CHAPTER II

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THE SURVIVAL OF PAGAN DEITIES.

§ 1. THE RANGE OF MODERN POLYTHEISM.

Thus far we have considered paganism in its bearing and influence upon modern Greek Christianity. We have seen how the Church, in endeavouring to widen her influence, countenanced many practices and conciliated many prejudices of a people whose temperament needed a multitude of gods and whose piety could pay homage to them all, a people moreover to whom the criterion of divinity was neither moral perfection nor omnipotence. From the ethical standpoint some of the ancient gods were better, some worse than men: in point of power they were superhuman but not almighty. Some indeed claimed that there was no difference in origin between mankind and its deities. ‘One is the race of men’ sang Pindar ‘with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath of life: yet sundered are they by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[107].’ One in origin, they are diverse in might. The test of godhead is power sufficing to defy death. Rightly therefore did Homer make ‘deathless’ and ‘everbeing’ his constant epithets for the gods. Immortality alone is the quality which distinguishes them in kind and not merely in degree from men, and makes them worthy of worship. A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad--broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.

So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word ‘Christian’ has become a popular synonym for ‘Greek’ in contradistinction not only with ‘Mohammedan,’ but even sometimes with ‘Western’ or ‘Catholic’ or with ‘Protestant,’ and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[108]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.

The origin of the non-Christian deities, even if we were unable to identify any of them with the gods of classical Greece, would be clearly enough proved by some of the general terms under which all of them are included. Those who use these terms indeed no longer appreciate their significance; for all sense of antagonism between the pagan and Christian elements in the popular religion has, as we have seen, long been lost. But the words themselves are a relic of the early days in which the combat of Christianity with the heathen world was still stern. Among the most widespread of these terms is the word ξωτικά[109] (i.e. ἐξωτικά), the ‘extraneous’ powers, clearly an invention of the early Christians. The phrase ‘those that are without’ (οἱ ἔξω or οἱ ἔξωθεν) was used by S. Paul first[110] and afterwards generally by the Fathers of the Church to denote men of all other persuasions. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea employed the adjective ἐξωτικός also in a corresponding sense[111]. This word no doubt became popular, and hence τὰ ἐξωτικά, ‘the extraneous ones,’ became a convenient term by which to denote comprehensively all those old divinities whose worship the Church disallowed but even among her own adherents could not wholly suppress. Another comprehensive term equally significant, if not so commonly used, is τὰ παγανά[112], ‘the pagan ones.’ This is in use in the Ionian islands and some parts of the mainland, but I have not met with it nor found it understood in the Peloponnese or in the islands of the Aegean Sea[113]. In Cephalonia it is chiefly, though not exclusively, applied to a species of supernatural beings usually called callicántzari (καλλικάντζαροι) of whom more anon: the reason of this restriction may be either the fact that these monsters--to judge from the folk-stories of the island--so far outnumber there all other kinds of ‘pagan’ beings that this one species has almost appropriated to itself the generic name, or that in old time, when the word παγανά, ‘pagan,’ was still understood in the sense which we attribute to it, these monsters were deemed specially ‘pagan’ because, as we shall see later, they delight in disturbing a season of Christian gladness. But elsewhere the term, still employed in what must have been its original meaning, comprises all kinds of non-Christian deities; and in earlier times ‘the pagan ones’ was probably as frequent an expression as its synonym ‘the extraneous ones.’ To these may perhaps be added the rare appellation recorded by Schmidt[114], τσίνια: for if the derivation from τζίνα, ‘fraud,’ ‘deceit,’ be right, it will mean ‘the false gods.’

Besides these three names, which indicate the pre-Christian origin of these deities, there are several others--some in universal usage, others local and dialectic,--which represent them in various aspects. As a class of ‘divinities’ they are called δαιμόνια: as ‘apparitions,’ whose precise nature often cannot be further determined, φάσματα or φαντάσματα and, in Crete, σφανταχτά[115]: as swift and ‘sudden’ in their coming and going, ξαφνικά[116]: as ghostly and passing like a vision, εἰδωλικά: as denizens, for the most part, of the air, ἀερικά: and from their similarity to angels, ἀγγελικά.

It may seem strange that the first and the last of these terms, δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά, should be practically interchangeable; for the Church at any rate did her best in early days to make the former understood in the sense of ‘demons’ or ‘devils’ rather than ‘deities.’ But the attempted change of meaning seems to have failed to make much impression on a people who did not view goodness as an essential of godhead; and in later times the Church herself, or many of her less educated clergy at any rate, surrendered to the popular ideas. Father Richard[117], a Jesuit resident during the seventeenth century in the island of Santorini, mentions the case of an old Greek priest who had long made a speciality of exorcism and was prepared to expel angels and demons alike from the bodies of those who were afflicted by them. The priest when questioned by the Jesuit as to what distinction he drew between demons and angels, replied that the demons came from hell, while the angels were ἀερικόν τι, a species of aërial being; but while he maintained a theoretical difference between them, his practice betrayed a belief that both were equally harmful. Exorcism had to be employed in cases of ‘angelic’ as well as of ‘demoniacal’ possession; and Father Richard details the cruelties and tortures inflicted upon a woman suspected of the former in order to make the pernicious angelic spirit within her confess its name. The characters of δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά are in fact the same, and the subtle theological distinctions which might be drawn between them are naturally lost on a people who see them treated even by the priests as equally baneful.

A few other local or dialectic names remain to be noticed. Two of them, στοιχει̯ά and τελώνια, denote properly two several species of supernatural beings--the former being the _genii_ of fixed places[118], and the latter aërial beings chiefly concerned with the passage of men from this world to the next[119]--and are only loosely and locally employed in a more comprehensive sense. The name σμερδάκια, recorded from Philiatrá in Messenia, is apparently a diminutive form from a root meaning ‘terrible[120].’ A Cretan word καντανικά is of less certain etymology, but if, as has been surmised, it has any relation with the verb καντανεύω, ‘to go down to the underworld,’ and hence ‘to fall into a trance,’ (‘entranced’ spirits being thought temporarily to have departed thither,) it may denote either denizens of the lower world or beings who frighten men into a senseless and trance-like state[121]. Next come the two words ζούμπιρα and ζωντόβολα, of which I believe the interpretation is one and the same. Bernhard Schmidt[122], whose work I have constantly consulted in this and later chapters, would derive the former from a middle-Greek word ζόμβρος[123], equivalent to the ancient τραγέλαφος, a fantastic animal of Aristophanic fame; but it was explained to me in Scyros to be a jocose euphemism as applied to supernatural beings and to denote properly parasitic insects. The implied combination of superstitious awe in avoiding the name of supernatural things with a certain broad humour in substituting what is, to the peasant, one of the lesser annoyances of life is certainly characteristic of the Greek folk; and the accuracy of the explanation given to me is confirmed by the fact that in the island of Cythnos the other word, ζωντόβολα, is recorded to bear also the meaning of ‘insects[124].’ The joke, if such it be, must date from a long time back and in its prime must have enjoyed a widespread popularity; for at Aráchova on the slopes of Parnassus, a place far distant from Scyros, the word ζούμπιρα is employed in the sense of supernatural beings by persons who apparently are quite ignorant of its original meaning[125]. To these difficult terms must be added a few euphemisms of a simple nature--τὰ πίζηλα (i.e. ἐπίζηλα) ‘the enviable ones’ in one village of Tenos[126], and in many places such general terms as οἱ καλοί ‘the noble,’--οἱ ἀδερφοί μας ‘our brothers,’--οἱ καλορίζικοι ‘the fortunate ones,’--οἱ χαρούμενοι ‘the joyful ones.’ These evasions of a more direct nomenclature are very frequent, and, since the choice of epithet is practically at the discretion of the speaker, it would be impossible to compile a complete list of them.

How far each of these names may be applied in general to all the classes of pagan gods and demons and monsters whom I am about to describe is a question which I cannot determine. On the one hand many of the names, as we have seen, are purely local, confined to a few villages or districts or islands and unknown and unintelligible elsewhere: and on the other hand some of these supernatural beings themselves are equally local, and my information concerning them has been gathered from widely separated regions of the Greek world. Hence it follows that while the several terms which I have explained are comprehensive in local usage and include all the supernatural beings locally recognised, it is impossible to say whether the users of them would think fit to extend them to the deities of other districts. Probably they would do so; but only for the most widely current terms, δαιμόνια and ἐξωτικά, can I claim with assurance anything like universal application.

The surviving pagan deities fall naturally into two classes. There are the solitary and individual figures such as Demeter, and there is the gregarious and generic class to which belong for example the Nymphs. An exceptional case may occur in which some originally single personality has been multiplied into a whole class. The Lesbian maiden Gello, who, according to a superstition known to Sappho[127], in revenge for her untimely death haunted her old abodes preying upon the babes of women whose motherhood she envied, is no longer one but many; the place of a maiden, whom death carried off ere she had known the love of husband and children, has been taken by withered witch-like beings who none the less bear her name and resemble her in that they light, like Harpies, upon young children and suck out their humours[128]. But in the main the division holds; there are single gods and there are groups of gods. Of the former, in several cases, there is very little to record. Such memory of them as still lingers among the people is confined perhaps to a single folk-story out of the many that have been preserved. In such cases I do not feel entire confidence that the reference is a piece of genuine tradition; in spite of the popular form in which the stories are cast, it is always possible that, owing to the spread of education, some scholastic smatterings of ancient mythology have been introduced by the story-teller. There are certainly plenty of tales to be heard about Alexander the Great which are drawn from literary sources; and it is possible that two stories published by Schmidt which contain apparent reminiscences of Poseidon and of Pan are vitiated, from the point of view of folklore, in the same way. Fortunately the cases in which this reserve must be felt are few and in the nature of things unimportant: for, though proof of genuine tradition would be interesting, yet a single modern allusion is not likely to throw any light on the ancient conception of a deity or his cult. Where on the other hand modern folklore is more abundant--and in the case of the groups of lesser deities above all there is ample store of information--it is possible that study of the popular conceptions of to-day may illumine our understanding of ancient religion.

§ 2. ZEUS.

Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα.

To Zeus, the ancient father of gods and men, belongs precedence; but there is in truth little room for him in the modern scheme of popular religion. His functions have been transferred to the Christian God, and his personality merged in that of the Father whom the Church acknowledges. But though he is no longer a deity, the ancient conception of him has imposed narrow limitations upon the character of his successor. We have noted already that the God now recognised exercises the same general control, as did formerly Zeus, over all the changes and chances of this mortal life, but has, again resembling Zeus, for his special province only the regulation of the more monotonous phases of nature and the weather. The more unusual phenomena, and among them sometimes even the thunder, to which S. Elias has pretensions, are delegated to saints or to non-Christian deities; but for the most part the thunder remains the possession of God, as it was always that of Zeus; and its more important concomitant, the lightning, is never, I think, attributed to S. Elias, but is wielded by God alone.

The very name of this weapon which the Christian God has inherited is suggestive of the Olympian _régime_. Much has been heard lately of the double-headed axe as a religious symbol which seems to have been constantly associated, especially in Crete, with the worship of Zeus. The modern Greek word for what we call the thunderbolt is ἀστροπελέκι (a syncopated form of ἀστραποπελέκι by loss of one of two concurrent syllables beginning with the same consonant), and means literally a ‘lightning-axe.’ The weapon therefore which the supreme God wields is conceived as an axe-shaped missile; and, though in the ancient literature which has come down to us we may nowhere find the word πέλεκυς used of the thunderbolt, there is no reason why the modern word should not be the expression of a conception inherited from antiquity and so furnish a clue to what in itself seems a simple and suitable explanation of the much-canvassed symbol.

Again the divine associations of the thunderbolt now as in the reign of Zeus are attested by the awe in which men and cattle, trees and houses, which have been struck by lightning, are universally held--awe of that primitive kind which does not distinguish between the sacred and the accursed. It is sufficient that particular persons or objects have come into close contact with divine power; that contact sets them apart; they must not do common work or be put to common uses. In old days any place which had been struck was distinguished by the erection of an altar and the performance of sacrifice, but at the same time it was left unoccupied and, save for sacrificial purposes, untrodden[129]; it was both honoured and avoided. In the case of persons however the sense of awe verged on esteem. ‘No one,’ says Artemidorus, ‘who has been struck by lightning is excluded from citizenship; indeed such an one is honoured even as a god[130].’ The same feeling is still exhibited. The peasant makes the sign of the cross as he passes any scorched and blackened tree-trunk; but if a man has the fortune to be struck and not killed, he may indulge a taste for idleness for the rest of his life--his neighbours will support him--and enjoy at the same time the reputation of being something more than human.

But in spite of the reverent awe which the victim of the lightning excites, the thunderbolt is often viewed now, as in old time, as the instrument of divine vengeance. The people of Aráchova, when they see a flash, explain the occurrence in the phrase κάποιον διάβολον ἔκαψε, ‘He has burnt up some devil,’ and the implied subject of the verb, as in most phrases describing the weather, is undoubtedly God[131]. The same idea, in yet more frankly pagan garb, is well exhibited in a story from Zacynthos[132], which is nothing but the old myth of the war of the Titans against Zeus with the names of the actors omitted. The gist of it is as follows.

The giants once rebelled against God. First they climbed a mountain and hurled rocks at him; but he grasped his thunderbolts (τσακώνει τὰ ἀστροπελέκι̯α του) and threw them at the giants, and they all fell down from the mountain and many were killed. Then one whose courage was still unshaken tied reeds together and tried to reach to heaven with them (for what purpose, does not appear in the story; but folk-tales are often somewhat inconsequent, and this vague incident is probably an imperfect reminiscence of the legend of Prometheus); but the lightning burnt him to ashes. Then his remaining companions made a last assault, but the lightning again slew many of them, and the rest were condemned to live all their life long shut in beneath a mountain.

This story is one of those which in themselves might be suspected of scholastic origin or influence; but it so happens that practically the same story has been recorded from Chios also, with the slight addition that there the leader of the giants’ assault has usurped the name of Samson. Such corroboration from the other end of the Greek world goes far to establish the genuine nature of the tradition.

Thus though Zeus has been generally superseded by the Christian God, his character and mythic attributes have left a strong and indelible mark upon the religion of to-day. The present conception of God is practically identical with the ancient conception of the deity who was indeed one among many gods and yet in thought and often also in speech the god _par excellence_. Christianity has effected little here beyond the suppression of the personal name Zeus.

All this, no doubt, illustrates the fusion of paganism with Christianity rather than the independent co-existence of deities of the separate systems. But there are two small facts in virtue of which I have given to Zeus a place among the pagan deities whose distinct personality is not yet wholly sunk in oblivion. The men of Aráchova, as we have noticed above, still swear by the ‘god of Crete,’ who can be no other than Zeus; and in Crete itself there was recently, and may still be, in use the invocation ἠκοῦτε μου Ζῶνε θεέ, ‘Hearken to me, O god Zeus[133].’ Such expressions, though their original force is no longer known by those who use them, are none the less indications that perhaps not many generations ago Zeus was still locally recognised and reverenced as a deity distinct from the Christian God, to whom indeed everywhere he can only gradually have ceded his position and his attributes.

§ 3. POSEIDON.

For the survival of any god of the sea in the imagination of the Greek people I cannot personally vouch. Though I have been among the seafaring population in many parts, I have never heard mention of other than female deities. That which I here set down rests entirely on the authority of Bernhard Schmidt.

In his collection of folk-stories there is one from Zacynthos, entitled ‘Captain Thirteen,’ which runs as follows[134]:--A king who was the strongest man of his time made war on a neighbour. His strength lay in three hairs on his breast. He was on the point of crushing his foes when his wife was bribed to cut off the hairs, and he with thirteen companions was taken prisoner. But the hairs began to grow again, and so his enemies threw him and his companions into a pit. The others were killed by the fall, but he being thrown in last, fell upon them and was unhurt. Over the pit his enemies then raised a mound. He found however in the pit a dead bird, and having fastened its wings to his hands flew up and carried away mound and all with him. Then he soared high in the air until a storm of rain washed away the clay that held the feathers to his hands, and he fell into the sea. ‘Then from out the sea came the god thereof (ὁ δαίμονας τῆς θάλασσας) and struck him with a three-pronged fork (μία πειροῦνα μὲ τρία διχάλια)’ and changed him into a dolphin until such time as he should find a maiden ready to be his wife. The dolphin after some time saved a ship-wrecked king and his daughter, and the princess by way of reward took him for her husband and the spell was broken.

Other characteristics of this trident-bearing sea-god are, according to the same authority[135], that he is in form half human and half fish; that his wealth, consisting of all treasures lost in the sea, is so great that he sleeps on a couch of gold; and that he rides upon dolphins. Thus Poseidon, it appears, (or it may be Nereus,) has survived locally in the remembrance of the Greek people as a deity unconnected with Christianity. Far more generally however his functions have been transferred to S. Nicolas, whose aid is invariably invoked by seamen in time of peril, and who has acquired the byname of ‘sailor’ (ναύτης)[136].

The allusion to the sea-god and his trident in the story which I have repeated must, I think, be accepted with some reserve as being possibly a scholastic interpolation. I cannot find confirmation of it in any other folk-story, and moreover the latter part of the tale is familiar to me in another form. The hero is usually a young prince who goes out to seek adventures in the world, not a king who has already a wife at home; and his transformation into a dolphin is effected by some malicious witch into whose toils he falls. But while for these reasons I do not put the story forward as certain evidence of the survival of Poseidon in the popular memory, I have recounted it at some length because it is an excellent type of current folk-tales, and from a study of it, if we may now leave Poseidon and make a brief digression, we may appreciate the relation existing between such stories and the myths of antiquity.

The king who was the strongest man of his time has a classical prototype in the Messenian leader Aristomenes. He too was thrown with his comrades into a pit by his enemies, the Spartans, and alone escaped death from the fall, being borne up on the wings of eagles. Again, the idea of a man’s strength residing in a certain hair or hairs is well known in ancient mythology; and although it is by no means peculiar to the Greeks, but is common to many peoples of the world, we may fairly suppose that the modern Greek has not borrowed it from outside, but has inherited it from those ancestors among whose myths was the story of Scylla and Nisus. Lastly, in the incident of the hero fastening wings to his arms with clay and his subsequent fall into the sea there are all the essentials of the legend of Icarus.

Here then combined in one modern folk-story we find the _motifs_ of three separate ancient myths. And from it and others of like nature--for in the collection from which I have borrowed it there are several stories in which such figures as Midas, the Sphinx, and the Cyclopes are easily recognised--an inference may be drawn as to the real relation of ancient mythology to modern folk-stories. Certain themes must have existed from time immemorial, and these have been worked up into tales by successive generations of _raconteurs_ with ever-varying settings. Fresh combinations of _motifs_ have been and are still being tried; fresh embroidery of detail may be added by each artist; only the theme in its plainest form, the mere groundwork of story, remains immutable. This at the same time explains the wide variations of the same myth even among the ancients themselves, and warns us not to judge of the value of a modern folk-story or folk-song by the closeness of its resemblance to any ancient myth which may have been preserved to us in literature. It was naturally the most finished and artistic presentment of the story which appealed to the taste of educated men and thus became the orthodox classical version; but there is every likelihood that before the story reached the stage of acknowledged perfection much that was primitive had been suppressed as inartistic, and much that was not traditional had been added by the poet’s imagination. The unlettered story-teller, endowed with less fancy and ignorant of the conventions of art, is a far trustier vehicle of pure tradition; for though he feels himself at liberty to compose variations of the original theme, he certainly has less power and generally less inclination to do so; for it is on exactness of memory and even verbal fidelity to the traditional form of the story that the modern story-teller chiefly prides himself. Hence the modern folk-story, straight from the peasant’s lips in a form almost verbally identical with that in which successive generations of peasants before him narrated it, may contain more genuinely primitive material than a literary version of it which dates from perhaps two thousand years or more ago.

§ 4. PAN.

A story, again from the same collection[137], runs in brief as follows:--Once upon a time a priest had a good son who tended goats. One day ‘Panos’ gave him a kid with a skin of gold. He at once offered it as a burnt-offering to God, and in answer an angel promised him whatsoever he should ask. He chose a magic pipe which should make all hearers dance. So no enemy could come near to touch him. The king however sent for him, and the goatherd, after making the envoys dance more than once, voluntarily let himself be taken. The king then threw him into prison, but he had his flute still with him, and when he played even houses and rocks danced, and fell and crushed all save him and his. ‘The whole business,’ concludes the story, ‘was arranged by Panos to cleanse the world somewhat of evil men.’

Here the pastoral scene and the gift of the magic pipe (not by Panos himself, it is true, but indirectly thanks to him) suggest a genuine remembrance of Pan. It was from him that ‘bonus Daphnis’ learnt the art of music. The form which the name has assumed is the chief difficulty. The modern nominative, if formed in the same way as in other words of the same declension, would naturally be Panas (Πάνας), and the unusual termination arouses some suspicion that the narrator of the story had heard of Pan from some literary source and, as often happens in such cases, had got the name a little wrong. But if the tale be a piece of genuine tradition, the conclusion of it is remarkable. The moral purpose ascribed to the deity seems to indicate a loftier conception of him than that which is commonly found in ancient art and literature. But the popular tradition embodied in the legend is not therefore necessarily at fault; indeed it may be more true to the conception of Pan which prevailed among the common-folk in old days than were the portraits drawn and handed down by the more educated of their contemporaries. The patron-god of Arcadian shepherd-life would naturally have seemed a rude being to the cultured Athenians of the fifth century, who but for his miraculous intervention in the battle of Marathon would never have honoured him with a temple. But among his original worshippers it may well be that, besides presiding over the increase of their flocks, as did Demeter over the increase of their fields, he was deemed to resemble her also in the possession of more exalted attributes, so that there was cause indeed for lamentation over that strange message ‘Great Pan is dead[138].’

But perchance Pan is not dead yet, or if dead not forgotten. And as this solitary modern story, if it be genuine, testifies to a longlived remembrance of his better qualities, so in the demonology of the middle ages a sterner aspect of his ancient character still secured to him men’s awe. Theocritus[139] gave voice to a well-known superstition when he made the goat-herd say: ‘Nay, shepherd, it may not be; in the noontide we may not pipe; ’tis Pan that we fear’; for in his rage if roused from his midday slumber he was believed to strike the intruder with ‘panic’ terror: and it was this superstition which influenced the translators of the Septuagint when they rendered the phrase, which in our Bible version of the Psalms[140] appears as ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday,’ by the words σύμπτωμα καὶ δαιμόνιον μεσημβρινόν. By the latter half of this phrase the memory of Pan was undoubtedly perpetuated; for in certain forms of prayer quoted by Leo Allatius[141] in the seventeenth century, among the perils from which divine deliverance is sought is mentioned more than once this ‘midday demon’; and a corresponding ‘daemon meridianus[142]’ found a place of equal dignity among the ghostly enemies of Roman Catholics.

Perhaps even yet in the pastoral uplands of Greece some traveller will hear news of Pan.

§ 5. DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE.

Of few ancient deities has popular memory been more tenacious than of Demeter; but in different districts the reminiscences take very different forms. There are many traces of her name and cult, and of the legends concerning both her and her daughter; but in one place they have been Christianised, in another they have remained pagan.

In so far as she has affected the traditions of the Church, a male deity, S. Demetrius, has in general superseded her. Under the title of στερεανός, ‘belonging to the dry land,’ he has in most districts taken over the patronage of agriculture; while his inherited interest in marriage receives testimony from the number of weddings celebrated, especially in the agricultural districts, on his day. But at Eleusis, the old home of Demeter’s most sacred rites, the people, it seems, would not brook the substitution of a male saint for their goddess, and yielded to ecclesiastical influence only so far as to create for themselves a saint Demetra (ἡ ἁγία Δήμητρα) entirely unknown elsewhere and never canonised. Further, in open defiance of an iconoclastic Church, they retained an old statue of Demeter, and merely prefixing the title ‘saint’ to the name of their cherished goddess, continued to worship her as before. The statue was regularly crowned with garlands of flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests, and without doubt prayer was made before it as now before the pictures of canonical saints. This state of things continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1801, two Englishmen, named Clarke and Cripps, armed by the Turkish authorities with a license to plunder, perpetrated an act unenviably like that of Verres at Enna, and in spite of a riot among the peasants of Eleusis removed by force the venerable marble; and that which was the visible form of the great goddess on whose presence and goodwill had depended from immemorial ages the fertility of the Thriasian plain is now a little-regarded object catalogued as ‘No. XIV, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, (much mutilated)[143].’

Saint Demetra however, though lost to sight, was yet dear to the memory of the village-folk; and in spite of the devastation of old beliefs and legends which the much-vaunted progress and education of Greece have committed in the more civilised districts without conferring any sensible compensation, the antiquarian Lenormant found in 1860 an old Albanian[144] priest who when once reassured that no ridicule was intended, recited to him the following remarkable legend[145]: ‘S. Demetra was an old woman of Athens, kind and good, who devoted all her little means to feeding the poor. She had a daughter who was beautiful past all imagining; since “lady Aphrodite” (κυρὰ ’φροδίτη) none had been seen so lovely. A Turkish lord of the neighbourhood of Souli, who was a wicked man and versed in magic, saw her one day combing her hair, which was of golden hue and reached to the very ground, and became passionately enamoured of her. He bided his time, and having found his chance of speaking with her tried to seduce her. But she being as prudent as she was beautiful, repulsed all the miscreant’s advances. Thereupon he resolved to carry her off and put her in his harem. One Christmas night, while Demetra was at church, the Turk (ὁ ἀγᾶς) forced the door of her house, seized the girl who was at home alone, carried her off in spite of her cries of distress, and holding her in his arms leapt upon his horse. The horse was a wonderful one; it was black in colour; from its nostrils it breathed out flames, and in one bound could pass from the East unto the West. In an instant it had carried ravisher and victim right to the mountains of Epirus.

When the aged Demetra came back from church, she found her house broken into and her daughter gone; great was her despair. She asked her neighbours if they knew what had become of her daughter; but they dared not tell her aught, for they feared the Turks and their vengeance. She turned her enquiries to the tree that grew before her house; but the tree could tell her nothing. She asked the sun, but the sun could give her no help; she asked the moon and the stars, but from them too she learnt nothing. Finally the stork that nested on the house-top said to her: “Long time now we have lived side by side; thou art as old as I. Listen; thou hast always been good to me, thou hast never disturbed my nest, and once thou didst help me to drive away the bird of prey that would have carried off my nestlings. In recompense I will tell thee what I know of the fate of thy daughter; she was carried off by a Turk mounted on a black horse, who took her towards the West. Come, I will set out with thee and we will search for her together.”

Accompanied by the stork, Demetra started; the time was winter; it was cold, and snow covered the mountains. The poor old woman was frozen and could hardly walk; she kept asking of all those whom she met, whether they had seen her daughter, but they laughed at her or did not answer; doors were shut in her face and entrance denied her, for men love not misery; and she went weeping and lamenting. In this manner however she dragged her limbs as far as Lepsína (the modern form of the name Eleusis); but, arriving there, she succumbed to cold and weariness and threw herself down by the roadside. There she would have died, but that by good luck there passed by the wife of the _khodja-bachi_ (or head man of the village), who had been to look after her flocks and was returning. Marigo--such was her name--took pity on the old woman, helped her to rise and brought her to her husband, who was named Nicolas[146]. The _khodja-bachi_ was as kind as his wife; both welcomed as best they could the poor sorrow-stricken woman, tended her and sought to console her. To reward them S. Demetra blessed their fields and gave them fertility.

Nicolas, the _khodja-bachi_, had a son handsome, strong, brave, and practised, in a word the finest _pallikar_ of all the country side. Seeing that Demetra was in no condition to continue her journey, he offered to set to work to recover her daughter, asking only her hand in recompense. The offer was accepted, and he set out accompanied by the faithful stork who would not abandon the undertaking.

