitethorn, taking care to drive it right through the heart at one blow. The usual Greek method is to burn the body. The Greeks therefore, who learnt from the Slavs all that is most horrible in their conception ofvrykolakes, none the less thought that they knew a better way of disposing of these new-found pests than that which was practised by their teachers. Convinced by foreign influence of the danger, they relied on a native method of obviating it. They would not impale thevrykolakas; they would burn him. Clearly there must have been some strong conviction and assurance in the heart of a people who, freshly persuaded of the peril threatening them at the hands of so loathly and savage a monster, yet chose to pursue their own method of combating it rather than to adopt the foreign and repugnant practice of impaling the dead. That conviction plainly was that cremation, by ensuring the immediate and complete dissolution of the body, put an end to all relations of the dead with the living; and their confidence in it can only have been based upon their own experience in the treatment of the Greek species ofrevenants. Cremation then was the means by which the Greek folk had always been wont to succour those of the dead who suffered from incorruptibility and resuscitation.
Such a custom would not, so far as I can judge, have encountered any serious ecclesiastical opposition. The Church, it is true, in her earlier days had condemned cremation as a pagan rite, and with the spread of Christianity inhumation became the ordinary rite. But in the case of those who, having been buried, yet returned from the grave, since the Christian rite had proved of no avail, some concession to pagan traditions would have been natural. Many of the clergy, as we have seen, condoned cremation in the case ofvrykolakesas a measure of self-defence; surely they would equally have allowed it as an act of charity to more innocent men to whom the earth had denied dissolution and death had brought no repose.
Thus the actual custom of burning dates from the pre-Slavonic era; it is only the motive of the act which is changed. Formerly men felt pity for therevenant, and sought to promote his dissolution in order to release him from a state of suffering; now, as for some centuries past, men feel only horror of thevrykolakas, andseek to promote his dissolution in order to release themselves from a state of peril. Hence no doubt came the more horrible barbarities occasionally inflicted on the corpse; to tear out the heart, to boil it in vinegar, to tear the body to shreds—these are the acts of a panic-stricken and vindictive people eager to torment their foe before annihilating him. But in the old custom of cremation there was nothing inhumane; it was the merciful act of a people who had compassion upon the unquiet dead and gave to them, in solicitude for their welfare, that boon of bodily dissolution by which alone they were finally severed from the living and admitted to the world of the departed.