The young man walked for many days without finding anything. At last one night, when he was in a forest right among the mountains, he caught sight of a great bright light at some distance. Towards this he hastily bent his steps, but the point from which the light came was much further off than he had at first imagined; the darkness had deceived him. Eventually however he arrived there, and to his great astonishment found forty dragons lying on the ground and watching an enormous cauldron that was boiling on the fire. Undismayed by the sight, he lifted the cauldron with one hand, lit a torch, and replaced the vessel on the fire. Astounded by such a display of strength, the dragons crowded round him and said to him, “You who can lift with one hand a cauldron which we by our united efforts can scarcely carry, you alone are capable of carrying off a maiden whom we have long been trying to lay our hands on, and whom we cannot seize because of the height of the tower wherein a magician keeps her shut up.” The son of the _khodja-bachi_ of Lepsína perceived the impossibility of escape from these monsters. Accompanied by the forty dragons, he approached the tower, and after having examined it, he asked for some large nails, which he took and drove into the wall, so as to form a kind of ladder, and which he kept pulling out again as he ascended to prevent the dragons from following him. Having arrived at the top and with some difficulty entered at a small window there, he invited the dragons to ascend as he had done, one by one, which they did, thus giving him time to kill each as it arrived while the next was climbing up, and to throw it over the other side of the tower, where there were a large court, a splendid garden, and a fine castle. Thus rid of his dangerous guardians, he went down into the interior of the tower and found there S. Demetra’s daughter, whose beauty at once inspired him with the most ardent love.

He was kneeling at her feet when suddenly the magician appeared, and in a fury of anger threw himself upon the young man, who met him bravely. The former was of superhuman strength, but Nicolas’ son was not inferior to him. The magician had the power to transform himself into any thing he might choose; he changed successively into a lion, into a serpent, into a bird of prey, into fire--hoping under some one of these forms to wear his adversary out; but nothing could shake the courage of the young man. For three days the combat continued. The first day the magician seemed beaten, but the next he regained his advantage; at the end of the day’s struggle he killed his young opponent, and cut his body into four quarters, which he hung on the four sides of the tower. Then elated by his victory, he did violence to Demetra’s daughter, whose chastity he had hitherto respected. But in the night the stork flew away to a great distance to fetch a magic herb which it knew, brought it back in its beak, and rubbed with it the young man’s lips. At once the pieces of his body came together again and he revived. Great was his despair when he learnt what had taken place after his defeat; but he only threw himself upon the magician with the greater fury the third day, to punish him for his crime.

Once again the young man, it seemed, was on the point of being vanquished, when suddenly he conceived the happy idea of invoking the Panagia, vowing that if victorious he would become a monk at the monastery of Phaneroméne[147]. The divine protection which he had invoked gave him strength and he succeeded in throwing his adversary: the stork, who had aided him so much, at once attacked the fallen magician and picked out his eyes; then with its beak pulled out a white hair noticeable among the black curls that covered his head. On this hair depended the life of the Turkish magician, who immediately expired. His conqueror, taking with him the girl, brought her back to Lepsína, just at the season when spring was coming and the flowers were beginning to appear in the fields. Then he went, as he had vowed, and shut himself up in the monastery. S. Demetra, having received back her daughter, went away with her. What became of them afterwards, no one knows; but since that time the fields of Lepsína, thanks to the blessing of the Saint, have not ceased to be fertile.’

It would be superfluous to point out the numerous details of this legend which accord explicitly with the account of the rape of Persephone in the Homeric hymn. The interspersion of Christian ideas and reminiscences of Turkish domination and stories of fabulous monsters may strike oddly on the ear unacquainted with the vagaries of Greek folk-stories. Yet the most sceptical could not doubt that the tradition which forms the groundwork of the legend is none other than the old myth, or that the four chief actors in the drama are none other than Demeter and Core, Pluto and Triptolemus. Pluto, masked as a Turkish _agha_, is perhaps the least readily recognisable; yet in one way as a relic of ancient tradition the part he plays is the most remarkable in the whole legend. It is to Souli in Epirus that he carries off the maiden. Now this is the district of the ancient Cocytus and Acheron; here was one of the descents to the lower world; here Aidoneus held sway; and here, in one version of the myth[148], was laid the scene of the rape of Persephone by that god. Hence the claims of two separate localities to the same mythological distinction seem by some means to have become incorporated in the single modern legend.

In the same part of Epirus, according to Lenormant, a similar story to that which he heard at Eleusis concerning S. Demetra’s daughter, is told, _mutatis mutandis_, of S. Demetrius: but since either a sense of propriety or a want of knowledge prevented him from publishing the details of it, the mere statement that it existed is of no great value. But the legend which he narrates in full may I think be accepted as genuine without corroboration on the grounds of its own structure. Lenormant has indeed been accused of _mala fides_ in his own department of archaeology and of tampering with some of the inscriptions which he published; but even if this charge could be substantiated, I should doubt whether he had either the inclination to invent a legend which he only mentions in a cumbrous foot-note, or the ability to fuse ancient and modern ideas into so good an imitation of the genuine folk-story. In my judgement the construction of the legend is practically proof of its genuinely popular origin.

Thus Eleusis and, in a lesser degree, the many places where S. Demetrius has succeeded to the chief functions of Demeter have hardly yet lost touch with the ancient worship of the goddess, Christianised in form though it may be. But Arcadia too, where alone of all the Peloponnese the indigenous population were secure from the Achaean and Dorian immigrations and maintained in seclusion the holiest of Pelasgian cults, preserves to the present day in story and in custom some vestiges of the old religion; and here they are less tinged with Christian colour.

Near the city of Pheneos, which according to Pausanias[149] was the scene of mysteries similar to those enacted at Eleusis, there are some underground channels by which the waters of Lake Pheneos are carried off, soon to reappear as the river Ladon. These channels were believed by Pausanias himself to be artificial--the work of Heracles, it was said, who also constructed a canal close by, traces of which are still visible: but according to another authority[150] they were the passage by which Pluto carried off Persephone to the infernal regions. Some memory of the latter belief seems still to linger among the people of Phoniá (the modern form of Pheneós), who call these subterranean vents ἡ τρούπαις τοῦ διαβόλου, ‘the holes of the devil,’ and who further believe that it is through them that the spirits of the dead pass to the lower world. My guide informed me also that the rise or fall of the waters of the lake--the level varies to an extraordinary degree--furnishes an augury as to what rate of mortality may be expected in the village. If the water is high, the lower world is for the time being congested and requires no more inhabitants; if it sinks, the lower world is empty, and thirsts for fresh victims. The connexion of such beliefs with the cult of Persephone, though vague, is probably real; but how general they may be among the present villagers I cannot say; Dodwell[151] apparently heard nothing of them except the name of ‘the devil’s holes,’ and the explanation of this name which was given to him took the form of a story about a conflict between the devil and a king of Phoniá, in which the former hurled explosive balls of grease at his adversary, one of which set him on fire and drove his body right through the base of the mountain which rises from the lake’s edge, leaving thereafter an escape for the waters. There is certainly nothing in common between this story, which Leake also heard in a slightly different version[152], and the beliefs communicated to me; and I suspect that it is a comparatively modern aetiological fable designed perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of children concerning the name. The belief that the subterranean channel is a descent to the lower world is more clearly a vestige of the old local cult of Kore.

Again in the neighbourhood of Phigalia there is current among the peasantry a curious story which I tried in vain to hear recited in full, but only obtained in outline at second-hand. I cannot consequently vouch for its accuracy, but such as it is I give it. There once were a brother and sister, of whom the former was very wicked and a magician, while the latter was very virtuous and beautiful. Her beauty was indeed so wonderful, that her brother became enamoured of her. In her distress she fled to a cave near Phigalia, hoping to elude his pursuit; but the magician straightway discovered her. Then being at her wits’ end how to save herself from the unholy passion which her beauty inspired, she prayed to be turned into some beast. Her prayer was straightway granted, but the wicked magician had power to change himself likewise. So when they had both been changed into several shapes he at length overcame her. But no sooner was the infamous deed done, than the Panagia caused an earthquake, and the roof of the cave fell and destroyed both brother and sister together.

A story of incest necessarily ends at the present day among the highly moral countryfolk of Greece with punishment inflicted by some Christian deity: but for the rest the story is practically the same as that which Pausanias heard concerning Poseidon and his sister Demeter in the same district[153]. In the old version, which Pausanias gives very briefly, there is only one transformation mentioned, that of Demeter into a mare and of Poseidon into a horse; but it is at least noteworthy that the statue of horse-headed Demeter which commemorated this incident is said to have had ‘figures of snakes and other wild animals’ fixed on its head; and possibly, if Pausanias had given a fuller version of the myth, we should find that these figures related to other transformations which Demeter had tried in vain before in equine form she was finally forced to yield. The mention of the cave in the modern story is also significant; for though the cave in the ancient version is not the scene of the rape, it was there that Demeter hid herself in her anger afterwards and there too that the statue of horse-headed Demeter was set up. It would be interesting to know whether the horse is one of the forms assumed in the modern story; perhaps some other traveller will be fortunate enough to hear the tale in full.

In northern Arcadia I also learnt that the flesh of the pig, in respect of which the ordinary _Graeculus_ fully deserves the epithet _esuriens_, is taboo; and the result of eating it is believed to be leprosy. It might be supposed that this superstition has resulted from contact with Mohammedans; but such an explanation would not account for the confinement of it to one locality--and that a mountainous and unprofitable district where intercourse with the Turks must have been small; and further the Greek would surely have found a malicious pleasure, the most piquant of sauces, in eating that which offended the two peoples whom he most abhors, Turks and Jews. On the other hand, if we suppose this fear of swine’s flesh to be a piece of native tradition, its origin may well be sought in the ritual observances of the old cult of Demeter and her daughter, to whom the pig was sacred and in whose honour it was sacrificed once only in each year, at the festival of the Thesmophoria[154]. There are many instances among different peoples of the belief that skin diseases, especially leprosy, are the punishment visited upon those who eat of the sacred or unclean animal; for the distinction between sacred and unclean is not made until a primitive sense of awe is inclined by conscious reasoning in the direction either of reverence or of abhorrence[155]. Thus in Egypt, the land from which the Pelasgians, if Herodotus[156] might be believed, derived the worship of Demeter, it was held that the drinker of pig’s milk incurred leprosy[157]; and we may reasonably suppose that the same punishment threatened those Egyptians who tasted of pig’s flesh save at their one annual festival when this was enjoined[158]. Now the Thesmophoria resembled this Egyptian festival in that it was an annual occasion for sacrificing pigs and for partaking therefore of their flesh; if then the worshippers of Demeter, like the Egyptians, were forbidden to use the pig for food at other times, and if the penalty for disobedience in Greece too was believed to be leprosy, the present case of taboo in Arcadia--the only one known to me in modern Greece--may be a survival from the ancient cult.

But apart from these traces of the worship of Demeter and Kore in Christian worship, in folk-story, and in custom, traces which constitute in themselves cogent proof of the firm hold on the popular mind which the goddesses twain must long have kept, there exists in the belief of the Greek peasantry a personal Power, a living non-Christian deity, who still inspires awe in many simple hearts and who may reasonably be identified with one or rather perhaps with both of them.

For it must not be forgotten that the mother and the daughter were in origin and symbolism one. The idea of life’s ebb and flow, of nature’s sleeping and waking, is expressed in them severally as well as conjointly. It would be impossible to analyse the complete myth and, even if a purely physical interpretation were sought, to express in physiological terms the two persons and the parts which they play: for certain ideas find duplicate expression. Either Demeter’s retirement to some dark cave or the descent of Persephone to the underworld might have represented alone and unaided the temporary abeyance of earth’s productive powers. Yet it was with good reason that the myth expanded as it were spontaneously until the spirit of life, that pervades not only the cornfield but all that is animal and human too, was pourtrayed in double form; not because the mere physical fact of the decay and the revival of vegetation needed larger symbolism for its due expression, but because in the tie of mother and daughter and all that it connotes was fitly represented that by which the life-spirit works among the higher orders of created things, that which goes before life’s manifestations and outlasts its vanishings, the spirit of love.

Of all such ideas as these the modern peasant, needless to say, is wholly innocent. He has learnt from his ancestors of a woman beautiful, reverend, deathless, who dwells within a mountain of his land, and who by her dealings with mankind has proved her real and divine puissance. Her name is no more uttered, perchance because it is too holy for men of impure lips; they speak only of ‘the Mistress.’ She is a real person, not the personification of any natural force. The tiller of the land foresees his yearly gain from cornfield and vineyard; the shepherd on the mountain-side expects the yearly increase of his flock; but by neither is any principle inferred therefrom, much less is such a principle personified; the blessing which rests on field and fold is the work of a living goddess’ hands. Flesh and blood she is, even as they themselves, but immortal and very mighty, nobler than many of whom the priests preach, stronger to help the good and to punish the wicked. Simple people they are, who still believe such things, and ignorant; yet less truly ignorant than some half-educated pedants of the towns who vaunt their learning in chattering of ‘Ceres’ rather than of ‘Demeter’ and, misled by Roman versifiers who at least had an excuse in the exigencies of metre, misinterpret the name as a mere synonym for corn. Happily however the influence of the schools--for it is amongst the schoolmasters that the worst offenders in this respect are to be found--is not yet all-reaching, and in the remoter villages tradition is still untainted. There without fear of ridicule men may still confess their faith in the great compassionate goddess.

It was in Aetolia that I first recognised the popular belief in this deity. There I heard tell of one who was called ἡ κυρὰ τοῦ κόσμου, ‘the mistress of the world.’ Her dwelling was in the heart of a mountain, the means of access to it a cave, but where situated, the peasants either did not know or feared to tell. Her character indeed was ever gracious and kindly, but it may be they thought she would resent a foreigner’s approach. In her power was the granting of many boons, but her special care was the fertility of the flocks and the abundance of the crops, including in that district tobacco.

This revelation convinced me of the accuracy of what I had previously suspected only in North Arcadia and in Messenia. In both those regions I had heard occasional mention among the peasants of one whose title was simply ἡ δέσποινα, ‘the Mistress.’ The word had always struck me as curious, for in ordinary usage it is obsolete and the mistress of a house or whatever it may be is always ἡ κυρά (i.e. κυρία). Knowing however that the Church had preserved the title ἡ δέσποινα among those under which the Virgin may be invoked, I was disposed at first to think that the dedication of some church in the neighbourhood had influenced the people to use the rare name ἡ δέσποινα instead of the ordinary ‘Panagia.’ But when I enquired where the church of ‘the Mistress’ was, the answer was ‘she has none’: and yet, on making subsequent enquiries of other persons, I found that there was a church of the Panagia close by. Clearly then it was not in the ecclesiastical sense that the title ἡ δέσποινα was being used. More than this I failed to elicit--the peasants of the Peloponnese are on the whole more suspicious and secretive than those of northern Greece--but I have little doubt that this goddess is the same as she who in Aetolia bears a title more colloquial in form but identical in meaning.

The existence of this deity among the survivals of the old religion has never, I think, been observed by any writer on the subject of Greek folk-lore. But in Bernhard Schmidt’s collection of popular stories and songs there is evidence, whose value he himself did not recognise, to corroborate it. One of the songs[159] from Zacynthos contains the lines:

Ἔκαμ’ ὁ Θεὸς κι’ ἡ Παναγι̯ὰ κι’ ἡ Δέσποινα τοῦ κόσμου, καὶ ἐπολέμησα με Τούρκους, μ’ Ἀρβανίταις· χίλιους ἔκοψα, χίλιους καὶ δυ̯ὸ χιλιάδες.

‘They wrought in me, even God and the Virgin and the Mistress of the world, and I fought with Turks and with Albanians: a thousand I slew, a thousand yea and two thousand.’

The editor of this song omits from his translation and does not even mention in his notes the last phrase of the first line, assuming, I suppose, that the Virgin is mentioned twice over under two different titles; but it is at least possible that three persons are intended. God and the Virgin belong to the category of Christian deities; the third may be the pagan goddess already discovered in Messenia, Arcadia, and Aetolia; if so, the collocation of her name along with those of the highest Christian powers is strong testimony to the reverence with which the people of Zacynthos too were wont, and perhaps still continue, to regard her.

In Schmidt’s stories again yet another variation of the title occurs. In one, which has already been narrated in full[160], ‘the Mistress of the earth and of the sea’ (ἡ κυρὰ τσῆ γῆς και τσῆ θάλασσας) rewards a poor man, on the recommendation of his good angel, with miraculous gifts, and when he is slain by an envious king, herself appears and sends down the tyrant quick into the pit where punishment for his wickedness awaits him. Another, in which the same ample appellation is used, runs in brief as follows[161]:

‘Once upon a time a king on his return from a journey gave to his eldest son as a present a picture of “the Mistress of the earth and of the sea.” The prince was so dazzled by her beauty that he resolved to seek her out and make her his wife. He accordingly consulted a witch who told him how to find the palace where the Mistress of earth and sea lived, and warned him also that before he could secure the fulfilment of his desire two tasks would be set him, the first to shatter a small phial carried by a dove in its beak without injuring the bird, the second to obtain the skin of a three-headed dragon. She also provided him with a magic bow wherewith to perform the first labour, and with two hairs from the dragon’s head, by means of which he would be magically guided to the monster’s lair. Arrived there he should glut it with a meal of earth which he was to carry with him, and then slay it as it slept.

Thus forewarned and forearmed the prince set out and passing through a cave, of which the witch had told him, came to the palace. The Mistress having enquired of him his errand at once set him to perform the two tasks. These he accomplished, and she returned with him as his wife to his own land. But they did not live peaceably together, and one day the Mistress of earth and sea in her anger bade the waters overflow the whole land, so that all mankind was drowned while she herself hovered above in the air and looked on. Then when the waters subsided, she descended to the earth and made new men by sowing stones; and thereafter she ruled again as before over the whole world.’

Both these stories hail, as does the song of which a few lines are cited above, from Zacynthos, and there is therefore good reason for believing that in that island the same ‘Mistress’ was recently acknowledged as at this very day is venerated in those parts of the mainland which I have mentioned.

Taking the common factors in these several traditions and beliefs, we are led at once to identify the goddess to whom they relate with Demeter.

First, the simplest form of her title, ἡ δέσποινα, of which the others are merely elaborations, is that which Demeter commonly shared with Persephone in old time; and that the title has been handed down from antiquity is shown clearly by the fact that the word is in ordinary usage obsolete. Since then it is unlikely that in the course of tradition such a title should be transferred (save, owing to Christian influence, in the case of the Virgin, who has locally no doubt superseded one of the goddesses twain and appropriated her byname), the word itself declares in favour of the identification of this still living deity with Demeter.

Secondly, her dwelling-place is consistently in the modern accounts the heart of a mountain, and the passage to it a cave. Such precisely, according to Pausanias, was the habitation of Demeter in Mt Elaïon[162]; and the same idea is reflected in her whole cult; for, though in the classical period she had temples built like those of other deities, yet her holy of holies, as befitted a Chthonian deity, was always a subterranean hall (μέγαρον) or palace (ἀνάκτορον), an artificial and glorified cavern.

Thirdly, the modern deity is in character benevolent, therein differing markedly from many of the pagan powers whom we have yet to consider and also from several of the Christian saints. Once only, in the second of the stories from Zacynthos, does she appear in angry mood, when she destroys all mankind by a flood. To the actual means of destruction employed too much importance must not be attached. The _motif_ of the flood is common in modern Greek folk-tales. In the islands of the Aegean I encountered it several times, the fullest version being one which I heard in Scyros. The story as told there was exactly that of Deucalion, save that in deference to biblical tradition he was named Noah and, by a slight anachronism, it was the Panagia instead of Themis who counselled him to create fresh men by throwing stones over his shoulder. I was also taken to see the place where the flood was at its highest, a narrow glen through which runs a small stream, whose high sloping banks are certainly a mass of half-fossilised animal and vegetable matter; and I was escorted to the hill-top on which Noah’s caïque finally rested. Such a theme is easily worked into a story of the deity, usually benevolent though she be, who is ‘Mistress of the earth and of the sea’; and apart from the means of punishment so appropriately adopted by a goddess who rules the sea, this single outburst of somewhat unreasonable anger on the part of the modern deity against all mankind is singularly like the old-time Demeter’s resentful retirement into the depths of her cave, until ‘all the produce of earth was failing and the human race was perishing fast from famine[163].’ Yet otherwise the ancient goddess too was benevolent and gracious to man.

Fourthly, in Aetolia at any rate and probably also in the Peloponnese, where however I failed to extract definite information, the modern goddess is the quickener of all the fruits of the earth, and in functions therefore corresponds once more with the ancient conception of Demeter. On these grounds the identification seems to me certain.

This being granted, the permanence of tradition concerning the dwelling-place of Demeter raises a question which I approach with diffidence, feeling that an answer to it must rest with others more competent than myself in matters archaeological. First, is the tradition as old as that of the personality of the goddess? It is hard to suppose otherwise; for the primitive mind would scarcely conceive of a person without assigning also an habitation; and the habitation actually assigned is of primitive enough character--a cave in a mountain-side. Where then was Demeter worshipped by the Pelasgians in the Mycenaean age? That she was a deity much reverenced by the dwellers in the Argive plain is certain; small idols believed to represent Demeter Kourotrophos have been found at Mycenae[164]; others, of which the identification is more certain, at Tiryns[165]; and at Argos, in later times, Demeter continued to be worshipped under the title Pelasgian[166]. Was a mere cavern then her only home? Or did Mycenae lavish some of its gold on building her a more worthy temple? May not the famous bee-hive structures which have passed successively for treasuries and for tombs of princes prove to be μέγαρα, temples of Chthonian deities such as Demeter?

It is true that in some humbler structures of the same type, such as those at Menídi and Thoricus, clear evidences of inhumation have been found; but I question whether it is permissible to draw from this fact the inference that those magnificent structures also, the so-called Treasuries of Atreus and of Minyas, were in reality tombs. It would seem reasonable to suppose that dwelling-places for the dead beneath the earth and for earth-deities may have been constructed on the same plan, but that the abodes dedicated to immortals were more imposing than those destined for dead men. This hypothesis appears to me more consistent with the evidence of the actual sites at Mycenae and Orchomenos than the commonly accepted view that the inner chamber of the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ was a place of burial. ‘In the centre of the Mycenaean chamber,’ says Schuchhardt[167], ‘there is an almost circular depression three feet in diameter and two feet in depth, cut into the rocky ground. In spite of its unusual shape, we must recognise in it the actual site of the grave.’ Was it a royal posture to lie curled up like a cat? And if so, what of a similar depression in the floor of the ‘Treasury of Minyas’ at Orchomenos? ‘Almost in the centre of the treasure-room’--I again quote Schuchhardt[168]--‘was a long hole in the level rock, nine inches deep, fifteen inches broad and nineteen inches long, which’--must be recognised as the sepulchre of a royal baby? No, our faith is not to be so severely taxed;--‘which must have served to secure some monument.’ May we not, with more consistency, extend the same explanation to Mycenae? And what then were the monuments? May they not have been images of the deity set up in the most natural place, the centre of the outer or the inner sanctuary?

Again, the actual shape of the buildings is important. Ethnologists tell us that it is ultimately derived from a type of dwelling commonly occupied by primitive man, a circular wattle-hut with conical top; or even more directly, as some would have it, from a similarly shaped abode which the ancient Phrygians used to excavate in the ground, constructing the top of withies laced over beams converging to the apex and covered over with earth, while they tunnelled out an approach from one side where the ground sloped conveniently away[169]. From this it is argued that the domed chambers of Mycenae must be tombs, on the ground that ‘men in all ages have fashioned the dwellings of the dead in accordance with those of the living; but the dead are conservative, and long after a new generation has sought a new home and a new pattern for its houses, the habitations of the dead are still constructed in ancestral fashion[170].’ I readily admit conservatism in all religious matters; but how does the argument touch Mycenae? Archaeologists, and among them Schuchhardt himself[171], are agreed that the shaft-graves in the citadel are earlier in date than the bee-hive structures of the lower town. There was therefore a breach in the continuity of the ancestral fashion. Reversion to a disused fashion is a very different thing from conservatism in upholding an unbroken usage.

But even supposing that there were good evidence of the uninterrupted continuity of this type of sepulchre, may not the temples of Chthonian deities have been built on the same plan? The use of the old word μέγαρον suggests that the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, though subterranean, was modelled on the dwellings of men, and, to borrow an argument, religious conservatism may well have preserved for the gods’ abodes the hut-like shape of primitive man’s dwellings long after a new type of house had become general among mortals. Concrete instances of this actually existed in much later times[172]. In Rome the temple of Vesta was of this primitive shape, and so also most probably was the Prytaneum of Athens, which, though not a temple, contained the sacred hearth of the whole community and a statue of Hestia[173]. Demeter then, as one of the deities of primitive Greece, might well have been provided with a temple constructed on the same primitive pattern as that of Vesta, but subterranean, as would befit a Chthonian deity, and thus analogous to the cave wherein she had been wont to dwell. The large domed chamber would be her _megaron_, wherein her worshippers assembled just as guests assembled in the _megaron_ of a prince. The small square apartment, where such exists, opening on one side of the main room, might be the παστάς or ‘bedchamber,’ an inner sanctuary which temples of later ages also possessed. The approach or ‘dromos’ would represent the natural cave which had given access to her fabled palace in the bowels of the earth.

Finally, on such a view of these buildings, it would not be difficult to explain Pausanias’ belief that they were treasuries[174]. Treasuries only, we may be sure, they were not; for they would not have been built outside the walls of the citadel. But temples in later times were used as depositories for treasure; the would-be thief shrank apparently from the further crime of sacrilege; and it is not unlikely that in a more primitive age, when superstitious awe was certainly no less strong, while robbery far from being a crime was an honourable calling, men should have secured their treasure by storing it in some inviolable sanctuary. Indeed it may be to such a custom that Homer alludes in speaking of ‘all that the stone threshold of the archer, even Phoebus Apollo, doth enclose within at rocky Pytho[175].’ If then this practice prevailed in Mycenaean, as it did in later, times, Pausanias would be recording a tradition which was partially right; and it is not hard to see how, when Mycenae’s greatness had suddenly, as it seems, declined and her population perhaps had migrated for the most part to Argos, later generations, familiar in their new settlements with that different type of temple only which afterwards became general, might have forgotten the sacred character of the bee-hive structures and have remembered only the proverbial wealth once stored by the kings of Mycenae within them.

There remains one point to which I may for the moment direct attention here, reserving the development of the religious idea contained in it for a later chapter. The main theme of the second of the stories from Zacynthos was the seeking of the Mistress in marriage by a young prince. Now if this story stood alone, it would not be right to lay much stress upon it; for the adventures of a young prince in search of some far-famed bride form the plot of numerous Greek folk-tales; and it would be possible to suppose that the real divine personality of the Mistress had been partially obscured in the popular memory before such a story became connected with her name. But the same _motif_ as it happens is repeated in two stories, one Greek and the other Albanian, in von Hahn’s collection[176]. The name of ‘the Mistress’ does not indeed occur; the deity is called in both ‘the beautiful one of the earth[177].’ But her identity is made quite clear in the Albanian story, which evidently must have been borrowed from the Greek and is therefore admissible as good evidence, by the mention of ‘a three-headed dog that sleeps not day nor night’ by which she is guarded. This is undoubtedly the same monster as the hero of the Zacynthian story was required to kill--the three-headed snake; and while the Albanian story, in making the beast a guardian of the subterranean abode whom the adventurer must slay before he can reach ‘the beautiful one,’ is better in construction and, incidentally, more faithful to old tradition[178] than the Greek version which makes the slaying an useless task arbitrarily imposed, yet in both portraits of the monster we can recognise Cerberus--half dog, half snake. But of him more anon; ‘the beautiful one of the earth’ whom he guards can be none other than Persephone.

Thus there are three modern stories which record the winning of Demeter or Persephone in marriage by a mortal lover. Is this a relic of ancient tradition? There was the attempt of Pirithous to seize Persephone for his wife; but that failed, and moreover was judged an impious deed for which he must suffer punishment. Yet there is also the story of Iasion who was deemed worthy of Demeter’s love. Wedlock then even with so great a deity as Demeter or her daughter was not beyond mortals’ dream or reach. Thus much I may notice now; when I come to examine more closely the ancient worship of these goddesses, I shall argue that the idea of a marriage-union between them and human kind was the most intimate secret of the mysteries, and that in such folk-tales as those which I have here mentioned is contained the germ of a religious conception from which was once evolved the holiest of ancient sacraments.

§ 6. CHARON.

There is no ancient deity whose name is so frequently on the lips of the modern peasant as that of Charon. The forms which it has now assumed are two, Χάρος and Χάροντας, analogous to the formations γέρος and γέροντας from the ancient γέρων: for in late Greek at any rate the declension of Χάρων followed that of γέρων[179]. The two forms do not seem to belong to different modern dialects, for they often appear in close juxtaposition in the same folk-song. The shorter form however is the commoner in every-day speech, and I shall therefore employ it.

About Charos the peasants will always, according to my experience, converse freely. Neither superstitious awe nor fear of ridicule imposes any restraint. They feel perhaps that the existence of Charos is one of the stern facts which men must face; and even the more educated classes retain sometimes, I think, an instinctive fear of making light of his name, lest he should assert his reality. For Charos is Death. He is not now, what classical literature would have him to be, merely the ferryman of the Styx. He is the god of death and of the lower world.

Hades is no longer a person but a place, the realm over which Charos rules. But the change which has befallen the old monarch’s name is the only change in the Greek conception of that realm. It is still called ‘the lower world’ (ὁ κάτω κόσμος or ἡ κάτω γῆ), and even the name Tartarus (now τὰ Τάρταρα, with the addition frequently of τῆς γῆς) still may be heard. Nor is the character of the place altered. Its epithet ‘icy-cold,’ κρυοπαγωμένος, is well-nigh as constant in modern folk-songs as was the equivalent κρυερός in Homer’s allusions to Hades’ house, while the picturesque word ἀραχνιασμένος, ‘thick with spiders’-webs,’ repeats in thought the Homeric εὐρωείς, ‘mouldering.’ Such is Charos’ kingdom, and hither he conveys men’s souls which he has snatched away from earth.

Here with him dwells his mother, a being, as one folk-song tells[180], more pitiful than he, who entreats him sometimes, when he is setting out to the chase, to spare mothers with young children and not to part lovers new-wed. He has also a wife, Charóntissa or Chárissa, who as the name itself implies is merely a feminine counterpart of himself without any distinct character of her own. A son of Charos is also mentioned in song, for whose wedding-feast ‘he slays children instead of lambs and brides as fatlings[181],’ and to whose keeping are entrusted the counter-keys of Hades[182]. Adopted children are also counted among his family, but these are of those whom he has carried from this world to his own home[183]. The household is completed by the three-headed watch-dog, of whom however remembrance is very rare. Yet in two stories in the last section we recognised Cerberus, and even the less convincing of the embodiments there presented, that which represented him as a three-headed snake rather than dog, is not devoid of traces of ancient tradition. The hero who would slay the monster has to cross a piece of water--the sea instead of the river Styx--in order to reach an island where is the monster’s lair; and there arrived, he sees ‘looking out from a hole three heads with eyes that flash fire and jaws that breathe flames[184].’ This is Cerberus without doubt; and if the story calls him ‘serpent’ rather than ‘dog,’ ancient mythology and art alike justify in part the description; for his mother was said to be Echidna, and he himself is found pourtrayed with the tail of a serpent and a ring of snakes about his neck. Schmidt himself appears to have overlooked the testimony of this story and of that also from the collection of von Hahn in which, as I have pointed out, we have a modern picture of Cerberus guarding the realm of Persephone; for he speaks of some remarkable lines from a song which he himself heard in Zacynthos as an unique mention of Cerberus, and questions the genuine nature of the tradition. All doubt is however removed by the corroborative evidence contained in the two stories already mentioned and by the fact that a three-headed dog belonging to Charos was recently heard of by a traveller in Macedonia[185]. The lines themselves are put in the mouth of Charos:--

Ἔχω ὀχτρὸ ἐγὼ σκυλὶ, π’ ούλους μας μᾶς φυλάει, κῂ ἄντας με ἰδῇ ταράζεταικὴ καὶ θέλει νά με φάῃ. εἶναι σκυλὶ τρικέφαλο, ποῦ καίει σὰ φωτία, ἔχει τὰ νύχια πουντερὰ καὶ τὴν ὠρὰ μακρύα. βγάνει φωτιὰ ’φ’ τὰ μάτια του, ἀπὸ τὸ στόμα λάβρα, ἡ γλῶσσα του εἶναι μακρυά, τὰ δόντια του εἶναι μαῦρα[186].

‘A savage dog have I, who guards us all, and when he sees me he rages and fain would devour me. A three-headed dog is he, and he burns like fire; his claws are sharp and his tail is long; from his eyes he gives forth flame and from his mouth burning heat; long is his tongue and grim his teeth.’

Here at least recognition of Cerberus must be immediate; every detail of the description, save for the characteristically modern touch which makes Charos afraid of his own dog, is in accord with classical tradition.

Such is the household of Charos, so far as a description may be compiled from a few scattered allusions; his own portrait varies more, in proportion as there are more numerous attempts in every part of Greece to draw it. Sometimes he is depicted as an old man, tall and spare, white of hair and harsh of feature; but more often he is a lusty warrior, with locks of raven-black or gleaming gold--just as Hades in old time was sometimes κυανοχαίτης, sometimes ξανθός,--who rides forth on his black steed by highway or lonely path to slay and to ravage: ‘his glance is as lightning and his face as fire, his shoulders are like twin mountains and his head like a tower[187].’ His raiment is usually black as befits the lord of death, but anon it is depicted bright as his sunlit hair[188], for though he brings death he is a god and glorious.

His functions are clearly defined. He visits this upper world to carry off those whose allotted time has run, and guards them in the lower world as in a prison whose keys they vainly essay to steal and to escape therefrom. But the spirit in which he performs those duties varies according as he is conceived to be a free agent responsible to none or merely a minister of the supreme God. Which of these is the true conception is a question to which the common-folk as a whole have given no final answer; and the character of Charos consequently depends upon the view locally preferred.

Those who regard him as simply the servant and messenger of God, find no difficulty in accommodating him to his Christian surroundings; for, as I have said, the peasant does not distinguish between the Christian and the pagan elements in his faith which together make his polytheism so luxuriant. We have already seen Charos’ name with the prefix of ‘saint[189]’; and though this Christian title is not often accorded him, yet his name appears commonly on tomb-stones in Christian churchyards. At Leonídi, on the east coast of the Peloponnese, I noted the couplet:

καὶ μένα δὲν λυπήθηκε ὁ Χάρος νά με πάρῃ, ποῦ εἴμουνα τοῦ οἴκου μου μονάκριβο βλαστάρι.

‘Me too Charos pitied not but took, even me the fondly-cherished flower of my home.’

So too in popular story and song he is represented as working in concord with the Angels and Archangels, to whom sometimes falls the task of carrying children to his realm[190]. Indeed one of the archangels, Michael, who as we saw above has ousted Hermes, the escorter of souls, and assumed his functions, is charged with exactly the same duties as Charos in the conveyance of men’s souls to the nether world, so that in popular parlance the phrases ‘he is wrestling with Charos’ (παλεύει μὲ τὸ Χάρο)[191] and ‘he is struggling with an angel’ (ἀγγελομαχεῖ)[192] are both alike used of a man in his death-agony.

This Christianised conception of Charos has not been without influence in softening the lines of the character popularly ascribed to him. The duties imposed upon him by the will of God are sometimes repugnant to him, and he would willingly spare those whom he is sent to slay. One folk-story related to me exhibits him even as a friend of man:--

‘Once upon a time there were a man and wife who had had seven children all of whom died in infancy. When an eighth was born, the father betook himself to a witch and enquired of her how he might best secure the boy’s life. She told him that the others had died because he had chosen unsuitable godparents, and bade him on this occasion ask the first man whom he should meet on his way home to stand sponsor for the child. He accordingly departed, and straightway met a stranger riding on a black horse, and made his request to him. The stranger consented, and the baptism at once took place; but no sooner was it over than he was gone without so much as telling his name.

Ten years passed, and the child was growing up strong and healthy. Then at last the father again encountered the unknown stranger, and reproached him with having been absent so long without ever making enquiry after his godson. Then the stranger answered, “Better for thee if I had not now come and if thou neededst not now learn my name. I am Charos, and because I am thy friend[193], am come to warn thee that thy days are well-nigh spent.” Thereupon Charos led him away to a cave in the mountain-side, and they entered and came to a chamber where were many candles burning. Then said Charos, “See, these candles are the lives of men, and yonder are thine and thy son’s.” Then the man looked, and of his own candle there were but two inches left, but his son’s was tall and burnt but slowly. Then he besought Charos to light yet another candle for him ere his own were burnt away, but Charos made answer that that could not be. Then again he besought him to give him ten years from the life of his son, for he was a poor man, and if he died ere his son were grown to manhood, his widow and orphan would be in want. But Charos answered, “In no way can the decreed length of life be changed. Yet will I show thee how in the two years that yet remain to thee thou mayest enrich thyself and leave abundant store for thy wife and child. Thou shalt become a physician. It matters not that thou knowest nought of medicine, for I will give thee a better knowledge than of drugs. Thine eyes shall ever be open to see me; and when thou goest to a sick man’s couch, if thou dost see me standing at the bed-head, know then that he must die, and say to them that summoned thee that no skill can save him; but if thou dost see me at the foot of the bed, know that he will recover; give him therefore but pills of bread if thou wilt, and promise to restore him.” Then did the man thank Charos, and went away to his home.

Now it chanced that the only daughter of the king lay grievously sick, and all the doctors and magicians had been called to heal her, but they availed nothing. Then came the poor man whom Charos had taught, and went into the room where the princess lay, and lo! Charos stood at the foot of her bed. Then he bade the king send away the other physicians, for that he alone could heal her. So he himself went home and mixed flour and water and came again and gave it to the king’s daughter, and soon she was recovered of her sickness. Then the king gave him a great present, and his fame was spread abroad, and many resorted to him, and soon he was rich.

Thus two years passed, and at the end thereof he himself lay sick. And he looked and saw Charos standing at the head of his bed. Then he bade his wife turn the bed about, but it availed nothing; for Charos again stood at his head, and caught him by the hair, and he opened his mouth to cry out, and Charos drew forth his soul[194].’

Again the unwillingness of Charos to execute the harsh decrees of God is illustrated in numerous folk-songs. Most often it is some brave youth, shepherd or warrior, a lover of the open air, who excites his compassion; for the same notes of regret which Sophocles made melodious in the farewell of Ajax to the sunlight, to his house in Salamis, even to the streams and springs of the Trojan land which brought his death, ring clear and true in modern folk-song too from the lips of dying warriors. Such were the last words of the outlaw-patriot (κλέφτης) Zedros:

‘Farewell, Olympus, now farewell, and all the mountain-summits, Farewell, my strongholds desolate, and plane-trees rich in shadow, Ye fountains with your waters cool, and level plains low-lying. Farewell I bid the swift-winged hawks[195], farewell the royal eagles, Farewell for me the sun I love and the bright-glancing moonlight, That lighted up my path wherein to walk a warrior worthy[196].’

Such laments are not lost upon Charos, the servant of God, but he must needs turn a deaf ear to prayers for a respite. Clear and final comes his answer, almost in the same words in every ballad[197],

δὲν ἠμπορῶ, λεβέντη μου, γιατ’ εἶμαι προσταμμένος, ἐμένα μ’ ἔστειλ’ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ πάρω τὴ ψυχή σου.

‘No respite can I give, brave sir, for I am straitly chargèd; ’Tis God that sent me here to thee, sent me to take thy spirit.’

Sometimes then the doomed man will seek to tempt Charos with meat and drink, that he may grant a few hours’ delay, but against offers of hospitality he is obdurate. Or again his victim refuses to yield to death ‘without weakness or sickness’ and challenges him to a trial of athletic skill, in wrestling or leaping, whereon each shall stake his own soul. And to this Charos sometimes gives consent, for he knows that he will win. So they make their way to the ‘marble-paved threshing-floor,’ the arena of all manly pursuits; and there the man perchance leaps forty cubits, yet Charos surpasses him by five; or they wrestle together from morn till eve, but at the last bout Charos is victor. One hero indeed is known to fame, whose exploits make him the Heracles of modern Greece, Digenes the Cyprian, who wrestled with Charos for three nights and days and was not vanquished. But then ‘there came a voice from God and from the Archangels, “Charos, I sent thee not to engage in wrestlings, but that thou should’st carry off souls for me[198].”’ And at that rebuke Charos transformed himself into an eagle and alighted on the hero’s head and plucked out his soul.

The other and more pagan conception of Charos excludes all traits of kindness and mercy; and men do not stint the expression of their hatred of him. He is ‘black,’ ‘bitter,’ ‘hateful’ (μαῦρος[199], πικρός, στυγερός). He is the merciless potentate of the nether world, independent of the God of heaven, equally powerful in his own domain, but more terrible, more inexorable: for his work is death and his abode is Hades. Thence he issues forth at will, as a hunter to the chase. ‘Against the wounds that Charos deals herbs avail not, physicians give no cure, nor saints protection[200].’ His quarry is the soul of man; ‘where he finds three, he takes two of them, and where he finds two, takes one, and where he finds but one alone, him too he takes[201].’ Sometimes he is enlarging his palace, and he takes the young and strong to be its pillars; sometimes he is repairing the tent in which he dwells, and uses the stout arms of heroes for tent-pegs and the tresses of bright-haired maidens for the ropes; sometimes he is laying out a garden, and he gathers children from the earth to be the flowers of it and young men to be its tall slim cypresses; more rarely he is a vintager, and tramples men in his vat that their blood may be his red wine, or again he carries a sickle and reaps a human harvest.

But most commonly he is the warrior preëminent in all manner of prowess--archer, wrestler, horseman. Once a bride boasted that she had no fear of Charos, for that her brothers were men of valour and her husband a hero; then came Charos and shot an arrow at her, and her beauty faded; a second and a third arrow, and he stretched her on her death-bed[202]. Often in the pride of strength have young warriors laughed Charos to scorn; then has he come to seize the strongest of them, and though the warrior strain and struggle as in a wrestling-match, yet Charos wearies not but wins the contest by fair means or foul: for he is no honourable foe, but dishonest above thieves, more deceitful than women[203]: he seizes his adversary by the hair and drags him down to Hades. Even more striking is the picture of Charos as horseman riding forth on his black steed to the foray, and it is this conception which has inspired one of the finest achievements of the popular muse:--

Why stand the mountains black and sad, their brows enwrapped in darkness? Is it a wind that buffets them? is it a storm that lashes? No, ’tis no wind that buffets them, nor ’tis no storm that lashes; But ’tis great Charos passing by, and the dead passing with him. He drives the young men on before, he drags the old behind him, And at his saddle-bow are ranged the helpless little children. The children cling and cry to him, the old men call beseeching, “Good Charos, at some hamlet halt, halt at some cooling fountain; There let the young men heave the stone, the old men drink of water, There let the little children go agathering pretty posies.” “No, not at hamlet will I halt, nor yet at cooling fountain, Lest mothers come draw water there and know their little children, Lest wife and husband meet again and there be no more parting.”

Such is the more pagan presentment of the modern Charos, a tyrant as absolute in his own realm as God in heaven, a veritable Ζεὺς ἄλλος[204] as was Hades of old, but hard of heart, heedless of prayer, delighting in cruelty.

At first sight then the Charos of modern Greece would seem to have little in common with the Charon of ancient Greece beyond the name and some connexion with death: and Fauriel, in the introduction to his collection of popular songs, pronounces the opinion that in this case the usual tendencies of tradition have been reversed, in that it is the name that has survived, while the attributes have been changed[205]. To this judgement I cannot subscribe. I suspect that in ancient times the literary presentation of Charon was far more circumscribed than the popular, and that out of a profusion of imaginative portraitures as varied as those seen in the folk-songs of to-day one aspect of Charon became accepted among educated men as the correct and fashionable presentment. Hades was, in literature, the despot of the lower world, and for Charon no place could be found save that of ferryman. But this, I think, was only one out of the many guises in which the ancient Charon was figured by popular imagination; for at the present day the remnants of such a conception are small, in spite of the fact that there has remained a custom which should have kept it alive--the custom of putting a coin in the mouth of the dead.

Only in one folk-song, recorded from Zacynthos, can I find the old literary representation of Charon as ferryman of the Styx unmistakably reproduced. The following is a literal rendering:--‘Across the river that none may ford Charos was passing, and one soul was on the bank and gave him greeting. “Good Charos, long life to thee, well-beloved; take me, even me, with thee, take me, dear Charos! A poor man’s soul was I, even of a poor man and a beggar; men left me destitute and I perished for lack of a crumb of barley-bread. No last rites did they give me, they gave me none, poor soul, not even a farthing in my mouth for thee who dost await me. Poor were my children, poor and without hope; destitute were they and lay in death unburied, poor souls. Them thou did’st take, good Charos, them thou did’st take, I saw thee, when thy cold hand seized them by the hair. Take me too, Charos, take me, take me, poor soul; take me yonder, take me yonder, no other waiteth for thee.” Thus cried to him the poor man’s soul, and Charos made answer, “Come, soul, thou art good, and God hath pitied thee.” Then took he the soul and set her on the other bank, and spreading then his sail he sped far away[206].’

In another song[207] of the same collection, hailing also from Zacynthos, there may be a reminiscence of the same old tradition. In it Charos has a caïque with black sails and black oars and goes to and fro--whence and whither is not told--with cargoes of the dead. But more probably the imagery is borrowed from seafaring; the Greek peasant would hardly imagine a caïque plying on a river; the streams of his own country will seldom carry even a small bark. A sea-voyage on the other hand is, especially in the imagination of islanders, the most natural method of departure to a far-off country. From the sea certainly comes the metaphor in a funeral dirge from Zacynthos in which the mourner asks of the dead,

σὲ τὶ καράβι θὰ βρεθῇς καὶ ’σ τὶ πόρτο θ’ ἀράξῃς;[208]

‘In what boat wilt thou be and at what haven wilt thou land?’

This too is claimed by Schmidt[209] as a reminiscence of Charon’s ferry--somewhat unfortunately; for the next line continues,

γιὰ νἄρθῃ ἡ μανοῦλα σου νά σε ξαναγοράσῃ,

‘That thy mother may come and ransom thee again.’

Now in another dirge[210] also heard by Schmidt in the same island, this idea is worked out even more fully: the mother cries to the master of the ship that bears away her lost son not to sell him, and offers high ransom for him; but the dead man in answer bids her keep her treasure; ‘not till the crow doth whiten and become a dove, must thou, mother mine, look for me again.’ Clearly the imagery is borrowed not from the ferry-boat of Charon plying for hire, but from a descent of pirates who carry men off to hold them to ransom or to sell them for slaves. In neither dirge is Charos actually named, but doubtless he is understood to be the captain of the pirates; for in more than one dirge of Laconia and Maina he is explicitly called κουρσάρος, a corsair[211].

Here then we have yet another presentation of the modern Charos; but of Charon the ferryman there is no sure remembrance except in one song from Zacynthos. Nor again, save in that one song, is the river of death imagined as an impassable barrier; it is rather a stream of Lethe: no boatman is needed to carry the dead across; but mention is made only of ‘the loved ones, that pass the river and drink the water thereof, and forget their homes and their orphan children[212]’--just as in the mountains there are ‘springs in marble grots, whereat the wild sheep drink and remember no more their lambs[213].’ It is the drinking of the water, not the passing of the stream, which frees the dead from aching memories: the picture is wholly different from that of a river which cannot be crossed but by grace of the ferryman.

The general oblivion into which the ancient conception of Charon has fallen is the more remarkable, as I have said, in view of the survival of a custom which in antiquity was closely associated with it. In parts of Macedonia, Thrace, and Asia Minor the practice prevails[214], or till recently prevailed, of placing in the mouth (or more rarely on the breast) of the dead a small coin, which in the environs of Smyrna is actually known as τὸ περατίκι, passage-money[215]. In the Cyclades and in parts of the Greek mainland I myself have met aged persons who could recall the existence of the custom: a century or two ago it was probably frequent. But there is less evidence that the coin was commonly intended for Charos. Protodikos indeed, the authority for the existence of the custom in Asia Minor, writing in 1860, says expressly that the coin was designed for Charos as ferryman; and the name of ‘passage-money’ locally given to the coin tends to confirm the statement of a writer whom I have found in some other matters inaccurate. Another authority[216] moreover, writing also in 1860, states that at Stenimachos in Thrace ‘until a short time ago’ the coin was laid in the mouth of the dead actually for Charos; nor can there be any question that the classical interpretation of the custom survived long in Zacynthos, as is evidenced by the complaint of the poor man’s soul in the song translated above,

’στερνὰ ἐμὲ δὲ μοὔδωκαν, δε μοὔδωκαν τσῆ καϋμένης, μήτε λεφτὸ ’στὸ στόμα μου γιὰ σὲ ποῦ περιμένεις,

‘No last rites did they give me, they gave me none, poor soul, not even a farthing in my mouth for thee (Charos) who awaitest me.’

Yet Schmidt, who recorded these lines from Zacynthos, found that the actual custom was barely remembered there. He met indeed, in 1863, one old woman aged eighty-two, who as a child had known the practice of putting a copper in the mouth of the dead as also that of laying a key on the corpse’s breast; but of the purpose of the coin she knew nothing; the key she believed to be useful for opening the gates of Paradise. For myself, though I have heard mention of the use of the coin, I have never known it to be associated with Charos. I incline therefore to the opinion that in most places where the custom is or has recently been practised, it has outlived the interpretation which was in classical times put upon it.

But was the classical interpretation a true index to the origin of the custom? Was it anything more than an aetiological explanation of a custom whose significance even in an early age had already become obscured by lapse of time? One thing at least has been made certain by the modern study of folklore, namely that a custom may outlive not only the idea which gave it birth but even successive false ideas which it has itself engendered in the minds of men who have sought vainly to explain it. When therefore Lucian[217] stated that ‘they put an obol in the dead man’s mouth as boat-fare for the ferryman,’ it is possible that he was recording a late and incorrect interpretation of a custom which had existed before the rôle of ferryman had ever been invented for Charon. Further if that interpretation had been in the main a literary figment, it would have been natural for the original meaning of the custom to be still remembered among the unlettered common-folk of outlying districts. There are plenty of cases in modern Greece in which different explanations of the same custom are offered in different localities. In spite therefore of the fact that one view only found expression in classical literature, there is no antecedent improbability in the supposition that an older view may have been handed down even to recent generations in the purer oral traditions of the common-folk.

Once only, from a fellow-traveller in the Cyclades, did I obtain any explanation at all of the use of the coin, εἶναι καλὸ γιὰ τἀερικά[218], ‘it is useful because of the aërial ones.’ This sounds vague enough, but nothing more save gestures of uncertainty could I elicit. Was the coin useful, in his view, as a fee to be paid to ‘the aërial ones’ on the soul’s journey from this world to the next, or as a charm against the assaults of such beings? That was the question to which I sought an answer from him, but in vain. For myself I cannot determine in which sense the dark saying was actually meant. The former would accord well with one local belief of the present day, if only my informant had specified one particular kind of aërial beings who are believed to take toll of departing souls; but to this I shall return in a later section of this chapter[219]. The second interpretation of the words, however, whether they were intended in that sense by the speaker or not, furnishes what will be shown by other evidence to be the key to the origin of the custom.

A coin is often used as a charm against sinister influences[220]. In this case then it may have been a prophylactic against aërial spirits. Why then is it generally put in the dead man’s mouth? Not, I think, because the mouth is a convenient purse, as seems to be assumed in the classical interpretation of the custom, but because the mouth is the entrance to the body. The peasants of to-day believe as firmly as men of the Homeric age that it is through the mouth that the soul escapes at death. The phrase μὲ τὴ ψυχὴ ’στὰ δόντια, ‘with the soul between the teeth,’ is the popular equivalent for ‘at the last gasp’; and in the folk-songs the same idea constantly recurs; ‘open thy mouth,’ says Charos to a shepherd whom he has thrown in wrestling, ‘open thy mouth that I may take thy soul[221].’ Now the passage by which the soul makes its exit, is naturally the passage by which evil spirits (or the soul[222], if it should return,) would make their entrance; and, as we shall see later, there is a very real fear among the peasantry that a dead body may be entered and possessed by an evil spirit. Clearly then the mouth, by which the spirit would enter, is the right place in which to lay the protective coin.

The interpretation which I suggest gains support from some points in modern usage. In Macedonia, according to one traveller[223], the coin which formerly used to be laid in the corpse’s mouth was Turkish and bore a text from the Koran, an aggravation of the pagan custom which was made a pretext for episcopal intervention[224]. Now clearly, if the coin had in that district been designed as payment for the services of Charos as ferryman, there would have been no motive for preferring one bearing an inscription from the Mohammedan scriptures, which assuredly could not enhance the coin’s value in the eyes of Charos: but if the coin was itself employed as a charm against evil spirits, the sacred text might well have been deemed to add not a little to its prophylactic properties. Thus the character of the particular type of coin chosen indicates that the coin in itself too was at one time viewed as a charm; a charm moreover whose effect would be precisely that of the key which in the island of Zacynthos was also laid upon the dead man’s breast; for the key was certainly not designed, as Schmidt’s informant would have it, to open the gates of Paradise, but, like any other piece of iron, served originally to scare away spirits. The use of a coin as well as of a key in that island was merely meant to make assurance doubly sure.

Again, in many places throughout Greece, where this use of a coin is no longer known, a substitute of more Christian character has been found. On the lips of the dead is laid either a morsel of consecrated bread from the Eucharist[225], or more commonly a small piece of pottery--a fragment it may be of any earthenware vessel--on which is incised the sign of the cross with the legend Ι. Χ. ΝΙ. ΚΑ. (‘Jesus Christ conquers’) in the four angles[226]. Here the choice of the inscribed words of itself seems to indicate the intention of barring the dead man’s mouth against the entrance of evil spirits; and as final proof of my theory I find that in both Chios[227] and Rhodes[228], where a wholly or partially Christianised form of the custom prevails, the charm employed is definitely understood by the people to be a means of precaution against a devil entering the dead body and resuscitating it. Nor must the mention of a devil in this connexion be taken as evidence that the Chian and Rhodian interpretation of the custom is not ancient. I shall be able to show in a later chapter that the idea of a devil entering the corpse is only the Christian version of a pagan belief in a possible re-animation of the corpse by the soul[229].

But there is yet another variety of the custom, in which no coin and no Mohammedan nor Christian[230] symbol is used, but a charm whose magic properties were in repute long before Mohammed, long before Christ, probably long before coinage was known to Greece. Again a piece of pottery is used, but the symbol stamped upon it is the geometrical figure [pentagram], the ‘pentacle’ of mediaeval magic lore. In Greece it is now known as τὸ πεντάλφα, but of its properties, beyond the fact that it serves as a charm[231], the people have nothing to say. In the mediaeval and probably in the yet earlier magic of Europe and the East it is one of the commonest figures, appearing sometimes as Solomon’s seal, sometimes as the star which led the wise men to Bethlehem, sometimes, in black colouring, as a symbol of the principle of evil, and correspondingly, in white, as the symbol of the principle of good. But though the figure has been known to the magicians of many nations and many epochs, there is no reason to suppose that it is in recent times or from other races that the Greeks have learnt it: for it was known too by the ancient Greeks, who noted among its more intelligible properties the fact that the five lines composing it can be drawn without removing pencil from paper. The Pythagoreans, who called it the πεντάγραμμον[232], are known to have attached to it some mystic value. There is a reasonable likelihood therefore that the symbol has been handed down in Greece as a magical charm--for we have seen how many other methods of magic have survived--from the time of Pythagoras. Further back we cannot penetrate; yet--_vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_, and there were professors of occult sciences before Pythagoras. Was it then he who first discovered the figure’s mystic value? Or did he merely adopt and interpret in his own way a symbol which for long ages before him had been endowed with magical powers? Was it perhaps this figure, graven on some broken potsherd, which long before coinage supplied a more ready charm protected the corpse from possession by evil spirits, or rather, in those days, from reanimation by the soul? Who shall say? The belief, which has found its modern expression in the engraving of Christian or Mohammedan texts on prophylactic coins or pottery and in barring with them the door of the lips which gives access to the corpse, is certainly primitive enough in character to date from the dimmest prehistoric age.

If my suggestion as to the origin of the custom is correct, it was only the accident of a coin being commonly used as the prophylactic charm, which caused the classical association of the custom with Charon; and, once disembarrassed of this association, the popular conception of Charon in antiquity is more easily studied.

The literary presentation of him in the guise of a ferryman only is a comparatively late development. The early poets know nothing of him whatever in any character. The first literary reference to him was apparently in the _Minyad_, an epic poem of doubtful but not early date, of which two lines referring to the descent of Theseus and Pirithous to the lower world ran thus: ‘There verily the ship whereon the dead embark, even that which the aged Charon as ferryman doth guide, they found not at its anchorage[233].’ These are the lines by which Pausanias believed that Polygnotus had been guided when painting the figure of Charon in his famous representation of the nether world at Delphi. Thenceforth this was the one orthodox presentation of Charon in both literature and art. Euripides and Aristophanes in numerous passages[234] both alike conform to it, and the painters of funeral vases were equally faithful.

But there is evidence to show that this was not the popular conception of Charon, or at any rate not the whole of it. Phrases occur (and were probably current in classical times) which seem to imply a larger conception of Charon’s office and functions. The ‘door of Charon’ (Χαρώνειος θύρα[235] or Χαρώνειον[236]) was that by which condemned prisoners were led out to execution. The ‘staircase of Charon’ (Χαρώνειος κλίμαξ[237]) was that by which ghosts in drama ascended to the stage, as if they were appearing from the nether world. To Charon likewise were ascribed in popular parlance many caverns of forbidding aspect, particularly those that were filled with mephitic vapours--Χαρώνεια βάραθρα[238], σπήλαια[239], ἄντρα[240]. Finally Χαρωνῖται is Plutarch’s[241] rendering of the Latin _Orcini_, the _sobriquet_ given to the low persons whom Caesar brought up into the Senate. These uses point to a popular conception of Charon larger than classical art and literature reveal, and justify Suidas’ simple identification of Charon with death[242].

Moreover once in Euripides, for all his strict adherence to the conventional literary characterisation of Charon, a glimpse of popular thought is reflected in the person of Death (Θάνατος) and the part which he plays in the _Alcestis_. First, in the altercation between Apollo and Death over the fate of Alcestis, there occur the words, ‘Take her and go thy way; for I know not whether I should persuade thee’; to which Death answers, ‘Persuade me to slay those whom I must? nay, ’tis with this that I am charged’ (τοῦτο γὰρ τετάγμεθα[243]). Can it be a mere coincidence that, in modern folk-song, when some doomed man seeks to persuade Charos to grant a respite, he answers, ‘Nay, brave sir, I cannot; for I am straitly charged’? The very word ‘charged,’ προσταμμένος, the modern form of προστεταγμένος, repeats the word placed by Euripides in the mouth of Death. Secondly, Death appears in warrior-guise, just as does Charos most commonly in modern folk-songs; he is girt with a sword[244], and it is by wrestling[245] that Heracles vanquishes him and makes him yield up his prey. Is this again a mere coincidence? Or was Euripides, in his personification of Death, utilising the character popularly assigned to Charon? It looks indeed in one line as if the poet had almost forgotten that he was not using the popular name also; otherwise there is no excuse for the inelegance of making Death inflict death[246]. It is hardly surprising that the copyist of one[247] of the extant manuscripts of the _Alcestis_ was so impressed with the likeness of Death to Charon as he knew him, that he altered the name of the _dramatis persona_ accordingly.

In the Anthology again Charon appears several times[248] acting in a more extended capacity than that of ferryman; as in modern folk-songs, he actually seizes men and carries them off to the nether world. One epigram is particularly noticeable as seeming to have been suggested by a passage of the _Alcestis_. ‘Is there then any way whereby Alcestis might come unto old age?’ asks Apollo; and Death answers, ‘There is none; I too must have the pleasure of my dues.’ ‘Yet,’ says Apollo, ‘thou wilt not get more than the one soul,’--be it now or later. And similarly the epigram from the Anthology, save that Death is frankly named Charon. ‘Charon ever insatiable, why hast thou snatched away Attalus needlessly in his youth? Was he not thine, an he had died old?’

Clearly, it would seem, Euripides knew a popular conception of Charon other than that which literary and artistic tradition had crystallised as the orthodox presentation, but rather than break through the conventions by bringing Charon on the stage otherwise than as ferryman, he had recourse to a purely artificial personification of death.

But the conception of Charon as lord of death can be traced yet further back than the time of Euripides. Hesychius states that the title Ἀκμονίδης[249] was shared by two gods, Charon and Uranus. Charon therefore, as son of Acmon and brother of Uranus, is earlier by two long generations of gods than Zeus himself, and belongs to the old Pelasgian order of deities. Was Charon then the god of death among the old Pelasgian population of Greece, before ever the name of Hades or Pluto had been invented or imported? Yes, if the corroboration from another Pelasgian source, the Etruscans, is to count for anything. On an Etruscan monument figures the god of death with the inscription ‘Charun’[250]; and the same person is frequently depicted on urns, sarcophagi, and vases[251]. Usually the door of the nether world is to be seen behind him; either he is issuing forth to seek his prey, or he is about to enter there with a victim who stands close beside him, his hand clasped in that of wife or friend to whom he bids farewell[252]. In appearance he is most often an old bearded man (though a more youthful type is also known) bearing an axe or mallet, and more rarely a sword as well, wherewith he pursues men and slays them[253]. In effect the Etruscan Charun closely corresponds with the modern Greek Charos in functions as well as in name. The coincidence allows of one explanation only. The Greeks of the present day must have inherited their idea of Charos from ancestors who were closely connected with the Etruscans and to whom Charon was the god of death who came to seize men’s souls and carry them off to his realm in the nether world. These ancestors can only have been the original Pelasgian population of Greece. In classical times the primitive conception of Charon was in abeyance. Hades had assumed the reins of government in the nether world; and a literary legend, which confined Charon to the work of ferryman, had gained vogue and supplanted or rather temporarily suppressed the older conception. But this version, it appears, never gained complete mastery of the popular imagination, and to the common-folk of Greece from the Pelasgian era down to this day Charon has ever been more warrior than ferryman, and his equipment an axe or sword or bow rather than a pair of sculls. More is to be learnt of the real Charon of antiquity from modern folk-lore than from all the allusions of classical literature.

§ 7. APHRODITE AND EROS.

In the story of S. Demetra communicated to Lenormant at Eleusis and narrated above, we have already had one instance of the preservation of Aphrodite’s name. ‘Since the lady Aphrodite (ἡ κυρὰ ‘φροδίτη) none had been seen so lovely’ as S. Demetra’s daughter. Another story related to Perrot[254] by an Attic peasant in the year 1858 contains both the name of the goddess and some reminiscences of her worship. The gist of it is as follows. There once was a very beautiful queen, by name Aphrodite, who had a castle at Daphni (just half-way on the road from Athens to Eleusis) and also owned the heights of Acro-Corinth; these two places she had caused to be connected by a subterranean way which passed under the sea. Now there were two kings both of whom were smitten with her beauty and sought her hand in marriage. She herself favoured one of them and hated the other; but not wishing to declare her preference and so arouse the anger of the rejected suitor, she announced that she was about to build a palace on the height of Acro-Corinth, and would set her suitors each a task to perform; one should build the fortifications round the summit, the other should sink a well to provide the castle with water[255]; and she promised her hand to the suitor who should first complete his task. Now she supposed the sinking of the well to be the lighter task and therefore assigned it to the suitor whom she favoured; but he met with unforeseen difficulties, and his rival meanwhile made steady progress with the walls. At last they were wellnigh built, and it remained only to put in place the keystone over the main gate. Then Aphrodite, marking the danger, went with winning words and smiles and bade the builder lay aside his tools, for the prize was now safely in his grasp, and led him away to a grassy spot where she beguiled him so long with tender words and caresses, that the other suitor meanwhile redoubling his efforts pierced the rock and found water in plenty.

In this story the character, as well as the name, of the queen is that of the ancient goddess; but there are other points too deserving of notice. Perrot points out that in the neighbourhood of the modern monastery at Daphni there stood in antiquity a temple of Aphrodite[256]; and to this fact Schmidt[257], in commenting on the story, adds that on the summit of Acro-Corinth also there was a sanctuary of the goddess[258], while he accounts for the mention of that place in an Attic story by the fact that Corinth was specially famous for the worship of Aphrodite.

No other vestiges of the actual name, so far as I know, are to be found, save that among certain Maniote settlers in Corsica the corrupt derivative, Ἀφροδήτησσα[259] (which would perhaps be better spelt Ἀφροδίτισσα) was until recent times at any rate applied to an equally corrupt class of women, votaries of Ἀφροδίτη Πάνδημος. In a few stories however from Zacynthos[260] the same goddess is prettily described as ἡ μάνα τοῦ Ἔρωτα[261], ‘the Mother of Love,’ a title competent in itself to establish her identity.

The first of these stories tells how a poor maiden fell in love with a youth of high degree, and went to the Mother of Love to ask her help. The latter promised to ask the assistance of her son Eros (Ἔρωτας) when he came home. Next morning went Eros with bow and arrows and sat at the maiden’s door till the swain passed by. Then suddenly he shot his arrow at him, and the young man loved the maiden and took her to wife.

Another yet more remarkable story introduces us to the garden of Eros, whither a prince once went to fetch water to cure the blindness of the king, his father. ‘There at the entrance he beheld a woman that was the fairest upon earth; she sat at the gate and played with a boy who had wings and in his hand held a bow and many arrows. The garden was full of roses, and over them hovered many little winged boys like butterflies. In the midst of this garden was a spring, whence the healing water flowed. As the king’s son drew near to this spring, he espied therein a woman white as snow and shining as the moon; and it was in very truth the moon that bathed there. Beside the spring sat a second woman of exceeding beauty who was the Mother of Eros (ἡ μάνα τοῦ Ἔρωτα).’ She gave him the water and her blessing, and his father was healed.

The distinct reminiscence of Artemis in this story will be noticed later[262]; here we need only notice a few points in the story relating to Eros and his mother. The description of the ‘boy who had wings and in his hand held a bow and many arrows’ is simply and purely classical, according exactly with the Orphic address to him as τοξάλκη, πτερόεντα[263]. The ‘woman at the gate who was the fairest upon earth’ is in all probability the same as ‘the Mother of Eros’ beside the spring, the single personality, by some vagary in the transmission of the story, having become duplicated. The roses, of which the garden was full, are the flower always sacred to Aphrodite, the sweetest emblem of love; and over these it is fitting that the ‘little winged boys’ should hover, brothers as it were of Eros, ever-fresh embodiments of love, to all of whom, in antiquity, Aphrodite was mother[264].

These folk-tales present sufficient evidence that the memory of the name and attributes of Aphrodite survived locally until recent times to warrant the conclusion that her worship, like that of other pagan deities, possessed vitality enough to compete for a long while with Christianity for the favour of the common-folk; but as a personality she is no longer present, I think, to their consciousness; she is at most only a character in a few folk-stories--if indeed the present generation has not forgotten even these. For my part, I never heard mention of her in story or otherwise, although her son, the winged Eros, is often named in the love-songs which form a large part of the popular poetry.

Vows and offerings which would in former days have been made to Aphrodite are now made either to suitable saints who have taken her place, such as S. Catharine[265], or to the Fates (Μοίραις), who were from of old associated with her. According to a fragment of Epimenides[266], ‘golden Aphrodite and the deathless Fates’ were daughters of Cronos and Euonyme. Their sisterly relation was recognised also in cult. Near the Ilissus once stood a temple containing an old wooden statue (ξόανον) of Heavenly Aphrodite with an inscription naming her ‘eldest of the Fates’ (πρεσβυτέρα τῶν Μοιρῶν)[267]. So venerable a shrine must in old time have witnessed many a petition for success in love; and when we bear in mind the ancient inscription of the statue, it is interesting to find that among the girls of Athens until recent times the custom prevailed of visiting the so-called ‘hollow hill[268]’ (τρύπιο βουνό) in the immediate neighbourhood to offer to the Fates cakes with honey and salt and to consult them as to their destined husbands[269].

Sacred also to Aphrodite in old days was a cave in the neighbourhood of Naupactus, frequented particularly by widows anxious to be remarried[270]. At the present day a cave at the foot of Mt Rigani, which may probably be identified as the old sanctuary, is the spot to which girls repair in order to consult the Fates on the all-absorbing question[271].

Thus it seems that ‘golden Aphrodite’ has disappeared from the old sisterly group of deities, and that ‘the deathless Fates’ alone remain to receive prayers and to grant boons which once fell within the province rather of Aphrodite. To the Fates we must now turn.

§ 8. THE FATES.

The custom of taking or sending offerings to a cave haunted by the Fates, of which we have just seen two examples, is widely extended among the women of Greece. In Athens, besides the ‘hollow hill,’ two or three of the old rock-dwellings round about the Hill of the Muses were formerly a common resort for the same purpose, and the practice though rarer now is not yet extinct[272]. Among the best-known of these resorts is the so-called Prison of Socrates. Dodwell, in his account of his travels in Greece at the beginning of last century, states that he found there ‘in the inner chamber, a small feast consisting of a cup of honey and white almonds, a cake on a little napkin, and a vase of aromatic herbs burning and exhaling an agreeable perfume[273]’; and the observance of the custom is known to have continued in that place down to recent years[274]. The same practice, I was informed at Sparta, is known at the present day to the peasant-women of the surrounding plain, who will undertake even a long and wearisome journey to lay a honey-cake in a certain cave on one of the eastern spurs of Taÿgetus. Other places in which to my own knowledge the custom still continues are Agrinion in Aetolia and neighbouring districts, the villages of Mt Pelion in Thessaly, and the island of Scyros; and from the testimony of many other observers I conclude that it is, or was till recently, universal in Greek lands.

Nor does there seem to be much variety in the subjects on which the peasant-women consult the Fates: with the girls matrimony, with the married women maternity, is the perpetually recurring theme. Everywhere also honey in some form is an essential part of the offering by which the Fates’ favour is to be won. The acceptance of this offering, and therefore also the success of the prayers which accompany it, are occasionally, as in the cave near Sparta which I have mentioned, inferred from omens provided by the dripping of water from the roof of the cave; but more usually the realisation of the conjugal aspirations is not assured, unless a second visit to the sanctuary, three days or a month later, proves that the sweetmeats have been accepted by the Fates and are gone. This, I am told, occurs with some frequency. Dodwell mentions that his donkey ate some[275]; and considering the character of the offerings--cakes and honey for the most part, for only in the ‘hollow hill’ at Athens was salt added thereto--it is not surprising if the Fates find many willing proxies, human and canine as well as asinine.

At the moment when these delicacies are proffered, an invocation is recited. This may take the form of a metrical line,

Μοίραις μου, μοιράνετέ με, καὶ καλὸ φαγὶ σας φέρνω,

‘Kind Fates, ordain my fate, for I bring you good fare,’

or may be a simple prose formulary,

Μοίραις τῶν Μοιρῶν καὶ τῆς τάδε ἡ Μοῖρα, κοπιάστε νὰ φᾶτε καὶ νὰ ξαναμοιράνετε τὴν τάδε νἄχῃ καλὴ μοῖρα[276],

‘Fates above all Fates, and Fate of N., come ye, I pray, and eat, and ordain anew the fate of N., that she may have a good fate.’

Various other versions are also on record, one of which will be considered later; but these two examples illustrate sufficiently for the present the simple Homeric tenour of such prayers.

The words which I have quoted, it must be admitted, give clear expression to the hope that the Fates may revise the decrees which they have already pronounced on the fortunes of the suppliant. Nevertheless that such a hope should be fulfilled is contrary to the general beliefs of the people. The Fates, they know, are inexorable so far as concerns the changing of any of their purposes once set; for, as their proverb runs, ὅτι γράφουν ᾑ Μοίραις, δὲν ξεγράφουν, ‘what the Fates write, that they make not unwritten[277].’ They are not, it would appear, subordinate, as Charon is sometimes deemed to be, even to the supreme God; I can find no song or story that would so present them. They are absolute and irresponsible in the fashioning of human destiny. But the Greek peasants are not the first who have at the same time believed both in predestination and in the efficacy of prayer. Perhaps all unconsciously they reconcile the ideas as did Aeschylus of old:

τὸ μόρσιμον μένει πάλαι, εὐχομένοις δ’ ἂν ἔλθοι[278],

‘Destiny hath long been abiding its time, but in answer to prayer may come.’

But even without any intuition of so hard a doctrine the peasant-women may justify their prayers and offerings by the hope that, though the Fates will detract nothing from the fulfilment of whatsoever they have spoken or written, they may be willing to add thereto such supplement as shall modify in large measure the issue. For the Fates are as Greek in character as their worshippers, and stories are not wanting to illustrate the shifts to which they have stooped in order practically to invalidate without formally cancelling their whilom purpose.

‘Once upon a time a poor woman gave birth to a daughter, and on the third night after the birth the Fates came to ordain the child’s lot. As they entered the cottage they saw prepared for them a table with a clean cloth and all manner of sweetmeats thereon. So when they had partaken thereof and were content, they were kindly disposed toward the child. And the first Fate gave to her long life, and the second beauty, and the third chastity. But as they went forth from the cottage, the first of them tripped against the threshold, and turning in wrath towards the infant pronounced that she should be always an idler.

Now when she was grown up, she was so beautiful that the king’s son would have her to wife. As the wedding-day drew near, her mother and her friends chided her because she delayed to make her wedding dress; but she was idle and heeded not. Soon came the eve of the wedding, and she wept because the prince would learn of her idleness and refuse to take her to wife. Now the Fates loved her, and saw her tears and pitied her. Therefore they came suddenly before her, and asked why she wept; and she told them all. Then sat they down there and spun and weaved and embroidered all that night, and in the morning they arrayed her in a bridal dress decked with gold and pearls such as had never been seen.

Presently came the prince, and there was much feasting and dancing, and she was far the most beautiful of all the company. And because he saw her lovely dress and knew how much toil it must have cost her to array herself thus for him, he granted her the favour of doing no more work all her days[279].’

This story, besides illustrating well the finality of every word pronounced by the Fates and the means which they may employ to mitigate their own severity, is typical too of the ideas generally accepted concerning the Fates. Their number is three[280], and they are seen in the shape of old women, one of whom at least is always engaged in spinning. Of the remaining two, one is sometimes seen bearing a book wherein to record in writing the decrees which the three jointly utter, while the other carries a pair of scissors wherewith to cut the thread of life at the appointed time; or again sometimes these two also are spinning, one of them carrying a basket of wool or a distaff and the other fashioning the thread. This association of the Fates with spinning operations is commemorated in certain popular phrases by the comparison of man’s life to a thread. ‘His thread is cut’ or ‘is finished’ (κόπηκε or σώθηκε ἡ κλωστή του) is a familiar euphemism for ‘he is dead’: and again, with the same ultimate meaning but a somewhat different metaphor, the people of Arachova use the phrase μαζώθηκε τὸ κουβάρ’ του[281], ‘his spindle is wound full,’--an expression which seems to imply the idea that the Fates apportion to each man at birth a mass of rough wool from which they go on spinning day by day till the thread of life is completed.

According to Fauriel[282], a reminiscence of the Fates is also to be found in a personification of the plague (ἡ πανοῦκλα), which in the tradition of some districts is not represented as a single demon but has been multiplied into a trio of terrible women who pass through the towns and devastate them, one of them carrying a roll on which to write the names of the victims, another a pair of scissors wherewith to cut them off from the living, and the third a broom with which to sweep them away. He assigns however no reason for identifying the deadly trio with the Fates, and it is more natural, if any link with antiquity here exists, to connect them with the Erinyes[283] or other similar deities. In fact their resemblance to the Fates, save for some superficial details, is small. The Fates, though inexorable when once their decree is pronounced, are never wantonly cruel. Their displeasure may indeed be aroused by neglect, as we shall shortly see, to such an extent that they will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. But, when men treat them with the consideration and the reverence due to deities, they are unfailingly kindly, and deserve the title by which they are sometimes known, ᾑ καλοκυράδες, ‘the good ladies.’ For this name is not an euphemism concealing dread and hatred, but an expression of genuine reverence; such at any rate is my judgement, based on many conversations with the common-folk in all parts of Greece--for on this topic for some reason there is far less reticence than on many others. And indeed if the character of the Fates were believed to be cruel, their aspect also would be represented as grim and menacing; whereas they are actually pourtrayed as deserving almost of pity rather than awe by reason of their age and their infirmity.

The occasion on which the Fates have most often been seen by human eyes and on which, even though invisible, they never fail to be present, is the third night (or as some say the fifth night[284]) after the birth of a child. Provision for their arrival is then scrupulously made. The dog is chained up. Any obstacles over which the visitors might trip in the darkness are removed. The house-door is left open or at any rate unlatched. Inside a light is kept burning, and in the middle of the room is set a low table with three cushions or low stools placed round it--religious conservatism apparently forbidding the use of so modern an invention as chairs, for at the lying-in-state before a funeral also cushions or low stools are provided for the mourners. On the table are set out such dainties as the Fates love, including always honey; in Athens formerly the essentials were a dish of honey, three white almonds, a loaf of bread, and a glass of water[285]; and ready to hand, as presents from which the goddesses may choose what they will, may be laid all the most costly treasures of the family, such as jewellery and even money, in token that nothing has been spared to give them welcome. These preparations made, their visit is awaited in solemn silence; for none must speak when the Fates draw near. Most often they are neither seen nor heard; but sometimes, it is said, a wakeful mother has seen their forms as they bent over her child and wrote their decrees on its brow--for which reason moles and other marks on the forehead or the nose are in some places called γραψίματα τῶν Μοιρῶν[286], ‘writings of the Fates’; sometimes she has heard the low sound of their voices as they consulted together over the future of the child; nay more, she has even caught and understood their speech; yet even so her foreknowledge of the infant’s fate is unavailing; she may be aware of the dangers which await its ripening years, but though forewarned she is powerless to forearm; against destiny once pronounced all weapons, all wiles, are futile.

Neglect of any of the due preparations for the visit of the Fates may excite their wrath and cause them to decree an evil lot for the child. This idea is the _motif_ of many fables current in Greece. A typical example is furnished by the following extract from a popular poem in which a man whose life has brought him nothing but misery sees in a vision one of the Fates and appeals to her thus:

‘I beg and pray of thee, O Fate, to tell me now, my lady, Then when my mother brought me forth, what passèd at my bearing?’

And she makes answer:

‘Then when thy mother brought thee forth, ’twas deep and bitter winter, Eleven days o’ the year had run when anguish came upon her. Thereon[287] I robed me and did on this raiment that thou seëst, And had it in my heart to cry “Long life to thee and riches.” Ah, but the night was deep and dark, yea wrappèd thick in darkness, And hail and snow were driving hard, and angry rain was lashing; From mire to mud, from mud to mire, so lay my road before me, And as I went,--a murrain on’t,--against your well I stumbled; Nay, sirrah, an thou believest not, scan well the scars I carry. Two cursed hounds ye had withal, hounds from the Lombard country, And fierce upon me sprang the twain, and fierce as wolves their baying. Then cursèd I thee full bitterly, a curse of very venom, That no bright day should ever cheer thy miserable body, That thou shouldst burn, that thou shouldst burn, and have no hope of riddance, That joy should ever ’scape thy clasp, and sorrow dog thy goings, That thine own kin should slander thee and thy friends rail upon thee, Nor strangers nor thy countrymen know aught of love toward thee. Yet, hapless man, not thine the sin; thy parents’ was the sinning, That chainèd not those hounds right fast to a corner of their dwelling; Well is it said by men of old, well bruit they loud the saying, “The fathers eat of acid things, and the bairns’ teeth fall aching.” Have patience then, O hapless man, a year or twain of patience, And there shall come a happy day when all thy woes shall vanish; For all thy bitterness of soul thou shalt find consolation, Thy dreams of beauty and of wealth thou shalt at last encompass[288].’

The Fates, it has been already said, are three in number; why so, it seems impossible to determine. It may be that the functions discharged by them fell readily into a three-fold division; thus in the district of Zagorion in Epirus, one Fate ‘spins the thread’ (κλώθει τὸ γνέμα) which determines the length of life, the second apportions good fortune, and the third bad[289]. Or again, the division may have been made in such a way that one Fate should preside over each of the three great events of human experience, birth, marriage, and death. The term ‘fate’ (μοῖρα)[290] is often used by women as a synonym for marriage (γάμος)--in curious contrast with the man’s more optimistic description of his wedding as χαρά, ‘joy’; and a Greek proverb, used of a very ignorant man, δὲν ξέρει τὰ τρία κακὰ τῆς Μοίρας του, ‘he does not know the three evils of his Fate,’ to wit birth, marriage, and death, carries the connexion of fate with these three events a little further. But such distributions of functions are probably posterior to the choice of the number. Three was always a sacred number, and the ancients delighted in trinities of goddesses[291].

But besides the three great Fates we must recognise also in modern Greece the existence of lesser Fates, attached each to a single human life. This is a slight extension of the main belief, and consists really in the personification of the objective fate which the three great Fates decree. Just as each man is believed to have his good guardian-angel and, by antithesis but with less biblical warranty, his bad angel, so too he is accompanied by his own personal Fate. But these lesser Fates are only faint replicas of the great trinity, and I doubt whether they are believed to have any independent power of their own; they would seem to be mere ministers who carry out the original decrees of the three supreme Fates.

Often in the popular songs it is impossible to tell whether it is the lesser personal Fate or one of the great trio who is addressed. For in such lines as,

Παρακαλῶ σε, Μοῖρα μου, νὰ μή με ξενιτέψῃς, Κι’ ἂν λάχῃ καὶ ξενιτευτῶ, θάνατο μή μου δώσῃς[292],

‘I pray thee, good Fate, send me not to a strange land, but if it be my lot to be sent, let me not die there,’

the form of address Μοῖρα μου (literally ‘my Fate’) implies no personal possession, but is the same as that employed in praying to God or the Virgin, Θεέ μου, Παναγία μου. But in definite forms of incantation, composed for recitation along with propitiatory offerings, the great Fates and the lesser Fate of the individual suppliant are coupled in a way which shows the difference in importance between them. The former are called ‘the Fates over all Fates’ (ἡ Μοίραις τῶν Μοιρῶν), as in the plain prose formulary quoted above; the latter is merely the Fate of this or that person.

Whether these inferior Fates were known also in the classical period is a question which I am unable to answer; but that the belief in them is certainly of no recent growth is proved by an incantation more elaborate than those given above and on internal evidence very old:--

’π’ τὸν Ὄλυμπον, τὸν κόλυμβον, τὰ τρία ἄκρα τοὐρανοῦ, ὁποῦ ᾑ Μοίραις τῶν Μοιρῶν καὶ ἡ ’δική μου Μοῖρα, ἂς ἀκούσῃ καὶ ἂς ἔλθῃ[293].

‘From Olympus, even from the summit, from the three heights of heaven, where dwell the Fates of all Fates and my own Fate, may she hearken and come.’

The version of the formula which I have given is only one out of several which have been recorded from various parts of Greece[294], and there can be no doubt that the original was a widely-esteemed incantation. I have given the most intelligible; but the mere fact that some of the others, through verbal corruption in the course of tradition, have become almost meaningless, is strong proof of the antiquity of the original. There are however two clear marks of antiquity in the version before us. The mention of Olympus as the abode of deities carries us back at once to the classical age; and the word κόλυμβος in the sense of ‘summit’ is no less suggestive of a very early date. The ancient word κόρυμβος, used in this sense by Aeschylus[295] and by Herodotus[296], is obsolete now in the spoken language. But κόλυμβος is evidently either a dialectic form of it (with the common interchange of λ and ρ) or else a corrupt form, not understood by those who continued to use it in this incantation, and assimilated, by way of assonance, to Ὄλυμπος. Further one of the other versions gives the word as κόρυβο[297], where the original ρ is retained but the μ lost before β, which now universally has the sound of the English _v_. A comparison of the two forms therefore establishes beyond question the fact that the somewhat rare classical word κόρυμβος, in its known meaning of ‘summit,’ was the original form. Hence the incantation, containing both a mention of Olympus as the seat of deities and an old classical word long since disused, cannot but date from very early times. Possibly therefore the belief in subordinate Fates, attached each to one human being, was known to the common-folk of the classical age.

But, be this as it may, the popular conception of the great Trinity of Fates has persisted unchanged for more than a score of centuries--and who shall say for how many more? Here the literary tradition of classical times was evidently faithful to popular traditions. The number of the Fates is still the same as in Hesiod’s day[298]; they are still depicted as old and infirm women, as they were by the poets at any rate in antiquity, though in ancient art, for beauty’s sake, they are apt to be figured as more youthful; it is still their task ‘to assign to mortal men at their birth,’ as Hesiod knew, ‘both good and ill[299]’; the functions of Clotho who spun the thread of life, of Lachesis who apportioned destiny, and of Atropos whom none might turn from her purpose, are still the joint functions of the great Three; the book, the spindle, and an instrument for cutting the thread of life are still their attributes.

There is little new therefore to be learnt from the study of the Fates in modern folk-lore. The lesson which it teaches rather is the continuity of the present with the past. But there is one point to which special attention may perhaps be directed--the belief that the Fates invariably visit each child that is born in order to decree its lot. I do not wish to engage in the controversy which has raged round the identification of the figures in the east pediment of the Parthenon; but those who would recognise among them the three Fates may fairly draw a fresh argument from the strength of this popular belief. It is only fitting that at the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus the Fates should be present; for even Zeus himself, said Aeschylus[300], might not escape their decree.

§ 9. THE NYMPHS.

Of all the supernatural beings who haunt the path and the imagination of the modern Greek peasant by far the most common are the Nymphs or ‘Nereids’ (Νεράϊδες). The name itself occurs in a multitude of dialectic varieties[301], but its meaning is everywhere uniform, and more comprehensive than that of the ancient word. It is no longer confined to nymphs of the sea, but embraces also their kindred of mountain, river, and woodland. There is no longer a Nereus, god of the sea, to claim the Nereids as his daughters, denizens like himself of the deep; and the connexion of their name with the modern word for ‘water’ (νερό) is not understanded of the common-folk. Hence there has been nothing to restrain the extension of the term Νεράϊδα, and it has entirely superseded, in this sense, the ancient νύμφη, which in modern speech can only mean ‘a bride.’

The familiarity of the peasants with the Nereids is more intimate than can be easily imagined by those who have merely travelled, it may be, through the country but have no knowledge of the people in their homes. The educated classes of course, and with them some of the less communicative of the peasants, will deny all belief in such beings and affect to deride as old wives’ fables the many stories concerning them. But in truth the belief is one which even men of considerable culture fail sometimes to eradicate from their own breasts. A paper on the Nereids (the nucleus of the present chapter) was read by me in Athens at an open meeting of the British School; and no sooner was it ended than an Athenian gentleman whose name is well known in certain learned circles throughout Europe rose hurriedly crossing himself and disappeared without a word of leave-taking. As for the peasants, let them deny or avow their belief, there is probably no nook or hamlet in all Greece where the womenfolk at least do not scrupulously take precautions against the thefts and the malice of the Nereids, while many a man may still be found ready to recount in all good faith stories of their beauty and passion and caprice. Nor is it a matter of faith only; more than once I have been in villages where certain Nereids were known by sight to several persons (so at least they averred); and there was a wonderful agreement among the witnesses in the description of their appearance and dress. I myself once had a Nereid pointed out to me by my guide, and there certainly was the semblance of a female figure draped in white and tall beyond human stature flitting in the dusk between the gnarled and twisted boles of an old olive-yard. What the apparition was, I had no leisure to investigate; for my guide with many signs of the cross and muttered invocations of the Virgin urged my mule to perilous haste along the rough mountain-path. But had I inherited, as he, a belief in Nereids together with a fertile gift of mendacity, I should doubtless have corroborated the highly-coloured story which he told when we reached the light and safety of the next village; and the ready acceptance of the story by those who heard it proved to me that a personal encounter with Nereids was really reckoned among the possible incidents of every-day life.

The awe in which the Nereids are held is partially responsible, without doubt, for the many adulatory by-names by which they are known. Now and again indeed a peasant, when he is suffering from some imagined injury at their hands, may so far speak his mind concerning them as to call them ‘evil women’ (κακαὶς or ἄσχημαις γυναῖκες): but in general his references are more diplomatic and conciliatory in tone. He adopts the same attitude towards them as did his forefathers towards the Furies; and, though the actual word ‘Eumenides’ is lost to his vocabulary, the spirit of his address is unchanged. ‘The Ladies’ (ᾑ κυρᾶδες), ‘Our Maidens’ (τὰ κουρίτσι̯α μας), ‘Our good Queens’ (ᾑ καλαὶς ἀρχόντισσαις), ‘The kind-hearted ones’ (ᾑ καλόκαρδαις), ‘The ladies to whom we wish joy’ (ᾑ χαιράμεναις), or most commonly of all ‘Our good Ladies’ (ᾑ καλοκυρᾶδες or καλλικυρᾶδες)[302],--such is the wonted style of his adulation, in which the frequent use of the word κυρᾶδες (the plural of κυρά, i.e. κυρία) is a heritage from his ancestors who made dedications ‘to the lady nymphs’ (κυρίαις νύμφαις). Yet it may be questioned whether these by-names are wholly euphemistic; for mingled with the awe which the Nereids inspire there is certainly an element of admiration and, I had almost said, of affection in the feelings of the common-folk toward them.

The Nereids are conceived as women half-divine yet not immortal, always young, always beautiful, capricious at best, and at their worst cruel. Their presence is suspected everywhere; grim forest-depth and laughing valley, babbling stream and wind-swept ridge, tree and cave and pool, each may be their chosen haunt, the charmed scene of their dance and song and godlike revelry. The old distinctions between the nymphs according to their habitations still to some extent hold good; there are nymphs of the sea and nymphs of the streams, tree-nymphs and mountain-nymphs; but in characteristics these several classes are alike, in grace, in frolic, in wantonness. Of all that is light and mirthful they are the ideal; of all that is lovely the exquisite embodiment; and their hearts beneath are ever swayed by fierce gusts of love and of hate.

The beauty of the Nereids, the sweetness of their voices, and the grace and litheness of their movements have given rise to many familiar phrases which are eloquent of feelings other than awe in the people’s minds. ‘She is fair as a Nereid’ (εἶνε ὤμορφη σὰ νεράϊδα), ‘she has the eyes, the arms, the bosom of a Nereid’ (ἔχει μάτια, χέρια, βυζιὰ νεράϊδας), ‘she sings, she dances, like a Nereid’ (τραγουδάει, χορεύει, σὰ νεράϊδα),--such are the compliments time and again passed upon a bride, whose white dress and ornaments of gold seem to complete the resemblance. Possibly the twofold usage in antiquity of the word νύμφη is responsible for a still surviving association of bridal dress with the Nereids; it is at any rate to the peasants’ mind an incontestable fact that white and gold are the colours chiefly affected by Nereids in their dress[303].

Only in one particular is the beauty of the Nereids ever thought to be marred; in some localities they are said to have the feet of goats or of asses[304]; as for instance the three Nereids who are believed to dance together without pause on the heights of Taÿgetus. But this is a somewhat rare and local trait, and must have been transferred to them, it would seem, from Pan and his attendant satyrs, with whom of old they were wont to consort; in general they are held to be of beauty unblemished.

Their accomplishments include, besides singing and dancing, the humbler arts of the good housewife. ‘She cooks like a Nereid’ (μαγειρεύει σὰ νεράϊδα) and ‘she does house-cleaning like a Nereid’ (παστρεύει σὰν ἀνεράϊδα) are phrases of commendation[305] occasionally heard. But chiefly do they excel in the art of spinning[306]; and so well known is their dexterity therein that a delicate kind of creeper with which trees are often festooned is known in the vulgar tongue under the pretty name of νεραϊδογνέματα, ‘Nereid-spinnings.’ The attribute indeed is natural and obvious; for the popular conception of the nymphs is but an idealisation of the peasant-women, to whom, whether sitting in the sunlight at their cottage-door or tending their sheep and goats afield, the distaff is an ever constant companion. But, easy though it is to account for the trait, some interest, if no great measure of importance, attaches to its consonance with the ancient characterisation of Nymphs. To the Nereids proper[307] a golden spindle was specially assigned; and in the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca might be seen, in Odysseus’ day, the kindred occupation of weaving, for ‘therein were great looms of stone whereon the nymphs wove sea-purple robes, a wonder to behold[308].’

As might be expected of beings so divinely feminine, their relations with men and with women are very different; in the one case there is the possibility of love; in the other the certainty of spite. It is necessary therefore to examine their attitude towards either sex separately.

The marriage of men with Nereids not only forms the theme of many folk-stories current in Greece, but in the more remote districts is still regarded as a credible occurrence. Even at the present day the traveller may hear of families in whose ancestry of more or less remote date is numbered a Nereid. A Thessalian peasant whom I once met claimed a Nereid-grandmother, and little as his looks warranted the assumption of any grace or beauty in so near an ancestor--he happened to have a squint--his claim appeared to be admitted by his fellow-villagers, and a certain prestige attached to him. Hence the epithet ‘Nereid-born’ (νεραϊδογεννημένος or νεραϊδοκαμωμένος) frequently heard in amatory distichs[309] may formerly have been not merely an exaggerated compliment to the lady’s beauty, but a recognition of high birth calculated to conciliate the future mother-in-law.

Nor is it men only whose susceptibilities are stirred by the beauty of the Nereids; even animals may fall under their spell. A shepherd of Scopelos told me that in the neighbouring island of Ioura, which he frequented with his flocks for pasturage, he once tamed a wild goat, which after a time began to behave very oddly. All night long it would remain with the rest of his flock, but in the daytime it persistently strayed away from the pasture to the neighbourhood of a Nereid-haunted cave on the bare and rocky hillside, and from want of food became very thin. The goat, he believed, was enamoured of a Nereid and pining away from unrequited love.

But it is from the old folk-stories rather than from the records of contemporary or recent experience that the character of the Nereids as lovers or wives is best learnt. And herein they are not models of womanhood; passion indeed they feel and inspire; they suffer, they even seek the caresses of the young and brave; but true wives they will not long remain. Constancy and care are not for them; the longing for freedom and the breezes of heaven, the memory of rapid tuneful dance, are hot within them; they leave the men whose strength and valour snared their hearts, they forsake their homes and children, and on the wings of the wind are gone, seeking again their etherial unwearied fellows. Yet they do not altogether forget their children; for motherhood is presently more to them than mirth; ever and anon they steal back to visit their homes and bless their children with the gifts of beauty and wealth which their touch can bestow, and even stay to mend their husbands’ clothes and clean the house, vanishing again however before the man’s return. Only in one case have I heard of a nymph’s continued intimacy with a man throughout his life, and that strangely enough not in a folk-story but in recent experience. Their relations, it must be acknowledged, were illicit, for he had a human wife and family; but it was commonly reported that his rise from penury to affluence and the mayoralty of his native village was the work of a Nereid in a cave near by, who of her love for him enriched the produce of his land and shielded his flocks from pestilence.

In the popular stories which deal with the marriages of Nereids, the bridal fashion of their dress, which has already been noticed, is often an essential feature of the plot. In one tale it is said explicitly that the supernatural quality of the Nereids lies not in their persons but in their raiment[310]; and for this reason a prince, smitten with love of the youngest of three sister Nereids but knowing not how to win her, is counselled by a wise woman, to whom he confides his perplexity, to lie in wait when they go to bathe in their accustomed pool and to steal the clothes of his _inamorata_, who would then follow him to recover her loss and so be in his power to take to wife. But there is greater delicacy and, as we shall see, more certain antiquity also in the commoner version of the episode, in which a kerchief alone is possessed of the magic powers ascribed above to the whole dress. And in this detail of costume the resemblance of bride and Nereid still holds good; for no wedding-dress would be complete without a kerchief either wrapped about the bride’s head or pinned upon her breast or carried in her hand to form a link with her neighbour in the chain of dancers[311].

Of the stories which have for their _motif_ the theft of such a kerchief from a Nereid[312] the following Messenian tale is a good example.

‘Once upon a time there was a young shepherd who played the pipes so beautifully that the Nereids one night carried him off to the threshing-floor where they danced and bade him play to them. At first he was much afraid and thought that some evil would overtake him from being in their company and speaking with them. But gradually, as he grew accustomed to his strange surroundings and the Nereids showed themselves kind to him and grateful for his piping, he took courage again and night after night made his way to the spot which they haunted and made music till cock-crow.

Now it so happened that one of the Nereids was beautiful beyond the rest, and the shepherd loved her and determined to make her his wife. But inasmuch as the Nereids danced all night long without pause while he piped, and at dawn vanished to be seen no more until the next night’s dance began, he knew not what to do.

So at last he went to an old woman and told her his trouble, and she said to him, “Go again to-night and play till dawn is near; then before the cock crows[313], make a dash and seize the kerchief in the Nereid’s hand, and hold it fast. And though she change into terrible shapes, be not afraid; only hold fast until she take again her proper form; then must she do as thou wilt.”

The young man therefore went again that night and played till close on dawn. Then as the Nereid passed close beside him, leading the dance, he sprang upon her and grasped the kerchief. And straightway the cock crew, and the other Nereids fled; but she whose kerchief he had seized could not go, but at once began to transform herself into horrible shapes in hope to frighten the shepherd and make him loose his hold. First she became a lion, but he remembered the witch’s warning and held fast for all the lion’s roaring. And then the Nereid turned into a snake, and then into fire[314], but he kept a stout heart and would not let go the kerchief. Then at last she returned to her proper form and went home with him and was his wife and bore him a son; but the kerchief he kept hidden from her, lest she should become a Nereid again.’

In this story there are two ancient traits especially noteworthy. The power of transformation into horrible shapes is precisely the means of defence which the Nereid Thetis once sought to employ against Peleus; the forms of wild beast and of fire, which she assumed according to ancient myth, are the same as Nereids now adopt; and the instructions now given to hold fast until the Nereid resume her proper shape are the same as Chiron, the wise Centaur, gave once to Peleus[315]. It is true that in the ancient story it is the person of Thetis that Peleus was bidden to grasp, while in the modern tale the shepherd’s immediate object is to retain hold of the kerchief only. But this feature of the story too is an interesting witness to antiquity, although in Thetis’ history it does not appear. Ancient art has left to us several representations[316] of nymphs with veil-like scarves worn on the head or borne in the hand and floating down the breeze; and the magic properties inherent in them are exemplified by Ino’s gift, or rather loan, to Odysseus. The scarf imperishable (κρήδεμνον ἄμβροτον) which she bade him gird about his breast and have no fear of any suffering nor of death, was not his own to keep after he reached the mainland; in accordance with her behest ‘he loosed then the goddess’ scarf from about him, and let it fall into the river’s salt tide, and a great wave bore it back down the stream, and readily did Ino catch it in her hands’[317]. Here Ino’s anxiety and strait command as to the return of her veil are most easily understood by the aid of the modern belief which makes the possession of the scarf or kerchief the sole, or at least the chief, means of godlike power. In Cythnos at the present day it is the μπόλια, or scarf worn about the head, which alone is believed to invest Nereids with their distinctive qualities[318]; and if the modern scarf is a lineal descendant of the Homeric type such as Ino wore--for even in feminine dress fashions are slow to change in the Greek islands[319]--the epithet ‘imperishable’ may have unsuspected force, as implying that the scarf confers a semblance of divinity on its owner and not _vice versa_.

In such of the stories of the above type as do not end with the marriage of the Nereid[320] the sequel is not encouraging to other adventurers. For though she be a good wife in commonplace estimation--and the Greek view of matrimony is in general commonplace to the verge of sordidness--though her skill in domestic duties be as proverbial as her beauty, she either turns her charms and her cunning to such account as to discover the hiding-place of her stolen kerchief, or, failing this, so mopes and pines over her work that her husband worn down by her sullenness and persistent silence decides to risk all if he can but restore her lightheartedness. Then though he have taken an oath of her that she will not avail herself of her recovered freedom, but will abide with him as his wife, her promise is light as the breeze that bears her away with fluttering kerchief, and he is alone.

But fickleness is not the worst of the Nereids’ qualities in their dealings with men. In malice they are as wanton as in love. Woe betide him who trespasses upon their midday carnival or crosses their nightly path; dumbness, blindness, epilepsy, and horrors of mutilation have been the penalties of such intrusion, though the man offend unwittingly; for the Nereids are tiger-like in all, in stealth and cruelty as in grace and beauty; and none who look upon their radiance can guess the darkness of their hearts. Terrible was the experience of a Melian peasant, who coming unawares upon the Nereids one night was bidden by them to a cave hard by, where they feasted him and made merry together and did not deny him their utmost favours; but when morning broke, they sent him to his home shattered and impotent.

If such be sometimes the results of their seeming goodwill and proffered companionship, how much more fearful a thing must be their enmity! Let a man but intrude upon their revels in some sequestered glen, or sleep beneath the tree that shelters them, or play the pipe beside the river where they bathe, and in such wrath they will gather about him[321], that the eyes which have looked upon them see no more, and the voice that cries out is thenceforth dumb, and madness springs of their very presence.

But if the Nereids are fickle and treacherous in their dealings with men, towards women they are consistently malicious. Especially on two occasions must every prudent peasant-woman be on her guard against their envy--at marriage and in child-birth. For though the Nereids themselves prove no true wives, so jealous are they of the joys of wedlock, that if a bride be not well secured from their molestation, they will mar the fruition of her love, or else, where they cannot prevent, they will endeavour at the least to cut short the happiness of motherhood, slaying with fever the woman whose bliss has stirred their malevolence, yet sparing always the child and even blessing it with beauty and wealth.

The means by which women most commonly protect themselves on these occasions are the wearing of amulets; the fastening of a bunch of garlic over the house-door; the painting of a cross in black upon the lintel (this custom may be a Christianised form of the ancient practice, mentioned by Photius[322], of smearing houses with pitch at the birth of children as a means of driving away powers of evil); and, if any strange visitants are heard about the house at night, the maintenance of strict silence. But steps are also sometimes taken to appease the Nereids; offerings of food, in which honey is the essential ingredient, are set out for them, and formerly in Athens[323] to this a bride used to add two chemises out of her trousseau.

Such precautions after a confinement are regularly continued for forty days. It would appear that in ancient times this was the period during which women were held to be specially exposed to the evil eye and all other ghostly and sinister influences[324], including probably, as now, the assaults of nymphs; and in modern usage the duration of the time of peril is so well established that the word σαραντίζω, literally to ‘accomplish forty (σαράντα) days,’ is used technically of the churching of women at the end of that period; while a more frankly pagan survival is to be found in the fact that for forty days no right-minded mother will cross the threshold of her own house to go out, nor enter a neighbour’s house, without stepping on the door-key, that being the most easily available piece of iron, a metal, which in the folk-lore of ancient Greece[325], as in that of many other countries, was a charm and safeguard against the supernatural.

It is not however the mothers only, who need protection from the Nereids, but the children also, and that too throughout their childhood; yet not against the same perils; for the mother is liable to malicious injuries; the child is safe indeed from wilful hurt, but it may be stolen by Nereids. We have already seen how Nereids who have wed with mortal men, though faithless to their husbands, are yet drawn home now and again by love of their children. And such of them too as have never yielded to human embrace are yet instinct with a strange yearning to possess a mortal woman’s prettiest little ones; on one child they exert a fascination which unhappily proves fatal to it; another they seize with open violence; or again they set stealthily in some cradle a babe of pure Nereid birth--a changeling that by some weird fatality is weakly and doomed to die--and carry off to the woods and hills the human infant, in whom they delight, to be their playmate and their fosterling. In a history of the island of Pholegandros, the writer, a native of the place, accounts for the multitude of small chapels in the island on the ground of the peasants’ anxiety each to have a saint close to his property to defend him from such raids by Nereids and other kindred beings[326].

The wife of a priest at Chalandri in Attica related to Ross[327] a story in point. ‘I had a daughter,’ she said, ‘a little girl between twelve and thirteen years old, who showed a very strange disposition. Though we all treated her kindly, her mood was always melancholy, and whenever she got the chance she ran off from the village up the wooded spurs of the mountain (Brilessos). There she would roam about alone all day long, from early morning till late evening; often she would take off some of her clothes and wear but one light garment, so as to be less hindered in running and jumping. We dared not stop her, for we saw quite well that the Nereids had allured her, but we were much distressed. It was in vain that my husband took her time after time to the church and read prayers over her. The Panagia (the Virgin) was powerless to help. After the child had been thus afflicted a considerable while, she fell into yet deeper despondency, and at last died--a short time ago. When we buried her, the neighbours said, “Do not wonder at her death; the Nereids wanted her; it is but two days since we saw her dancing with them.”’

Such was the view taken by a Greek priest and his wife concerning the cause of their daughter’s death about two generations ago; and at the present day the traveller may hear of similar events in recent experience. An important point to notice is that the child’s death was thought to be due, not to any malevolence on the part of the Nereids, but to their desire to have her for their own, a desire more happily gratified in cases of which I have several times heard where the child has not died but has simply disappeared. Thus in Arcadia I was once assured that a small girl had been carried off by Nereids in a whirlwind, and had been found again some weeks after on a lonely mountain side some five or six hours distant from her home in a condition which showed that she had been well fed and well cared for in the interval.

But certainly the snatching away of children by the Nereids, whether this mean death or only disappearance, is still a well-accredited fact in the minds of many of the common-folk. They still remain too simple and too closely wedded to the beliefs of their forefathers to need the old exhortation[328],

‘Trust ye the fables of yore: ’tis not Death, but the Nymphs of the river Seeing your daughter so sweet stole her to be their delight.’

They believe still that the Nereids have befriended their children, even while they weep for their own loss.

Whatever mischief the Nereids work upon man, woman, or child, be it death or loss of faculties or merely deportation from home to some haunted spot, ‘seized’ (παρμένος or πιασμένος) is the word applied to the victim. The compound ἀναρᾳδοπαρμένος[329], ‘Nereid-seized,’ also occurs, exactly parallel in form as well as equivalent in meaning to the ancient νυμφόληπτος as used by Plato. ‘Now listen to me,’ says Socrates to Phaedrus[330], ‘in silence; for in very truth this seems to be holy ground, so that if anon, in the course of what I say, I suffer a “seizure” (νυμφόληπτος γένωμαι), you must not be surprised.’ Such speech, save for its disregard of the acknowledged peril, might be held in all seriousness by a peasant of to-day. In Socrates’ mouth it is intended merely as a happy metaphor; but its point and appropriateness are lost on those who do not both know the superstition to which he alludes and at the same time recall the _mise-en-scène_[331] of the dialogue. The two friends have crossed the Ilissus and are stretched on a grassy slope in the shade of a lofty plane-tree, beneath which is a spring of cool water pleasant to their feet as is the light breeze to their faces in the heat of the summer noon. The spot must surely be a favourite haunt of the rural gods, and indeed the statues close at hand attest its dedication to Pan and to the Nymphs. In such a situation there would be, according to modern notions, three distinct grounds for apprehending a ‘seizure.’ The neighbourhood of water is throughout Greece dreaded as the most dangerous haunt of Nereids[332], so that few peasants will cross a stream or even a dry torrent-bed without making the sign of the cross. Hardly less risky is it to rest in the shade of any old or otherwise conspicuous tree. If in addition to this the time of day be noon, it is not merely venturesome to trespass on such spots, but inexcusably foolhardy; for the hour of midday slumber is fraught with as many terrors as the night[333]. Any or all of these popular beliefs may have been present to Plato’s mind as he wrote this passage; for the ancients numbered among those Nymphs, by whom Socrates was likely to be ‘seized,’ both Naiads and Dryads, who might be expected to resent and to punish any intrusion upon their haunts in stream or tree; while, as regards the hour of noon, the fear felt in old time of arousing Pan[334] from his siesta may well have extended also to Nymphs, who on this spot beside the Ilissus, as commonly elsewhere, were named his comrades.

The same kind of ‘seizure’ was denoted formerly by the phrase ἔχει ἀπ’ ἔξω[335], ‘he has it (i.e. a stroke or seizure) from without,’ and the modern compound ’ξωπαρμένος[336] bears obviously a kindred meaning. The exact significance of ἔξω in this relation is difficult to determine. Either it is only another example of the usage already noted in discussing the term ἐξωτικά and implies the activity of one of those supernatural beings who exist side by side with the powers of Christianity and are by their very name proved to be pagan; or else it indicates a difference in the mode of injury by two classes of supernatural foes, the difference between ‘seizure’ and ‘possession.’ Certainly no story is known to me of ‘possession’ by Nereids in the same sense as by devils. The latter take up their abode within a man and are subject to exorcism; the seizure by Nereids is conceived rather as an external act of violence. This is made clear by several terms locally used of seizure. ‘He has been struck’ (βαρέθηκε or χτυπήθηκε), ‘he has been wounded’ (λαβώθηκε), ‘he has had hands laid upon him’ (ἐγγίχτηκε) are typical expressions, to which is sometimes added ‘by Nereids’ or ‘by evil women[337].’ Such phrases clearly convict the Nereids of assault and battery rather than of undue mental influence upon their victims.

Moreover the Nereids, and with them all the surviving pagan deities, are pictured by the peasant in corporeal form, whereas the angels--and there are bad angels, who ‘possess’ men, as well as good--are in common speech as well as in the formal dedications of churches known as οἱ ἀσώματοι, ‘the Bodiless ones.’ There is then an essential difference in the nature of these two classes of beings, which justifies the supposed distinction in their methods of working. For ‘possession’ proper is the injury inflicted, or rather infused, by spirits pure and simple; external ‘seizure’ is the work of corporeal beings. And this distinction was recognised in comparatively early times; for John of Damascus[338] in speaking of στρίγγαι, a peculiarly maleficent kind of witch (of whom more anon), notes as singular the fact that sometimes they appear clothed in bodily form and sometimes as mere spirits (μετὰ σώματος ἢ γυμνῇ τῇ ψυχῇ). It is then to the second interpretation of the phrase ἔχει ἀπ’ ἔξω, as implying external and bodily violence, that the balance of argument, I think, inclines.

The precautions which may be taken against injury by Nereids have already been briefly noticed. Amulets, garlic, the sign of the cross, the invocation of saints--all these are common and suitable prophylactics. But above all, in the actual moment when imminent danger is suspected, the lips, as Phaedrus was reminded by Socrates, and also the eyes should be close shut; for in general the principle obtains that the particular organ by which there is converse or contact with the Nereids is most likely to be impaired or destroyed. Apart from this, there is no precaution more specially adapted for self-defence against the Nereids than against the evil eye or any other baneful influence; and with these I have already dealt[339].

But when these precautions are neglected or fail, the mischief wrought by the Nereids is not necessarily permanent; there are several cures which may be tried. Sometimes prayers (but not, so far as I know, a formal exorcism such as the Greek Church provides for diabolic possession) are recited by a priest over the sufferer in the church of some suitable saint; or a trial may be made of sleeping in a church which possesses a wonder-working _icon_. Sometimes an offering of honey-cakes sent or carried to the spot where the misfortune occurred suffices to turn the Nereids from their wrath and wins them to undo the hurt that they have done; on such an errand however the bearer of the offering must beware of looking back to the place where he has once deposited it, lest a worse fate overtake him than that which he is trying to dispel[340]. Theodore Bent[341] gives full details of such an offering made in the island of Ceos. ‘For those,’ he writes, ‘who are supposed to have been struck by the Nereids when sleeping under a tree, the following cure is much in vogue. A white cloth is spread on the spot, and on it is put a plate with bread, honey, and other sweets, a bottle of good wine, a knife, a fork, an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and a censer. These things must be brought by an old woman who utters mystic words and then goes away, that the Nereids may eat undisturbed, and that in their good humour they may allow the sufferer to regain his health.’ How mystic may be the words of a Cean witch, I cannot say; but the formula to be used by mothers in Chios in the event of a similar misfortune to a child is extremely simple: ‘Good day to you, good queens, eat ye the little cakes and heal my child’--καλημέρα σας, καλαὶς ἀρχόντισσαις, φᾶτε σεῖς τὰ κουλουράκια καὶ ’γιάνετε τὸ παιδί μου[342]. But the most frequent and most efficacious method of cure (with which the offering of honeycakes may be combined) is for the sufferer to revisit the scene of his calamity at the same hour of the same day in week, month, or year, when by some capricious reversal of fate the presence of the Nereids is apt to remove the hurt which it formerly inflicted.

* * * * *

Thus far I have dealt with the main characteristics of nymphs in general: it remains to consider the several classes into which they were anciently divided; and though for the most part the old appellations, Nereids, Naiads, Oreads, and Dryads, have either disappeared or else changed their form or meaning, we shall find that the old division of them into these four main classes according to their habitation still to some extent survives.

The Nereids, whose name is now extended to comprise all kinds of nymphs, are in the ancient and proper sense of the term among the rarest of whom the peasant speaks. But here and there mention is made of genuine sea-nymphs, and also of their queen, the Lamia of the Sea[343], who has superseded Amphitrite. In 1826 a villager of Argolis described to Soutzos, the historian of the Greek revolution[344], a true Nereid. Her hair was green and adorned with pearls and corals; often by moonlight she might be seen dancing merrily on the surface of the sea, and in the daytime she would come to dry her clothes upon the rocks near the mills of Lerna. These, I may add from my own knowledge, are reputed to be haunted by Nereids down to this day. Happily a peasant of that period cannot be suspected of any education; he was not recalling a piece of repetition mastered at school when he spoke of

viridis Nereidum comas[345],

but knew by tradition from his ancestors what Horace learnt of them by study.

In the Greek town of Sinasos also, in Cappadocia, a class of sea-nymphs is popularly recognised and distinguished under the name Ζαβέται, a word said by the recorder of it to be derived from a Cappadocian word _zab_ meaning the ‘sea[346].’ But of the districts known to me the most fertile in stories of sea-nymphs is the province of Maina, the middle of the three peninsulas south of the Peloponnese. One such story attaches to a fine palm-tree growing on the beach at Liméni, a small port on the west coast of the peninsula. A full version of it has been published[347], but as it is long and not peculiarly instructive, I content myself with an abridgement of it.

A fisherman of Liméni was sleeping one summer night in his boat; at midnight he suddenly awoke to find Nereids rowing him out to sea, but happily, remembering at once that Nereids drown any one whom they catch looking at them, he lay quiet as if asleep. The boat travelled like lightning, and soon they reached Arabia; and having shipped a cargo of dates, the Nereids started home again. As they were returning, one Nereid proposed to drown the man; but the others replied that he had not opened his eyes to see them, and that they owed him a debt besides for the use of his boat. Finally they arrived at some unknown place and unloaded the dates; and then in a flash the fisherman found himself back at the shore by the monastery of Liméni, and ‘the she-devils, the Nereids,’ gone. As he baled out his boat, he found one date; but suspecting that it had been left intentionally by the Nereids to cause him trouble, he threw it, not into the sea, for fear his fishing should suffer, but ashore. And since the date had been handled by supernatural beings (’ξωτικά), it could not perish, but took root where it fell; and hence the palm-tree on the shore to this day.

These same sea-nymphs--θαλασσιναὶς νεράϊδες--play also a part in the daily life of the people of this district[348]. It is said that every Saturday night these Nereids join battle with the Nereids of the mountains, and according as these or those win, their _protégés_, the upland or the maritime population, are found on Sunday morning in higher or lower spirits, booty-laden or despoiled. It is indeed an imaginative folk which can thus make its deities responsible for drunken brawls and sober thefts; but some of them have humour enough to smile at their own imaginings.

A class of maleficent beings known to the inhabitants of Tenos, Myconos, Amorgos, and other islands of the same group under the name of ἀγιελοῦδες or γιαλοῦδες[349], have been reckoned as sea-nymphs by several writers, who would derive the name from ’γιαλός (i.e. αἰγιαλός), the ‘sea-shore[350].’ But there is no evidence advanced to show that the common-folk regard them as a species of Nereid; and there is, on the contrary, evidence of their identity with certain female demons whose name more commonly appears in the form γελλοῦδες[351], and with whom I shall deal later.

* * * * *

The Oreads are no longer known under their old name, but their existence is still recognised throughout the mainland of Greece. Their change of name is the result merely of a change in the ordinary word for ‘mountain.’ Anciently ὄρος was usual, βουνός rare; now the peasant uses commonly βουνό, and ὄρος although understood everywhere and occurring in popular poetry comes less readily to his lips. Hence the Oreads are now called ᾑ Βουνήσι̯αις[352] (sc. νεράϊδες) or τὰ κουρίτσια τοῦ βουνοῦ[353] (‘the mountain-nymphs’ or ‘the maidens of the mount’). These mountain-nymphs delight in dance and merriment even more than their kin of the rivers and of the sea. In Maina indeed they seem to have become infected with the pugnacious character of the people, for as we have seen they there do battle with the sea-nymphs each Saturday night. But in general frolic is more to their taste than fighting. On the heights of Taÿgetus are three Oreads, well known to the dwellers in the plain of Sparta, who dance together without pause. On the summit of Hymettus too there is a flat space, called in the modern Attic dialect a πλάτωμα and in shape ‘round like a threshing-floor,’ where Nereids of the mountain dance at midday[354]. Above all in the uplands of Acarnania and Aetolia many are the hollows or tree-encircled level spaces which the shepherds will point out as νεραϊδάλωνα, ‘threshing-floors’ where the nymphs make merry; for a threshing-floor, it must be remembered, is the usual resort for dancing, wrestling, and all those amusements for which a level space is required.

Nymphs of the same kind are known also in Crete. A curious story of a wedding procession in which they took part was there narrated to Pashley[355], and his informant’s words are recorded by him in the original dialect. ‘Once upon a time a man told me that two men had once gone up to the highest mountain-ridges, where wild goats live, and sat by moonlight in a grassy hollow[356] (διασέλι), in the hopes of shooting the goats. And there they heard a great noise, and supposed that there were men come to get loads of snow to carry to Canea. But when they drew nearer, they heard violins and cithers and all kinds of music, and such music they had never heard. So they knew at once that these were no men but an assemblage of divine beings (δαιμονικὸ συνέδριον). And they watched them and saw them pass at a short distance from where they were sitting, clothed in all manner of raiment, and mounted some on grey horses and some on horses of other colours, and they could make out that there were men and women, afoot or riding, a very host. And the men were white as doves, and the women very beautiful like the rays of the sun. They saw too that they were carrying something in the way that a dead body is carried out. Forthwith the mountaineers determined to have a shot at them as they passed before them. They had heard also a song of which the words were

“Go we to fetch a bride, a lady bride, From the steep rock, a bride that is alone.”

And they made up their minds and fired a shot at them. Thereupon those that were in front cried out with one voice, “What is it?” and those behind answered, “Our bridegroom is slain, our bridegroom is slain.” And they wept and cried aloud and fled.’

In regard to this story it may be noted that a male form of Nereid (Νεραΐδης) is sometimes mentioned, and here such are undoubtedly implied. The necessity of finding husbands for the Nereids naturally presents itself to the minds of the old women who are the chief story-tellers, and the demand is met by an assorted supply of young men, male Nereids, and devils. As consorts of the last-mentioned, the Nereids enjoy in many places the title of διαβόλισσαις, ‘she-devils’; and it was on the ground of such unions that a peasant-woman of Acarnania once explained to me the belief, held in her own village, that Nereids were seen only at midday. How should the devils their husbands let such beautiful women be abroad at night?

It is on the mountain-nymphs also that the peasants most frequently lay the responsibility for whirlwinds[357], by which children or even adults are said to be caught up and carried from one place to another[358], or to their death. Some such fate, we must suppose, in ancient times also was held to have befallen a seven-year-old boy on whose tomb was written, ‘Tearful Hades with the help of Oreads made away with me, and this mournful tomb that has been builded nigh unto the Nymphs contains me[359].’ The habit of travelling on a whirlwind, or more correctly perhaps of stirring up a whirlwind by rapid passage, has gained for the nymphs in some districts secondary names--in Macedonia ἀνεμικαίς, in Gortynia ἀνεμογαζοῦδες[360]--which might almost seem to constitute a new class of wind-nymphs. But so far as I know the faculty of raising whirlwinds, though most frequently exercised by Oreads, is common to all nymphs.

In Athens whirlwinds are said to occur most frequently near the old Hill of the Nymphs[361]: and women of the lower classes, as they see the spinning spiral of dust approach, fall to crossing themselves busily and to repeating μέλι καὶ γάλα ’στὴ στράτα σας[362] (or ’στο δρόμο σας), ‘Honey and milk in your path!’ This incantation is widely known as an effective safeguard against the Nereids in their rapid flight, and must in origin, it would seem, have been a vow. This supposition is confirmed by the fact that in Corfu[363] a few decades ago the peasantry used to make actual offerings of both milk and honey to the Nereids, and that Theocritus also associates these two gifts in vows made to the nymphs and to Pan. ‘I will set,’ sings Lacon, ‘a great bowl of white milk for the nymphs, and another will I set full of sweet oil’; to which Comatas in rivalry rejoins, ‘Eight pails of milk will I set for Pan, and eight dishes of honey in the honeycomb[364].’ The gift of honey is of special significance. In every recorded case which I know of offerings to Nereids in modern Greece honey is expressly mentioned, and seems indeed to be essential; and it is probably from their known preference for this food that at Kastoria in Macedonia they have even received the by-name, ᾑ μελιτένιαις, ‘the honeyed ones[365].’ And if we look back over many centuries we may find a hint of the same belief in Homer’s description of the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca, wherein ‘are bowls for mixing and pitchers of stone, and there besides do bees make store[366].’ For it is well established that honey was the special offering made to the indigenous deities of Greece before the making of wine such as Homer’s heroes quaff had yet been discovered[367]. Perchance then even in distant pre-Homeric days men vowed, as now they vow, honey and milk to the nymphs whose swift passing was the whirlwind, and felt secure.

* * * * *

The memory of the tree-nymphs is still green throughout Greece. From Aegina their ancient name δρυάδες is recorded as still in use[368]; and in parts of Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, as well as in several islands of the Aegean Sea, Chios, Cimolos, Cythnos, and others, there is a word employed which is, I believe, formed from the same root and once denoted the same class of beings. This word is found in the forms δρύμαις[369], δρύμιαις[370], δρύμναις[371], δρύμνιαις[372] and, in Chios, in a neuter form δρύματα[373].

It has been suggested indeed by one writer[374] that this word has nothing to do with Dryads, but that its root is δρυμ- (better perhaps written δριμ- as in the ancient δριμύς, since, so far as the sound of the vowel in modern Greek is concerned, the philologist may write η, ι, υ, ει, οι, or υι, as seemeth him best), in the sense of ‘fierce,’ ‘bitter’; and support for this derivation is sought in a somewhat vague statement of Hesychius who explains the word δρυμίους by the phrase τοὺς κατὰ τὴν χώραν κακοποιούς, ‘the evil-doers in the country’: but whether he took δρυμίους to be the proper name of some class of demons, or an adjective synonymous with κακοποιός, does not appear.

But even on the grounds of form alone (which grounds will be considerably strengthened when we come to consider signification), it appears better to derive this group of words from δρῦς or more immediately from δρυμός, ‘a coppice’; for in ancient literature mention is made of ‘Artemis of the coppice’ and ‘nymphs of the coppice’ (Ἄρτεμις δρυμονία[375] and δρυμίδες νύμφαι)[376], of a particular nymph named Drymo[377], of a Ζεὺς δρύμνιος[378] worshipped in Pamphylia, and of Apollo invoked at Miletus under the title δρύμας[379]. In the last two instances the title may be supposed to have had reference merely to the surroundings of a particular sanctuary; but in relation to Artemis and the nymphs the epithet clearly suggests their woodland haunts.

In present-day usage the words which we are considering almost universally denote, not nymphs or any other supernatural beings, but the first few days of August, which are observed in a special way. The number of these days varies from three in Sinasos[380], in Carpathos[381], and in Syme (an island north of Rhodes), to five in Cythnos[382] and Cyprus[383], and six in most other places where they are specially observed. There are two rules laid down for this observance, though in some places only one of the two is in force: no tree may be peeled or cut (this is the usual practice for obtaining mastic and resin); and the use of water for washing either the person or clothes is prohibited; neither is it permitted to travel by water during this period. In the interests of personal cleanliness it is unfortunate that the month of August should have been selected for this abstention; by that time even the Greeks find the sea tepid enough to admit of bathing without serious risk of chill, and it is a pity therefore that a penalty should be inflicted upon bathers during the first week of the only month in which ablutions extend beyond the pouring of a small jug of water over the fingers. Howbeit the decrees stand, and as surely as there is transgression thereof, skin will blister and peel off, clothes will rot[384], and trees will wither. The severity of these pains has in Cyprus changed the name of these days from δρύμαις into κακαουσκιαίς, ‘the evil days of August[385].’

Now among a people so superstitious as the Greeks it is reasonable to suppose that days thus marked by special abstinences were originally sacred to some deities. Washing and tree-cutting at this season must, we may assume, have been offences against some supernatural persons whose festival was then observed and who avenged its profanation; and the supernatural persons most nearly concerned would naturally be the tree-nymphs and the water-nymphs.

The association or even confusion of these two classes of nymphs is very common both in ancient literature and in modern belief, and is indeed a natural consequence of the fact that the finest trees, such as that plane under which sat Socrates and Phaedrus, grow only in the close vicinity of water. It would have puzzled even Socrates to say whether the Nymphs by whom he might be seized would be more probably Dryads or Naiads. Homer himself, to go yet further back, suggests the same association, for he tells of ‘a spreading olive-tree and nigh thereto’ the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca. Again in later times we find a dedication by one Cleonymus to ‘Hamadryads, daughters of the river’[386]; and though an ingenious critic would replace Ἁμαδρυάδες by Ἀνιγριάδες (nymphs of the Arcadian river Anigrus), I believe the fault to lie with Cleonymus and not with the manuscript; for the place where he makes his dedication is beneath pine-trees (ὑπαὶ πιτύων). At the present day the same tendency towards confusion of the two classes is common. This was well illustrated to me by some peasants of Tenos. Ten minutes’ walk from the town there is a good spring from which a remarkable subterranean passage cut through the solid rock carries the water to supply the town. The spring is within a cave, artificially enlarged at the entrance, over which stands a fine fig-tree. Standing outside while a companion entered first, I noticed that our guides (for several persons had escorted us out of curiosity or hospitality) were distinctly perturbed, and I heard one say to another, ‘See, he is going in, he is not afraid.’ Inferring thence that the place was haunted, and remembering that mid-day, the hour at which we happened to be there, was fraught with special peril, I determined to test my guides, and so sat down under the fig-tree. Then remarking that the sun was hot at noon, I invited them to come and sit in the shade and smoke a cigarette. But the bait was insufficient; they would stand in the sun rather than approach either the spring or the tree, though they were ready enough to accept cigarettes when I moved out of the zone of danger. Afterwards by enquiries made elsewhere I learnt that the spot was the reputed home of Nereids--but whether their abode was tree or water, who should say? Close neighbours in their habitations, indistinguishable in their appearance and attributes, it is pardonable to confuse those sister nymphs,

‘Centum quae siluas, centum quae flumina seruant[387].’

It is exactly this kind of confusion of the two classes of nymphs which has produced the twofold injunctions for the observance of the days known as δρύμαις: for evidence is forthcoming that this word originally denoted a class of nymphs and not, as generally now, their August festival. From Stenimachos in Thrace comes the statement that by δρύμιαις the people there understand female deities who live in water and are always hostile to man, but specially dangerous only during the first six days of August[388]. Here the name δρύμιαις, if the derivation which I prefer is right, points to the identification of these beings with the ancient Dryads; while their watery habitations proclaim them rather Naiads. Reversely again in Syme, where the word δρύμαις is not in use, there are certain nymphs known as Ἀλουστίναι who live in mountain-torrents, in trees, and elsewhere, and who are seen only at mid-day and at midnight during the first three days of August; but, far from being hurtful to men, they may even themselves be captured by certain magical ceremonies and employed as servants in the house for a period, after which the spell is broken and they return again to their homes. Their name Ἀλουστίναι[389], said to be formed from Ἀλούστος[389], the local name for the month of August, clearly means ‘anti-washing,’ and at once identifies them with those Naiads whose festival, as I believe, has rendered the waters sacred and therefore harmful if disturbed during these days; but on the other hand their dwelling-places include trees. These two pieces of evidence from places so wide apart as Stenimachos and Syme are reinforced by a popular expression formerly, and perhaps still, in use, τὸν ἔπι̯ασαν ᾑ δρύμαις[390], ‘the “drymes” have seized him’; where the word denoting ‘seizure’ is one of those already noted as proper to ‘seizure’ by nymphs.

From the usage of the word therefore as well as from its formation we may conclude that the word δρύμαις is the modern equivalent of the ancient δρυάδες: and the widely-spread custom of abstaining both from tree-cutting and from the use of water during the early days of August is a survival of an old joint festival of wood-nymphs and water-nymphs.

But it is not in the relics of ancient worship only that traces of the Dryads are now to be found. The traveller in Greece will commonly hear that such and such a tree is haunted by a Nereid. Particularly famous in North Arcadia is a magnificent pine-tree on the path from the monastery of Megaspélaeon to the village of Solos. My muleteer enthusiastically compared it to the gigantic tree which is believed to uphold the world; and piously crossed himself, as we passed it, for fear of the nymph who made it her home. In general the trees thus reputed are the fruit-bearing trees which were comprehensively denoted by the term δρῦς, from which the Dryads took their name--the fig-tree, the olive, the holly-oak[391], and the plane. Such trees, especially when conspicuous for age or for luxuriance, are readily suspected to be the abode of Nereids. One Nereid only, it would seem, is assigned to each tree (though, if her retreat be violated, she may swiftly call others of her kind to aid her in taking vengeance), and with the life of the tree her own life is bound up.

For a nymph is not immortal. Her span of life far exceeds that of man, but none the less it is measured. ‘A crow lives twice as long as a man, a tortoise twice as long as a crow, and a Nereid twice as long as a tortoise.’ Such is a popular saying which I heard from an unlettered peasant of Arcadia, to whom evidently had been transmitted orally through many centuries a version of Hesiod’s lines, ‘Verily nine times the age of men in their prime doth the croaking raven live; and a stag doth equal four ravens; and ’tis three lives of a stag ere the crow grows old; but the phoenix hath the life of nine crows; and ye, fair-tressed Nymphs, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, do live ten times the phoenix’ age[392].’ Commenting on this passage, Plutarch takes the word γενεά in the phrase ἐννέα γενεὰς ἀνδρῶν ἡβώντων, which I have rendered as ‘nine times the age of men in their prime,’ to be used as the equivalent of ἐνιαυτός, a year; and, making a sober computation on this basis, discovers that the limit of life for nymphs and _daemones_ in general is 9720 years. But he then admits that the mass of men do not allow so long a duration, and quotes by way of illustration a phrase from Pindar, νύμφας ... ἰσοδένδρου τέκμωρ αἰῶνος λαχούσας, according to which the nymphs are allotted a term of life commensurate with that of a tree; hence, it is added, the compound name Ἁμαδρυάδες, Dryads whose lives are severally bound up with those of the trees which they inhabit[393]. Other ancient authorities concur. Sophocles markedly calls the nymphs of Mt Cithaeron ‘long-lived’ (μακραιῶνες), not ‘immortal’[394]: Pliny certifies the finding of dead Nereids on the coasts of Gaul during the reign of Augustus[395]: Tzetzes cites from the works of Charon of Lampsacus the story of an Hamadryad who was in danger of being swept away and drowned by a swollen mountain-torrent[396]: and, to revert to yet earlier authority, in one of the Homeric Hymns Aphrodite rehearses to Anchises the whole matter[397]. Speaking of the son whom she will bear to him, she says: ‘So soon as he shall see the light of the sun, he shall be tended by deep-bosomed nymphs of the mountains, even those that dwell upon this high and holy mount. These verily are neither of mortal men nor of immortal gods. Long indeed they live and feed on food divine, and they have strength too for fair dance amid immortals; yea, and with them have the watchful Slayer of Argus and such as Silenus been joined in love within the depths of pleasant grots. But at the moment of their birth, there spring up upon the nurturing earth pines, may be, or oaks rearing high their heads, good trees and luxuriant, upon the mountain-heights. Far aloft they tower; sanctuaries of immortals they are called, and men hew them not with axe[398]. But so soon as the doom of death stands beside them, first the good trees are dried up at the root and then their bark withers about them and their branches fall away, and therewith the soul of the nymphs too leaves the light of the sun.’

So my Arcadian friend was true to ancient tradition both in his estimate of the life of Nereids and in his belief, thereby implied, that they are mortal. Nor is other modern testimony wanting. There are popular stories still current concerning Nereids’ deaths. One has been recorded in which a Nereid is struck by God with lightning and slain as a punishment for stealing a boy from his father, and her sister nymphs in terror restore the child[399]. A pertinent confession of faith has also been heard from the lips of a Cretan peasant. In explanation of the name Νεραϊδόσπηλος, ‘Nereid-grot,’ attached to a cave near his village, he had related a story of a Nereid who was carried off from that spot and taken to wife by a young man, to whom she bore a son; but as she would never open her lips in his presence, he went in despair to an old woman who advised him to heat an oven hot and then taking the child in his arms to say to the Nereid, ‘Speak to me; or I will burn your child,’ and so saying to make show of throwing the child into the oven. He did as the old woman advised; but the Nereid saying only, ‘You hound, leave my child alone,’ seized it from him and disappeared. And since the other Nereids would not admit her again to their company in the cave, as being now a mother, she took up her abode in a spring close by; and there she is seen two or three times a year holding the child in her arms. ‘After hearing this tale,’ says the recorder of it, ‘I asked the old peasant who told it me, how long ago this had happened.’ He replied that he had heard it from his grandfather, and guessed it to be about a hundred and sixty years. ‘My good man,’ said the other, ‘would not the child have grown up in all that time?’ ‘What do you suppose, sir?’ he answered; ‘are those to grow up so easily who live from a thousand to fifteen hundred years?[400]’

How this period was computed by the Cretan peasant, or whether it was computed at all on any system known to him, is not related; but very probably the longevity of trees was the original basis of the calculation; for the peasants will often point out some old contorted olive-trunk as a thousand or more years old; I was once even taken to see a tree reputed to have been planted by Alexander the Great. But at any rate it is clear that both in ancient and in modern times the nymphs have always been believed to be subject to ultimate death, and however the tenure of life may be determined in the case of the others, the Dryads have without doubt been generally reckoned coeval with the trees that are their homes.

An exception to this rule must however be made in the case of Nereid-haunted trees which do not die a natural death, but are felled untimely. A Nymph’s life is not to be cut short by a humanly-wielded axe. In the Homeric Hymn indeed, which I have quoted, we learn that men hew not such trees with steel; and the same might, I think, be said at the present day with certainty of those trees which are known to be haunted. But the unknown is ever full of risk; and the woodcutter of the North Arcadian forests, mindful of the sacrilege which he may commit and fearful of the vengeance wherewith it may be visited, takes such precautions as piety suggests. With muttered appeals to the Panagia or his own patron-saint and with much crossing of himself he fills up the moments between each bout of hewing at any suspected tree (unfortunately the finest timber on which he plies his axe is also the most likely to harbour a Nereid) and finally as the upper branches sway and the tree trembles to its fall, he runs back and throws himself down with his face to the ground, in silence which not even a prayer must break, lest a Nereid, passing out from her violated abode, hear and espy and punish. For, as has been said before, nothing is more sure than that he who speaks in the hearing of a Nereid loses from thenceforth the power of speech; while the practice of hiding the face in the ground is not a foolish imitation of the ostrich, but is prompted by the belief that a Nereid is most prone to injure those who by look, word, or touch have of their own act, though not always of their own will, placed themselves in communication or contact with her[401].

These precautions appertaining to the lore of modern Greek forestry indicate a belief that, when a tree is hewn down, its death does not involve the death of the Nereid within it, but that she escapes alive and vengeful. And herein once more there is agreement between the beliefs of modern and of ancient Greece. Apollonius Rhodius tells the story of the want and penury which befell Paraebius for all his labours. ‘Verily he was paying a cruel requital for the sin of his father; who once when he was felling trees, alone upon the mountains, made light of the prayers of an Hamadryad. For she with tears and passionate speech strove to soften his heart, that he should not hew the trunk of her coeval oak, wherein she lived continuously her whole long life; but he right foolishly did fell the tree, in pride of his young strength. Wherefore the Nymph set a doom of fruitless toil thereafter on him and on his children[402].’

* * * * *

The Naiads, of whose ancient name, so far as I know, no trace remains in the dialects of to-day, are not less numerous than other nymphs and as much to be feared. The peasants speak of them usually as ‘Nereids of the river’ or ‘of the spring’ (νεράϊδες τοῦ ποταμίου or τῆς βρύσης); and only in one place, Kephalóvryso (‘Fountain-head’) in Aetolia, did I find a distinctive by-name for them. This was the word ξεραμμέναις[403], which I take to be a half-humorous euphemism meaning ‘the Parched Ones’; but, so far as sound is concerned, it would be equally permissible to write ’ξεραμέναις (past participle of ’ξερνῶ = Latin _respuo_) and to interpret therefore in the sense of ‘the Abominable Ones.’ The latter appellation however seems to me too outspoken in view of the awe in which the Naiads are everywhere held.

Wherever fresh water is, whether in mountain-torrent or reservoir, in river or village-well, there is peril to be feared; no careful mother will send her children at noontide to fetch water from the spring, or, if they are sent, they must at least spit thrice into it before they dip their pitchers, nor will she suffer them to loiter beside a stream when dusk has fallen; no cautious man will ford a river without crossing himself first on the brink.

The actual dwelling-place of these nymphs may be either the depths of the water itself or some cave beside the stream. Homer gave to the Naiads of Ithaca for their habitation a grotto, wherein were everflowing waters[404]; and though in some cases the nymphs who haunt the mountain caves may as well be Oreads as Naiads, I have preferred to deal with them in this place; for usually it is river-gods who have hollowed out these rocky homes for their daughters, and in many such caves may be seen the everflowing waters that attest the Naiads’ birthright.

Some such places, whether springs or caves, have, as might be expected, attained greater fame or notoriety than others; some special incident starts a story about them which from generation to generation rolls on gathering it may be fresh volume.

A typical story--typical save only for the absence of tragedy, since the Naiads are wont to drown by mistake those whom they carry off--was heard by Leo Allatius[405] from what he considered a trustworthy source. ‘Some well-to-do people of Chios were taking a summer holiday in the country _en famille_, when a pretty little girl of the party got separated from the rest and ran off to a well at a little distance. Amusing herself, as children will, she leant forward over the well, and as she was looking at the water in it, was, without perceiving it, insensibly lifted by some force and pushed into the well. Her relations saw her carried off, and running up, perceived the girl amusing herself on the top of the water as if she were seated on a bed. Thereupon her father, emboldened by the sight, tried to climb down into the well, but was pulled in by some force and set beside his child. In the meantime some of the others had brought a ladder, which they lowered into the well and bade the man ascend. Catching up his daughter in his arms, he mounted the ladder safe and sound, and to the amazement of all, though father and daughter had been all that time in the water, they came out with clothes perfectly dry, without so much as a trace of dampness. The seizure of the girl and her father they attributed to Nereids, who were said to haunt that well. The girl too herself asserted that while she was hanging over the well, she had seen women sporting on the surface of the water with the utmost animation, and at their invitation had voluntarily thrown herself in.’

This story, though it ends happily, bears a marked resemblance to that of Hylas. It is specially noted that the child had a pretty face, and this without doubt is conceived as impelling the Nereids to seize her. It is of little consequence that their home is, in this case, a mere well instead of ‘a spring,’ as Theocritus[406] pictures it, ‘in a hollow of the land, whereabout grew rushes thickly and purple cuckoo-flower[407] and pale maidenhair and bright green parsley and clover spreading wide’; for the ancients also attributed nymphs to their wells[408].

Such stories are sometimes causes, sometimes effects, of the not uncommon place-names νεραϊδόβρυσι, νεραϊδόσπηλῃ͜ο[409], ‘Nereid-spring,’ ‘Nereid-cave.’

Two such caves, to which the additional interest attaches of having been in classical times also regarded as holy ground, are found on Parnassus and on Olympus. The former is the famous Corycian cave sacred in antiquity to Pan and the Nymphs[410] and still dreaded by the inhabitants of the district as an abode of Nereids[411]. The latter is thought to be the ancient sanctuary of the Pierian Muses, and the peasants of the last generation held the place in such awe that they refused to conduct anyone thither for fear of being seized with madness[412]. It is right to add that the tenants of this cavern were called by the vague name ἐξωτικαίς, which would comprise not only Nereids, but presumably the Muses also, if any remembrance of them survives in the district; but the fear of being seized with madness suggests the ordinary conception of nymphs. In neither of these instances of course can it be claimed that Naiads rather than Oreads are the possessors of the cave; but as I have said the peasants generally employ the wide appellation ‘Nereids’ or some yet vaguer name, and do not discriminate between the looks and the qualities of the several orders of nymphs. It is only by observing local and occasional distinctions that I have been able to trace some survivals of the four main ancient classes. In general the ‘Nereid’ of to-day is simply the ‘Nymph’ of antiquity.

§ 10. THE QUEENS OF THE NYMPHS.

Travelling once in a small sailing-boat from the island of Scyros to Scopelos I overheard an instructive conversation between one of my two boatmen and a shepherd whom we had taken off from the small island of Skánzoura. The occasion of our touching there, namely pursuit by pirates (from whom the North Aegean is not yet wholly free, though their piracies are seldom of a worse nature than cattle-lifting from the coasts and islands), had certainly had an exciting effect upon my boatman’s nerves, and, as darkness fell, the shepherd responded to his companion’s mood, and their talk ranged over many strange experiences. Very soon they were exchanging confidences about the supernatural beings with whom they had come into contact; and among these figured two who are the queens respectively of the nymphs of land and of sea. Of these deities one only was known to each of the speakers, but on comparing notes they agreed that the two personalities were distinct.

The landsman told of one whom he named ‘the queen of the mountains’ (ἡ βασίλισσα τῶν βουνῶν) who with a retinue of Nereids was ever roaming over the hills or dancing in some wooded dell. In form she was as a Nereid, but taller and more glistening-white than they; and as she surpassed her comrades in beauty, so did she also excel in cruelty towards those who heedlessly crossed her path. The sailor on the other hand had both seen and heard one whom he called ‘the queen of the shore’ (ἡ βασίλισσα τοῦ γιαλοῦ). Most often she stands in the sea with the water waist-high about her, and sings passionate love-songs to those who pass by on the shore. Then must men close fast their eyes and stop their ears; for, if they yield to her seductions, the bridal bed is in the depths of the sea and she alone rises up again to tempt yet others with her fatal love.

The former is without question she of whom Homer sang, ‘In company with her do mirthful nymphs ... range o’er the land.... High above them all she carries her head and brow, and full easily is she known, though they all be beautiful’[413].

Nigh on three thousand years ago was composed this graceful epitome of beliefs still current to-day; for, though the name of Artemis is no longer heard, her personality remains. The peasants in general describe rather than name her. In Zacynthos she is called ‘the great lady’ (ἡ μεγάλη κυρά)[414]; in Cephalonia and in the villages of Parnassus she is distinguished simply as ‘the chief’ or ‘the greatest’ of the Nereids[415]; in either Chios or Scopelos (I cannot say which, for my shepherd had been born in the former but was then living in the latter) her title is ‘Queen of the mountains.’ In Aetolia however I was fortunate enough to hear an actual name assigned, ἡ κυρὰ Κάλω, ‘the lady Beautiful,’ where the shift of the accent in Κάλω as compared with the adjective καλός is natural to the formation of a proper name, and the feminine termination in -ω, almost obsolete now, argues an early origin. The name therefore in its present form may have come down unchanged from classical times; but, whatever its age, we may at least hear in it an echo of the ancient cult-title of Artemis, Καλλίστη, ‘most beautiful’[416]. The same deity, I suspect, survived also until recently, under a disguised form but with a kindred name, in Athens: for the folk there used to tell of one whom they named ‘Saint Beautiful’ (ἡ ἅγι̯α Καλή), but to whom no church was ever dedicated[417]; her canonisation was only popular.

The account which I received in Aetolia of this ‘lady Beautiful’ agreed closely with the description already given of ‘the queen of the mountains.’ In appearance and in character she is but a Nereid on a larger scale. All the beauty and the frowardness so freely imputed to the nymphs are superlatively hers; there is no safety from her; on hillside, in coppice, by rivulet, everywhere she may be encountered; the tongue that makes utterance in her presence is thenceforth tied, and the eyes that behold her are darkened. The punishment that befell Teiresias of old for looking upon Athena as she bathed still awaits those who stray by mischance beside some sequestered pool or stream where the Nereids and their queen are wont to bathe in the heat of noon.

Such a spot, favoured in olden time by Artemis and her attendant Naiads, was the Cretan river Amnisos[418]; and it was probably no mere coincidence, but a good instance rather of the continuity of local tradition, that in comparatively recent times her personality and perhaps even her old name were still known in the district. It is recorded that in the sixteenth century both priests and people of the district declared that at a pretty little tarn near the Gulf of Mirabella they had seen ‘Diana and her fair nymphs’ lay aside their white raiment and bathe and disappear in the clear waters[419]. It would have been highly interesting to know the name of the goddess which the Italian writer translated as ‘Diana.’ Though it is true that in Italy[420] Diana herself was still worshipped in magical nightly orgies as late as the fourteenth century, it is scarcely likely that the Italian name had been adopted in Crete. More probably the slovenly fashion of miscalling Greek deities by Latin names was as common then as now; and in this instance a piece of valuable evidence has thereby been irretrievably lost. Yet the traditional connexion of Artemis with this district of Crete warrants the assumption that the leader of the nymphs of whom the story tells was in personality, if not also in name, the ancient Greek goddess, and no Italian importation.

Distinct reference to the bathing of Artemis is also made in a story which has already been related in connexion with Aphrodite and Eros[421]. A prince, who had journeyed to the garden of Eros to fetch water for the healing of his father’s blindness, saw in the spring there ‘a woman white as snow and shining as the moon. And it was in very truth the moon that bathed here.’ The last sentence, provided always that it be free from modern scholastic contamination, is an unique example of the survival of Artemis in the _rôle_ of the moon; while the healing properties of the spring in which she bathes offer a coincidence, certainly undesigned, with the powers of the goddess whom her worshippers of yore besought to ‘banish unto the mountain-tops sickness and suffering’[422].

Whether ‘the lady Beautiful’ is known now also in her ancient huntress-guise, is a point not readily determined. In Aetolia certainly I once or twice heard mention of her hunting on the mountains, but without feeling sure whether the word ‘hunt’ was being used literally or in metaphor. Expressions borrowed from the chase are not uncommon in the language, and the particular verb κυνηγῶ, ‘I hunt,’ is in the vernacular used of anything from rabbit-shooting to wife-beating. The injuries inflicted by Artemis on those who trespass upon her haunts might possibly be denoted by the same term. On the other hand it is not in the character of ‘the lady Beautiful,’ as it is in that of the ‘hunter’ Charos, to seek men out and slay them; men may fall chance victims to the sudden anger of the goddess, but they are the chosen quarry of the other’s prowess; he is a true ‘hunter’ of men, and, try as they will to evade him, he still pursues; but Artemis strikes none who turn aside from her path. I incline therefore to believe that the word ‘to hunt’ was intended literally when I heard it used of ‘the lady Beautiful,’ and that the ancient Artemis’ love of the chase is not forgotten by the Aetolian peasantry.

Such are the reminiscences of Artemis which I have been able to gather in a few districts of modern Greece. But it is clear that down to the seventeenth century the goddess was much more widely known. Leo Allatius[423], writing about the year 1630, after giving a good description of the Nereids, plunges abruptly into a long quotation from Michael Psellus, from which and from Allatius’ own comments on it some information about the Queen of the Nereids may be gleaned. The passage in question runs as follows, the comments and explanations in brackets being my own:--

‘ἡ καλὴ τὸν ὡραῖον. Supply ἀπέτεκεν. (Apparently a proverb, ‘Fair mother, fine son,’ to the usage of which Psellus gives some religious colour.) For the Virgin that brought forth was wonderfully fair, dazzling in the brightness of her graces, and her son was exceeding beautiful, fair beyond the sons of men. (Notwithstanding however the religious significance of the proverb, he at once condemns the use of it.) As a matter of fact, the phrase is due to faulty speech. For the popular language has perverted the saying. It is right to say καλὴν τῶν ὀρέων (‘fair lady of the mountains’); but the people have made the saying καλὴ τὸν ὡραῖον (‘fair mother, fine son’). (There is no distinction in sound, according to the modern pronunciation, between τῶν ὀρέων and τὸν ὡραῖον.) Hence we see that the popular imagination had once fashioned, quite unreasonably, a female deity whose domain was the mountains and who as it were disported herself upon them.... There is no deity called ‘fair lady of the mountains,’ nor is the so-called Barychnas a deity at all but a trouble arising in the head from heartburn or ill-digested food, ... which is also known as Ephialtes.’

Here Psellus is rambling in his dissertation as wildly as though his own head were affected by this demoniacal ailment. Which Allatius observing comments thus:--

‘What has Barychnas or Babutzicarius[424] or if you like Ephialtes to do with the fair lady of the woods or the mountains (_pulcram nemorum sive montium_)? From them men suffer lying abed; whereas attacks such as we have said are made by Callicantzarus[425], Burcolacas[426], or Nereid, occur in the open country and public roadways.... And Psellus himself knew quite well that the ‘fair lady of the mountains’ was nothing other than those who are commonly called the ‘fair mistresses’[427] (i.e. Nereids), who have nothing on earth to do with Barychnas and Ephialtes.’

The argument of this strangely confused passage is happily beside our mark, and we need not puzzle, with Psellus, over the demonology of dyspepsia. His interpretation of the phrase καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων I have even ventured to omit, for a devious path of wilful reasoning leads only to the conclusion that it means the tree on which Christ was crucified. The only method in his mad medley of medicine and theology is the intention to refute the popular belief in a beautiful goddess who haunted the mountains.

Some details of the belief may be gathered from Allatius’ criticism of the argument. Psellus mentions only the title ἡ καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων, but Allatius amplifies it in the phrase _pulcram nemorum sive montium_, implying thereby that in his own time Artemis--for it can be none other--was associated as much with woodland as with mountain; while her intimate connexion with the Nereids is adduced as a matter of common knowledge. The somewhat loose phrase by which Allatius indicates this fact--_pulcram montium nihil aliud esse quam eas quas vulgus vocat pulcras dominas_--must not be read in any strict and narrow sense. The beautiful lady of the mountains is, he means, just such as are the Nereids; but she is a definite person, distinguished as of old among her comrades by supreme grace and loveliness.

The statements of Leo Allatius, based as they are in the main upon his own recollections of his native Chios, find remarkable corroboration in a history of the same island written a little earlier by one Jerosme Justinian[428]. In the main the history is purely fabulous, taking its start from a point, if my memory serves me rightly, many centuries earlier than the Deluge; but the reference to contemporary superstitions may I think be trusted.

Previously to the passage which I translate, the writer has been telling the tale of the building of a wonderful tower by king Scelerion of Chios, wherein to guard his daughter Omorfia (Beauty) and three maids of honour with her until such time as he should find a husband worthy of her; how the workmen never left the tower till it was finished; how the master-mason threw down his implements from the top and himself essayed to fly down on wings of his own contrivance, which however failed to work as he had hoped, with the result that he fell into the river below the castle and was drowned; and how his ghost was seen there every first of May at midday. This story, which may be taken as a fair type of the whole ‘history,’ leads, by its mentions of apparitions on May 1st, to the following passage[429]:--

‘They have also another foolish belief, that near the tower are to be seen three youthful women, clothed in white, who invite passers-by to throw themselves into the river and get some cups of gold and silver which by diabolical illusion are seen floating on the water, in the hope that going into the river they may be drowned in a whirlpool called by the Greeks Chiroclacas, the water of which penetrates beneath the mountain as far as the precipice where the princess still shows herself. Further, there is no manner of doubt that the three ladies who appear to the inhabitants of the place are those spirits who make their dwelling in the water, assuming the form of women, and called by the ancients _Nereides_ or _Negiardes_; the good women are so abused by these illusions that on the first of May they are wont to make crosses on their doors, saying that the goddess of their mountains is due to come and visit them in their houses, and that without this mark she would not come in; likewise they say that she would slay any one who should go to meet her. And so they give her the name of ‘good,’ being obliged by the fear in which they hold her to give her this title of honour. Some people are of opinion that this goddess is one of the Oread nymphs who dwell in the mountains....’

This ‘goddess of the mountains’ whom they call ‘good’ (i.e. probably καλή) is beyond doubt the same who was known to Psellus and to Allatius as ἡ καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων, ‘the beautiful lady of the mountains,’ and to my pastoral informant as ἡ βασίλισσα τῶν βουνῶν, ‘the queen of the mountains’; and in general the conception of her is the same as continues locally to the present day. One statement indeed I cannot explain, namely that the women make crosses on their doors with the purpose of attracting the goddess to their houses; for I have already mentioned the same use of the symbol for the contrary purpose of keeping the Nereids out[430]. Possibly as regards this detail of the ‘foolish belief’ the _grand seigneur_ was wrongly informed. But in other respects, in the close association of the goddess with the Oreads or other nymphs, in the fear which she inspired, in the belief that she slew those who ventured upon her path, the Chian record is in complete agreement with the description which I have given from oral sources. In terror, as in charm, the Nereids’ queen is foremost.

A contrary view however is taken by Bernard Schmidt[431], who states that she is pictured by the commonfolk as gentler and friendlier to man than her companions, and even disposed to check their light and froward ways. On such a point, I freely admit, local tradition might well vary; but in this particular case I am inclined to think that Schmidt fell into the error of confusing the wild-roaming, nymph-escorted goddess of hill and vale and fountain with that other goddess who dwells solitary in the heart of the mountain, dispensing blessings to the good and pains to the wicked, and in the conception of whom we found an aftermath of the ancient crop of legends concerning Demeter and Kore. Surely this grand and lonely figure, ‘the Mistress of the Earth and of the Sea,’ is in every trait different from the lovely, capricious, cruel ‘Queen of the Mountains.’ Indeed the very circumstance of both presentations being known in one and the same district--as, to my own knowledge, in Aetolia, and, on Schmidt’s own showing, in Zacynthos[432]--proves that two divine persons, in type and in character essentially different, are here involved, and not merely two accidental and local differentiations of the same deity. Doubtless in the more ‘civilised’ parts of Greece (to use the word beloved of the half-educated town-bred Greek), in the parts where old beliefs and customs are falling into decay and contempt while nothing good is substituted for them, even the lower classes have lost or are losing count and memory of many of those powers whom their forefathers acknowledged; but in the more favourably sequestered villages, let us say, of Aetolia, where superstition still fears no mockery, no peasant would commit the mistake of confounding his Demeter with his Artemis. Between majestic loneliness and frolicsome throng, between dignified beauty and bewitching loveliness, between gentleness and lightness, between love of good and wanton merriment, between justice and caprice, the gulf is wide.

But while the modern Artemis is the leader of her nymphs in mischief and even in cruelty, it must not be thought that she is always a foe to man. In Aetolia ‘the lady Beautiful’ is quick to avenge a slight or an intrusion; but for those who pay her due reverence she is a ready helper and a giver of good gifts. Health and wealth lie in her hand, to bestow or to withhold, as in the hands of the Nereids. Hence even he whom her sudden anger has once smitten may regain her favour by offerings of honey and other sweetmeats on the scene of his calamity. And probably peace-offerings with less definite intent have been or still are in vogue; for it is reported that presents used to be brought to the cross-roads in Zacynthos at midday or midnight simply to appease ‘the great lady’ and her train[433], a survival surely of the ancient banquets of Hecate surnamed Τριοδῖτις, ‘Goddess of the Cross-roads.’

In some cases hesitation may be felt in pronouncing an opinion whether it is for Artemis and the nymphs or for the Fates[434] (Μοῖραι) that these gifts are intended; and in the category of the doubtful must be included all those cases where the dedication of the offerings is merely to the καλαὶς κυρᾶδες[435], ‘good ladies,’ no further information being vouchsafed. Several writers, including the German Ross and the Greek Pittakis, appear to have assumed without sufficient enquiry that none but the Nereids could be thus designated; but as a matter of fact, the same euphemistic title is occasionally given also to the Fates[436]; and while I incline to trust the experience and judgement of Ross in the general statement which he makes concerning such offerings at Athens, Thebes, and elsewhere[437], the accuracy of Pittakis[438] on the other hand is challenged by the actual spot which he is describing when he identifies the ‘good ladies’ with the Nereids; for the place was none other than the so-called ‘prison of Socrates,’ which the testimony of many travellers concurs in assigning to the Fates.

But, though some of the evidence concerning offerings demands closer scrutiny before it can have any bearing upon the continued belief in the existence of Artemis, there are certainly some corners of Greece in which that goddess is still worshipped. ‘The great lady,’ ‘the Queen of the mountains,’ ‘the lady Beautiful’ are the various titles of a single goddess whose beauty and quick anger have ever since the heroic age held the Greek folk in awe and demanded their reverence; and until the inroads of European civilisation destroy with the weapon of ridicule all that is old in custom and creed, Artemis will continue to hold some sway over hill and stream and woodland.

* * * * *

The other queen, of whom my boatman spoke, ‘the Queen of the Shore,’ she who stands in the shallows and by her beauty and sweet voice entices the unwary to share her bed in the depths of the sea, must I think be identified with a being who is more commonly called ‘the Lamia of the Sea’ or ‘the Lamia of the Shore.’ A popular poem[439] from Salonica, in which these two titles are found side by side, tells of a contest between her and a young shepherd. One day, in disregard of his mother’s warning, he was playing his pipes upon the shore, when the Lamia appeared to him and made a wager with him that she would dance longer than he would go on playing. If he should win, he should have her to wife; if she should win, she was to take all his flocks as the prize. Three days the shepherd played, three whole nights and days; then his strength failed him, and the Lamia took his sheep and goats and left him destitute.

This poem has some points in common with a belief said to be held in the district of Parnassos, that if a young man--especially one who is handsome--play the flute or sing at mid-day or midnight upon the shore, the Lamia thereof emerges from the depths of the sea, and with promises of a happy life tries to persuade him to be her husband and to come with her into the sea; if the young man refuse, she slays him[440]; and presumably, though this is not mentioned, if he consent, she drowns him.

The same Lamia, it is recorded[441], is also known on the coasts of Elis as a dangerous foe to sailors; for her work is the waterspout and the whirlwind, whereby their ships are engulfed. Among the Cyclades too the same belief certainly prevails (though I have never obtained there any details concerning the character of the Lamia); for on seeing a waterspout the sailors will exclaim, ‘the Lamia of the Sea is passing’ (περνάει ἡ Λάμια τοῦ πελάγου), and sometimes stick a black-handled knife into the mast as a charm against her[442].

In these somewhat meagre accounts of the Lamia of the Sea, there are several points in harmony with the general conception of Nereids. She is beautiful; she seeks the love of young men, even though that love mean death to them; she is sweet of voice and untiring in dance; and she passes to and fro in waterspout or whirlwind. It is not surprising then to find that in Elis she is actually named queen of the Nereids[443], that is, without doubt, of the sea-nymphs only, since she herself has her domain only in the sea. And the title ‘queen of the shore’ which I learnt of my boatman from Scyros points to the same belief; for as we found Artemis, ‘queen of the mountains,’ to be the leader of all the Nereids of the land, so should ‘the queen of the shore’ be ruler over the Nereids of the sea.

How far this conception of the Lamia of the Sea accords with classical tradition, it is impossible to decide. Only in one passage, a fragment of Stesichorus[444], is there any evidence of the connexion of a Lamia with the sea. There the marine monster, Scylla, was made ‘the daughter of Lamia,’ a phrase which has given rise to the conjecture that the ancients like the moderns, as we shall see in the next section, recognised more than one species. A marine Lamia would supply the most natural parentage for Scylla; and if her mother may be identified with the modern Lamia of the Sea, the foe of ships and creator of the waterspout, the character of Scylla is true to her lineage.

But the other traits in the character of the modern Lamia of the Sea can hardly be hers by such ancient prescription. It is difficult to suppose that Stesichorus pictured Scylla’s mother as a thing of beauty; and the charm of the modern Lamia’s love-songs which seduce men to their death is perhaps an attribute borrowed from the Sirens. It is therefore in virtue of acquired rather than original qualities that the Lamia of the Sea has come to be queen of the sea-nymphs.

§ 11. LAMIAE, GELLOUDES, AND STRIGES.

The three classes of female monsters, of whom the present section treats, have ever since the early middle ages[445] been constantly confounded, and the special attributes of each assigned promiscuously to the others. This is due to the fact that all three possess one pronounced quality in common, the propensity towards preying upon young children; and wherever this horrible trait has absorbed, as it well may, the whole attention of mediaeval writer or modern peasant, the distinctions between them in origin and nature have become obscured. Yet sufficient information is forthcoming, if used with discrimination, to enable some account to be given of each class separately.

The Lamiae are hideous monsters, shaped as gigantic and coarse-looking women for the most part, but, with strange deformities of the lower limbs such as Aristophanes attributed to a kindred being, the Empusa[446]. Their feet are dissimilar and may be more than two in number; one is often of bronze, while others resemble those of animals--ox, ass, or goat[447]. Tradition relates that one of these monsters was once shot by a peasant at Koropíon, a village in Attica, and was found to measure three fathoms in length; and her loathsome nature was attested by the fact that, when her body was thrown out in a desert plain, no grass would grow where her blood had dripped[448]. The chief characteristics of the Lamiae, apart from their thirst for blood, are their uncleanliness, their gluttony, and their stupidity. The details of the first need not be named, but would still furnish a jest for Aristophanes in his coarser mood as they did of old[449]. Their gluttony is clearly proved by their unwieldy corpulence. Their stupidity is best shown in their sorry management of their homes; for even the Lamiae have their domestic duties, being mated usually, according to the folk-tales[450], with dragons (δράκοι), and making their abode in caverns and desert places. They ply the broom so poorly that ‘the Lamia’s sweeping’ (τῆς Λάμιας τὰ σαρώματα) has become a proverb for untidiness[451]; they are so ignorant of bread-making that they put their dough into a cold oven and heap the fire on top of it[452]; they give their dogs hay to eat, and bones to their horses[453]. But they have at least the redeeming virtue of sometimes showing gratitude to those who help them out of the ill plight to which their ignorance has brought them[454].

Their stupidity also is regarded by the Greeks as a cause of honesty. Though they are often rich, as being the consorts of dragons whose chief function it is to keep guard over hidden treasure, they have not the wit to keep their wealth, but foolishly keep their word instead. Athenian tradition tells of a very rich Lamia (known by the name of ἡ Μόρα, perhaps better written Μώρα, a proper name formed from μωρός, ‘foolish’), who used to walk about at night, seizing and crushing men whom she met till they roared like bulls. But if her victim kept his wits about him and snatched her head-dress from her, she would, in order to get it back, promise him both life and wealth, and keep her word[455].

Such aspects of the Lamiae however are by no means universally acknowledged; nine peasants out of ten, I suspect, could give no further information about their character than that they feed on human flesh and choose above all new-born infants as their prey. Hence comes the popular phrase (employed, it would appear, in more than one district of Greece) in reference to children who have died suddenly, τὸ παιδὶ τὸ ἔπνιξε ἡ Λάμια[456], ‘the Child has been strangled by the Lamia.’

But in general I think the ravages of Lamiae have ceased to inspire much genuine fear in the peasants’ minds. One there was, so I heard, near Kephalóvryso in Aetolia, whose dwelling-place, a cave beside a torrent-bed, was to some extent dreaded and avoided. But in most parts the Lamia only justifies the memory of her existence by serving to provide adventures for the heroes of folk-stories; by lending her name, along with Empusa and Mormo (who still locally survive[457]), as a terror with which mothers may intimidate naughty children, or by furnishing it as a ready weapon of vituperation in the wordy warfare of women.

The word Lamia, which has survived unchanged in form down to the present day save that the by-forms Λάμνα, Λάμνια and Λάμνισσα are locally preferred, did not originally it would seem indicate a species of monster but a single person. Lamia according to classical tradition was the name of a queen of Libya who was loved by Zeus, and thus excited the resentment of Hera, who robbed her of all her children; whereupon the desolate queen took up her abode in a grim and lonely cavern, and there changed into a malicious and greedy monster, who in envy and despair stole and killed the children of more fortunate mothers[458].

But a plural of the word, indicating that the single monster had been multiplied into a whole class, soon occurs. Philostratus[459] in speaking of ‘the Empusae, which the common people call Lamiae and Mormolykiae,’ says, ‘Now these desire indeed the pleasures of love, but yet more do they desire human flesh, and use the pleasures of love to decoy those on whom they will feast.’ A plural such as is here used might of course be merely a studied expression of contempt for vulgar superstitions; but the latter part of the quotation seems to give a fair summary of the character of ancient Lamiae. This is illustrated by a gruesome story, narrated by Apuleius[460], of two Lamiae who, in vengeance for a slight of the love proffered by one of them to a young man named Socrates, tore out his heart one night before the eyes of his companion Aristomenes.

Of these two main characteristics of the ancient Lamiae, the one, lasciviousness, has come to be mainly imputed in modern times to the Lamia of the Sea, the single deity who rules the sea-nymphs; while the craving for human flesh is the most marked feature of the terrestrial tribe of Lamiae. But the latter certainly are the truest descendants of the ancient Lamia, and occupy a place in popular belief such as she held of old; for few, it would seem, stood then in any serious fear of the Lamia; the testimony of several ancient writers[461] (the story of Apuleius notwithstanding) proves that more than two thousand years ago she had already fallen to the level of bogeys which frighten none but children.

GELLOUDES.

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

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

Their prototype, mentioned, we are told, by Sappho, was the maiden Gello, whose spectre after her untimely end was said by the people of Lesbos to beset children and to be chargeable with the early deaths of infants[467].

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

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

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

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

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

STRIGES.

The Striges, though often confused with Lamiae and with Gelloudes, are essentially different from them. The two classes with which I have dealt are demons; the Striges, in the modern acceptation of the term, are women who possess the power to transform themselves into birds of prey or other animals; and it is only the taste for blood, shared by them with those demons, which has created the confusion.

The Striges moreover cannot, like the Lamiae or Gelloudes, be claimed either as an original product of the Greek imagination or as the exclusive property of Greek superstition at the present day. The Albanians have a word σ̈τρῑ́γ̇ε̱α, and the people of Corsica a term _strega_, both of which denote a witch of the same powers and propensities as are feared in Greece; and it is likely that all of them--Greeks, Albanians, Corsicans--have borrowed the conception from Italy. The ancient Greeks indeed had a word στρίγξ identical with the _strix_ of Latin, but the shrieking night-bird denoted by it was not, so far as I can discover, invested by Greek imagination with any terrors. In Italy on the contrary the Strix was widely feared as a bloodthirsty monster in bird-form. Pliny evidently supposed it to be some actual bird, though he doubted the fables concerning it. ‘The _strix_,’ he says, ‘certainly is mentioned in ancient curses; but what kind of bird it may be, is not I think agreed[477].’ Perhaps in those ‘ancient curses’ it was invoked to inflict such punishment upon enemies as it once meted out to Otos and Ephialtes for their attempt upon Diana’s chastity[478].

The notion however that Striges were not really birds but witches in bird-form early suggested itself and found an exponent in Ovid[479]. ‘Voracious birds,’ he says, ‘there are ... that fly forth by night and assail children who still need a nurse’s care, and seize them out of their cradles and do them mischief. With their beaks they are said to pick out the child’s milk-fed bowels, and their throat is full of the blood they drink. Striges they are called ... and whether they come into being as birds or are changed thereto by incantation, and the Marsian spell transforms old women into winged things,’--such are their ways.

This was probably the state of the superstition when the Greeks added Striges to their own list of nightly terrors; and the very form of the word in modern Greek, στρίγλα or στρίγγλα (being apparently a diminutive, _strigula_, such as spoken Latin would readily have formed from the literary form _strix_), testifies to the borrowing of the belief.

In Greece the latter of the two ways in which Ovid explained the origin of the Strix seems to have been generally accepted as correct. It is true that the modern Greeks still have a real bird called στριγλοποῦλι[480] (either some kind of owl or the night-jar), which not only loves twilight or darkness in the upper world but is also said to haunt the gloomy demesnes of Charos below--thereby revealing perhaps some slight evidence of its relationship to the _strix_ which tormented the brother giants; but the Strigla has long ceased to be a real bird, and (apart from the confusion with a Lamia or Gello) is always a witch.

The condition of the belief in the eighth century is noticed by John of Damascus[481]. ‘There are some of the more ignorant who say that there are women known as Striges (Στρῦγγαι), otherwise called Geloudes. They allege that these are to be seen at night passing through the air, and that when they happen to come to a house they find no obstacle in doors and bolts, but though the doors are securely locked make their way in and throttle infants. Others say that the Strix devours the liver and all the internal organs of the children, and so sets a short limit to their lives. And they stoutly declare, some that they have seen, and others that they have heard, the Strix entering houses, though the doors were locked, either in bodily form or as a spirit only.’

Again in the eleventh century Michael Psellus noticed the same superstition, though as we have seen his language suggests some confusion of Striges with Gelloudes. But he is really describing the faculty of the former to assume the shape of birds when he says, ‘The superstition obtaining nowadays invests old women with this power. It provides them with wings in their extreme age, and represents them as settling[482] unseen upon infants, whom, it is alleged, they suck until they exhaust all the humours in them’[483].

Leo Allatius, by whom this passage is cited, produces both from his own experience and from the testimony of others several instances of such occurrences, and mentions also the various precautions taken against them. These include all-night watches, lamps suspended before the pictures of patron-saints, amulets of garlic or of coral, and the smearing of oil from some saint’s lamp on the face of the child or invalid. It will suffice however to quote his general description of the Striges according to the beliefs of the seventeenth century. Striges (στρίγλαις), he tells us in effect, are old women whom poverty and misery drive to contract an alliance with the devil for all evil purposes; men are little molested by them, but women and still more commonly children, being a weaker and easier prey, suffer much from them, their breath alone[484] being so pernicious as to cause insanity or even death. They are especially addicted to attacking new-born babes, sucking out their blood and leaving them dead, or so polluting them by their touch that what life remains to them is never free from sickness.

It will have been noticed in this last account of the Striges, that the range of their activity is somewhat enlarged, so that women as well as children fall victims to them. At the present day, though they are believed to prey chiefly upon infants, even grown men are not immune, as witness a story[485] from Messenia.

Once upon a time a man was passing the night at the house of a friend whose household consisted of his wife and mother-in-law. About midnight some noise awakened him, and listening intently he made out the voices of the two women conversing together. What he heard terrified him, for they were planning to eat himself or his host, whichever proved the fatter. At once he perceived that his friend’s wife and mother-in-law were Striges, and knowing that there was no other means of escaping the danger that was threatening him, he determined to try to save himself by guile. The Striges advanced towards the sleeping men and took hold of their guest’s foot to see if it was heavy, and consequently fat and good for eating; he however, understanding their purpose, raised his foot of his own accord as they took it in their hands and weighed it, so that it felt to them as light as a feather, and they let it drop again disappointed. Then they took hold of the foot of the other man who was sleeping, and naturally found it very heavy. Delighted at the result of their investigation, they ripped open the wretched man’s breast, pulled out his liver and other parts, and threw them among the hot ashes on the hearth to cook. Then noticing that they had no wine, they flew to the wine-shop, took what they wanted and returned. But in the interval the guest got up, collected the flesh that was being cooked, stowed it away in his pouch, and put in its place on the hearth some animal’s dung. The Striges however ate up greedily what was on the hearth, complaining only that it was somewhat over-done. The next day the two friends rose and left the house; the victim of the previous night was very pale, but he did not bear the slightest wound or scar on his breast. He remarked to his companion that he felt excessively hungry, and the other gave him what had been cooked during the night, which he ate and found exceedingly invigorating; the blood mounted to his cheeks and he was perfectly sound again. Thereupon his friend told him what had happened during the night, and they went together and slew the Striges.

This story exhibits all the essential qualities of Striges. The pair of them are women, and one at least, the mother-in-law, is old; they choose the night for their depredations; they can assume the form of birds, for ‘they flew,’ it is said, to the wine-shop; and their taste for human flesh is the _motif_ of the story.

It must however be acknowledged that as the area of the Striges’

## activities has become somewhat extended, so also has the ancient

limitation of the term to old women become locally somewhat relaxed. In many parts of Greece a belief is held that certain infants are liable to a form of lycanthropy; and female infants so disposed are sometimes called Striges. A story from Tenos[486], narrated in several versions, concerns an infant princess who was a Strigla. Every day one of the king’s horses was found to have been killed and devoured in the night. The three princes, her brothers, therefore kept watch in turn; and it fell to the fortune of the youngest of them, owing to his courage and skill, to detect the malefactor. About midnight he heard a noise, and fired into the middle of a cloud that seemed to hang over the horses, thereby so wounding his sister that the mark observed on her next day betrayed her nightly doings. Not daring however to accuse her to his father, he fled from home with his mother to a place of safety, while the girl remained undisturbed in her voracity and consumed one by one all the people of the town.

But in other places where the same belief prevails, as we shall see later, these _enfants terribles_, who may be of either sex, are called not Striges but by some such name as ‘callicantzaros,’ ‘vrykolakas,’ or ‘gorgon’; and this variety of names is in itself a proof that, while the idea of infant cannibals is widespread, no exact verbal equivalent now exists, and each of the several names used is only requisitioned to supply the deficiency. A child can indeed enjoy the title of Strigla by courtesy; only an old woman can possess it of right.

Thus the old Graeco-Roman fear of Striges still remains little changed. The Church has repeatedly forbidden belief in them[487]; legislation has prohibited in times past the killing of them[488]. But the link of superstition between the past and the present is still unbroken; and witch-burning is an idea which in any secluded corner of Greece might still be put into effect[489].

§ 12. GORGONS.

The modern conception of the Gorgon (ἡ γοργόνα) or Gorgons (γοργόνες)--for popular belief seems to vary locally between recognising one or more such beings--is extremely complex. Of my own knowledge I can unfortunately contribute nothing new to what has been published by others concerning them; for though I have several times heard Gorgons mentioned, and always on further enquiry found them to be terrible demons who dwell in the sea, it has so chanced that I have been unable to get any more explicit information on the subject. The present section is therefore, so far as the facts are concerned, a compilation from the researches of others, especially of Prof. Polites of Athens University.

A Gorgon is represented as half woman, half fish. Rough sketches on the walls of small taverns and elsewhere may often be observed, depicting a woman with the tail of a fish, half emerging from the waves, and holding in one hand a ship, in the other an anchor; sometimes also she is armed with a breastplate[490]. Similar designs are also to be seen tattooed upon the arms or breasts of men of the lower classes, especially among the maritime population.

The Gorgons themselves are to be encountered in all parts of the sea; but their favourite resort, especially on Saturday nights, is reputed to be the Black Sea, where if one of them meets a ship, grasping the bows with her hand she asks, ‘Is king Alexander living?’ To this the sailors must reply ‘he lives and reigns,’ and may add ‘and he keeps the world at peace,’ or ‘and long life to you too!’; for then the awful and monstrous Gorgon in gladness at the tidings transforms herself into a beautiful maiden and calms the waves and sings melodiously to her lyre. If on the contrary the sailors make the mistake of saying that Alexander is dead, she either capsizes the ship with her own hand or by the wildness of her lamentations raises a storm from which there is no escape nor shelter[491]. The mention of Alexander the Great in these stories of the Gorgons, as also sometimes in connexion with the Nereids, is unimportant; it is not an instance of purely oral tradition, but has its source in the history of Alexander by Pseudocallisthenes[492], of which there exist paraphrases in the popular tongue. The interest of such fables lies in the association of beauty and melody as well as of horror with the Gorgons, and in the _rôle_ of marine deity which they play.

In general however it is upon the monstrous and terrifying aspect of the Gorgons that the common-folk seize, so that the name Gorgon is metaphorically applied to ill-favoured and malevolent women[493]. Thus in Rhodes it is used of any large fierce-looking virago[494]; in Cephalonia (where also the word Μέδουσα, Medusa, survives in the same sense) of any lady conspicuously ill-featured[495]. Allusion too has already been made to the case where a child possessed by a mania of bloodthirstiness is occasionally called a Gorgon[496].

But there is another and fresh aspect of the Gorgon’s nature suggested by the use of the word in Cythnos. There it is metaphorically applied to depraved women[497]; and this isolated usage is in accord with one description of the Gorgon which has come down from the middle ages. This description forms part of a poem entitled ‘The Physiologus[498]’ (written in the most debased ecclesiastical Greek and supposed to date from before the thirteenth century), which gives a fantastic account of the habits of many birds and beasts among which the Gorgon is included.

‘The Gorgon is a beast like unto a harlot; the hair of her head is all auburn; the ends thereof are as it were heads of snakes; and her body is bare and smooth, white as a dove, and her bosom is a woman’s with breasts fair to behold; but the look of her face brings death; whatsoever looks upon her falls down and dies. She dwells in the regions of the West. She knows all languages and the speech of wild beasts. When she desires a mate, she calls first to the lion; for fear of death he draws not near to her. Again she calls the dragon, but neither does he go; and even so all the beasts both small and great. She pipes sweetly and sings with charm beyond all; lastly she utters human voice: “Come, sate fleshly desire, ye men, of my beauty, and I of yours.” The men, knowing then their opportunity against her, lay snares that she may lose her pleasure; and stand afar off, that they may not see her, and raise their voice and cry and say unto her: “Dig a deep pit and put thy head therein, that we may not die and may come with thee.” She straightway then goes and makes a great hole and puts her head therein and leaves her body; from the waist downward it is seen naked; so she remains and awaits the pains of lewdness. The man goes from behind, cuts off her head, holds it face downward, and places it in a vessel, and if he meet dragon or lion or leopard, he shows the head, and the beasts die.’

These modern or mediaeval descriptions of the Gorgons, though they are by no means consistent one with another, offer four main aspects in which the modern Gorgon may be compared with the creatures of ancient mythology. Her face is terrible either in its surpassing loveliness or in its overwhelming hideousness. She possesses the gift of entrancing melody. She is voluptuous. She dwells in the sea.

The first aspect may be derived directly from the ancient conception of the Gorgons. The word Γοργώ itself is a name formed from the adjective γοργός and means simply ‘fierce’ or ‘terrible’ in look, without implying anything of beauty or the opposite; while of Medusa, the Gorgon _par excellence_, tradition relates that once she was a beautiful maiden beloved of Poseidon, and that it was only through the wrath of Athena that her hair was changed into writhing snakes and her loveliness lost in horror. Moreover in ancient works of art the representation of the Gorgon’s head varies from a type of cruel beauty to a grinning mask. But it is also possible that the idea of their beauty is due to a confusion of Gorgons with Sirens, from whom, as we shall see, certain traits have certainly been borrowed.

These traits are the two next aspects of the modern Gorgons which we have to consider, the sweetness of their singing and their voluptuousness. These were the essential qualities of the Sirens, and have undoubtedly been transferred to the Gorgons no less than to the Lamia of the Sea[499].

Possibly also from the same source comes the mixed shape, half woman and half fish, in which the Gorgon is now pourtrayed. The Sirens were indeed originally terrestrial, dwelling in a meadow near the sea, yet not venturing in the deep themselves, but luring men to shipwreck on the coast by the spell of their song; and an echo perhaps of this conception, though the Sirens themselves are no longer known, lives on in a folk-song which pictures the enchantment of a maiden’s love-song wafted to seafarers’ ears from off the shore: ‘Thereby a ship was passing with sails outspread. Sailors that hearken to that voice and look upon such beauty, forget their sails and forsake their oars; they cannot voyage any more; they know not how to set sail[500].’ But by the sixth century[501] the traditional habitat of the Sirens had changed. ‘The Sirens,’ says an anonymous work on monsters and great beasts, ‘are mermaids, who by their exceeding beauty and winning song ensnare mariners; from the head to the navel they are of human and maidenly form, but they have the scaly tails of fishes[502].’ This description establishes an unquestionable connexion between the Sirens and the modern Gorgons.

But the fourth aspect of the Gorgons on which I have to touch, their connexion with the sea, is not, I think, to be explained as another loan from the Sirens. On the contrary the Gorgons were it would seem deities of the sea, when the Sirens were still dwellers upon the shore; and it was their originally marine character which enabled them to absorb the qualities once attributed to the Sirens. Thus according to Hesiod[503] the three Gorgons were daughters of the sea-deities Phorcys and Ceto, and their home was at the western bound of Ocean. Further one of their number, Medusa, was loved by the sea-god Poseidon, and gave birth both to the horse Pegasus whose name may be a derivative of πήγη, ‘water-spring,’ and whose resort was certainly the fountain of Pirene[504], and also to Chrysaor whose bride was ‘Callirrhoe, daughter of far-famed Ocean.’ Whether this mythological problem is capable of solution in terms of natural phenomena[505] does not here concern us; but it is a straightforward and necessary inference from these genealogical data, that an early and intimate connexion existed between the Gorgons and the sea. And here art comes to the support of literature. In the National Museum of Athens are two vases of about the sixth century, depicting Gorgons in the company of dolphins. The first, an early Attic _amphora_[506] represents the three Gorgons, of whom Medusa appears headless, surrounded by a considerable number of them. The second, a _kylex_[507] with offset lip of the _Kleinmeister_ type, pourtrays a single Gorgon with a dolphin on either side. These artistic presentments furnish the strongest possible corroboration of Hesiodic lore, and justify the assertion that from the earliest times the Gorgons were deities of the sea. It was clearly then in virtue of their own marine character that they were able later to usurp also the place of the Sirens.

But the Sirens are not the only ancient beings who have contributed to the formation of the popular conception of modern Gorgons. In one story[508] the personality of Scylla is unmistakeable beneath the disguise of name. This fusion is the more natural in that Scylla was from the beginning[509] a monster of the sea, whose form, according to Vergil[510], terminated like that of latter-day Gorgons in a fish’s tail; a monster too fully as terrible in her own way as any Gorgon. The following extract from the story contains all that is pertinent.

‘So the lad departed and tramped on for twenty hours. Then he came to a village by the sea, and saw some men busy lading a boat with oil, and they were carrying on board each one a barrel. When he drew near to them, he said, “Can you carry but one barrel at a time, my good fellows? See how many I will carry.” So saying, he took a barrel on each shoulder, and placed them in the boat. Then said the captain to him, “Thank you, my lad” (for he was afraid of him), “come and have some food.” “No, thank you, captain,” he replied, “I do not want any. But when you are passing yonder straits, please take me along with you.” The captain was delighted to do so, for in the sea at that place there was a Gorgon, and from every boat that passed she took one man as toll and devoured him, or else swamped the whole boat. So they set out, and as they were going the captain said to the lad, “Take a turn at the tiller, my boy, that we may go and sleep, for we are tired.” Accordingly they went below--to sleep, so they pretended--and the lad remained at the helm. Suddenly the boat stopped. He was looking about on each side when he heard a voice behind him. He turned at once and saw a beautiful woman with golden hair, who said to him, “Give me my tribute.” “What tribute?” replied the lad. “The man whom I devour from each boat that passes.” “Give me your hand,” said the lad to her. Straightway without demur she gave it to him, and tried to pull him down into the sea. At this the lad grew angry. “Come up, you she-devil, come up here,” he cried, and dashed her upon the deck. Then he belaboured her soundly, and said to her: “Swear to me that you will never molest man again, or I will not let you go.” “I swear,” she said, “by my mother the sea and by my father Alexander, that I will molest none.” Then he threw her back into the sea.’

Apart from the description of the Gorgon in this story, as in others, as a ‘beautiful woman with golden hair,’ the tradition which has contributed chiefly to the invention of the episode is the ancient myth of Scylla and, we may perhaps add, of Charybdis; for here too the straits are the scene of alternative horrors, either the devouring of one man out of the crew or the sinking of the whole craft.

But in spite of the fusion of both Scylla and the Sirens with the Gorgons in the crucible of popular imagination, analysis of the complex modern conception still reveals two elements in the Gorgons’ nature which vindicate their claim to their ancient name, their association with the sea and the terror that they inspire.

§ 13. THE CENTAURS.

ἈΝΆΓΚΗ ΜΕΤᾺ ΤΟΥ͂ΤΟ ΤῸ ΤΩ͂Ν ἹΠΠΟΚΕΝΤΑΎΡΩΝ ΕἾΔΟΣ ἘΠΑΝΟΡΘΟΥ͂ΣΘΑΙ.

PLATO, _Phaedrus_, 7.

The Callicántzari (Καλλικάντζαροι) are the most monstrous of all the creatures of the popular imagination, and none are better known to the Greek-speaking world at large; for even where educated men have ceased to believe in them, they still figure in the stories told and retold to children with each recurring New Year’s Day; and, among the peasants, many reach manhood or womanhood without outgrowing their early fears of them.

The name Callicantzaros itself appears in many dialectic and widely differing forms, and there are also a multitude of local by-names. Of the former I shall treat later in discussing the origin of the word Callicantzaros, while the by-names, being for the most part descriptive of the appearance or qualities of these monsters, will be mentioned as occasion requires. But even where other local names are in common use, some form of the word Callicantzaros is almost always employed as well, or at least is understood.

As in the nomenclature, so too in the description of the Callicantzari, one locality differs very widely from another. And this cannot be merely a result of the wide distribution of the belief in them; for the Nereids certainly are equally widely known, and yet their appearance and habits are, broadly speaking, everywhere the same. The extraordinary divergences and even contradictions in different accounts of the Callicantzari demand some other explanation than that of casual variation. That explanation, as I shall show later, lies in their identity with the ancient Centaurs. But before I discuss their origin, I must attempt as general a description of their appearance and habits as the vast variation of local traditions permits. In revising this description I have had the advantage of consulting Prof. Polites’ new work on the traditions of modern Greece[511], from which I have learnt some new facts, and have obtained on several points confirmation from a new source of what I had myself heard or surmised. I take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging my indebtedness to him.

In describing the Callicantzari, although the diversities of their outward form are almost endless, two main classes of them must be distinguished, because corresponding with that physical division there is also a marked difference in character. The two classes differ physically in stature, and, while all Callicantzari are essentially mischievous in character, the mischief wrought by the larger sort is often of a malicious and even deadly order, while the smaller sort are more frolicsome and harmless in their tricks.

The larger kind vary from the size of a man to that of a gigantic monster whose loins are on a level with the chimneypots. They are usually black in colour, and covered with a coat of shaggy hair, but a bald variety is also sometimes mentioned. Their heads and also their sexual organs are out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their faces are black; their eyes glare red; they have the ears of goats or asses; from their huge mouths blood-red tongues loll out, flanked by ferocious tusks. Their bodies are in general very lean, so that in some districts the word Callicantzaros is applied metaphorically to a very lean man[512]; but a shorter and thickset variety also occurs. They have the arms and hands of monkeys, and their nails are as long again as their fingers and curved like the talons of a vulture. They are sometimes furnished with long thin tails. They have the legs of a goat or an ass, or sometimes one human leg and one of bestial form; or again both legs are of human shape, but the foot so distorted that the toes come where the heel should be[513]. Hence it is not surprising that they are often lame, but even so they are swift of foot and terrible in strength. ‘They devour their road at the pace of Pegasus,’ wrote Leo Allatius[514]; and at the present day several by-names bear witness to their speed. In Samos they are called Καλλισπούδηδες[515], ‘those who make good speed’; in Cyprus Πλανήταροι[516], ‘the wanderers’; in Athens they have the humorous title Κωλοβελόνηδες, formed from the proverbial expression βελόνια ἔχει ’στὸν κῶλο του, ‘he has needles in his buttocks,’ said of any one who cannot sit still, but is always on the move[517]. Their strength also has earned them one by-name, reported from Kardamýle in Maina, τὰ τσιλικρωτά, said to be formed from the Turkish _tselik_ (‘iron’), in the sense of ‘strong as iron[518].’

All or any of the features which I have mentioned may be found in the person of a single Callicantzaros; but it must be allowed also that no one of them is essential. For sometimes the Callicantzaros appears in ordinary human form without so much as a cloven hoof to distinguish him from ordinary mankind, or again completely in animal shape. In one place they are described as ἀγριάνθρωποι[519], savages but human in appearance, while in another they are ἄγρια τετράποδα[520], ‘savage quadrupeds.’

Yet in general the Callicantzari are neither wholly anthropomorphic nor wholly theriomorphic, but a blend of the two. In a story of some men at Athens who dressed themselves up as Callicantzari, it is said that they blacked their faces and covered themselves with feathers[521]. Again two grotesque and bestial clay statuettes from the Cabirium near Thebes and now in the National Museum at Athens, were identified by peasants as Callicantzari[522]; an identification I have also met with when questioning peasants about similar objects in local museums; in one case it was a Satyr and in another a Centaur which my guide identified as a Callicantzaros. On the whole I should say that the goat contributes more than any other animal to the popular conception of these monsters. Besides having the legs and the ears of goats, as was noted above, they are sometimes said to have their horns also; and in Chios their resemblance to goats is so clearly recognised that in one village they have earned the by-name of Κατσικᾶδες[523], which by formation should mean ‘men who have to do with goats (κατσίκια),’ though it has apparently been appropriated to the designation of beings who are in form half goat and half man. There are however districts, as we shall see later, in which some other animal than the goat forms the predominant element in the monstrous _ensemble_.

The smaller sort of Callicantzari is rarer than the large, but their distribution is at any rate wide. They are the predominant type in north-west Arcadia, in the district about Mount Parnassus, and at Oenoë[524] on the southern shore of the Black Sea. They are most often human in shape, but are mere pigmies, no taller than a child of five or six. They are usually black, like the larger sort, but are smooth and hairless. They are very commonly deformed, and in this respect the strange beasts on which they ride are like them. At Arachova[525], on the slopes of Parnassus, every one of them is said to have some physical defect. Some are lame; others squint; others have only one eye; others have their noses or mouths, hands or feet set all askew; and as a cavalcade of them passes by night through the village, one is to be seen mounted on a cock and his long thin legs trail on the ground as he rides; another has a horse no bigger than a small dog; another, the tiniest of them all, is perched on an enormous donkey’s back, and when he falls off cannot mount again; and others again ride strange unknown beasts, lame, one-eyed, or one-eared like their masters.

Callicantzari of this type are usually harmless to men. They play indeed the same boisterous pranks as their larger brethren, but perhaps owing to their insignificant size are an object of merriment rather than of fear. But, as I shall show later, there is reason to believe that they are not the original type of Callicantzari. It is only by a casual development of the superstition, that these grotesque hobgoblins have been locally substituted for the grim and gaunt monsters feared elsewhere. They form, as it were, a modern and expurgated edition of the larger sort of Callicantzari, to whom I now return.

The Callicantzari appear only during the δωδεκαήμερον or ‘period of twelve days’ between Christmas and Epiphany[526]. The rest of the year they live in the lower world, and occupy themselves in trying to gnaw through or cut down the great tree (or in other accounts the one or more columns) on which the world rests. Each Christmas they have nearly completed their task, when the time comes for their appearance in the upper world, and during their twelve days’ absence, the supports of the world are made whole again.

Even during their short visit to this world, they do not appear in the daytime. From dawn till sunset they hide themselves in dark and dank places--in caves or beneath mills--and there feed on such food as they can collect, worms, snakes, frogs, tortoises, and other unclean things. But at night they issue forth and run wildly to and fro, rending and crushing those who cross their path. Destruction and waste, greed and lust mark their course. Now they break into some lonely mill, terrify and coerce the miller into showing them his store, bake for themselves cakes thereof, befoul with urine all that they cannot use, and are gone again. Now they pass through some hamlet, and woe to that house which is not prepared against their coming. By chimney and door alike they swarm in, and make havoc of the home; in sheer wanton mischief they overturn and break all the furniture, devour the Christmas pork, befoul all the water and wine and food which remains, and leave the occupants half dead with fright or violence. Now it is a wine shop that they enter, bind the publican to his chair, gag him with dung, break open each cask in turn, drink their fill, and leave the wine running. Now they light upon some belated wayfarer, and make sport of him as their fancy leads them. Sometimes his fate is only to dance all night with the Callicantzari and to be let go at cockcrow unscathed; for these monsters despite their uncouth shape delight in dancing, and to that end often seek the company of the Nereids; but more often men are sorely torn and battered before they escape, and women are forcibly carried off to be the monsters’ wives. In some accounts they even make a meal of their human prey.

The fact that the activities of the Callicantzari are always limited to the night-time has given them a special claim to the name Παρωρίταις or Νυχτοπαρωρίταις[527], formed from πάρωρα, ‘the hour before cockcrow,’ for then it is that their excesses and depredations have reached their zenith; but the word cannot correctly be called a by-name of the Callicantzari, for it is also, if more rarely, applied to other nocturnal visitants.

The only redeeming qualities in these creatures’ characters, from the point of view of men who fall into their clutches, are their stupidity and their quarrelsomeness. They have indeed a chieftain who sometimes tries to marshal and to discipline them, and who is at least wise enough to warn them when the hour of their departure draws near. But in general ‘the Great Callicantzaros[528],’ as he is called, or ‘the lame demon[529],’ is too like the rest of them to be of much avail; and indeed his place is not at the head of the riotous mob where he might control them, but he limps along, a grotesque and usually ithyphallic figure, in the rear. Thus in the popular stories it often happens that either the Callicantzari go on quarrelling about the treatment of some man or the possession of some woman whom they have captured, or else their prisoner is shrewd enough to keep them amused, until cock-crow brings release. For at that sound (or, to be more precise, at the crowing of the third cock, who is black and more potent to scare away demons than the white and red cocks who precede him[530]) they vanish away, like all terrors of the night in ancient[531] as well as modern times, to their dark lairs.

The tales told by the peasants about the Callicantzari are extremely numerous, though there is a certain sameness about the main themes. Three types of story however are deserving of notice, to illustrate the character of the Callicantzari and the ways in which they may be outwitted and eluded.

The first type may be represented by a tale told to me in Scyros in explanation of the name of a cave some half-hour distant from the town. Both the cave itself and that part of the path which lies just below it are popularly called τοῦ καλλικαντζάρου τὸ ποδάρι, ‘the Callicantzaros’ foot.’ My enquiries concerning the name elicited the following story, which seems incidentally to explain how the Great Callicantzaros came to be lame.

‘Once upon the eve of Epiphany a man of Scyros was returning home from a mill late at night, driving his mule before him laden with two sacks of meal. When he had gone about half-way, he saw before him some Callicantzari in his path. Realising his danger, he at once got upon his mule and laid himself flat between the two sacks and covered himself up with a rug, so as to look like another sack of meal. Soon the Callicantzari were about his mule, and he held his breath and heard them saying, “Here is a pack on this side and a pack on that side, and the top-load in the middle, but where is the man?” So they ran back to the mill thinking that he had loitered behind; but they could not find him and came back after the mule, and looked again, and said, “Here is a pack on this side and a pack on that side, and the top-load in the middle, but where is the man?” So they ran on in front fearing that he had hasted on home before his mule. But when they could not find him, they returned again, and said as before, and went back a second time towards the mill. And thus it happened many times. Now while they were running to and fro, the mule was nearing home, and it so happened that when the beast stopped at the door of the man’s house, the Callicantzari were close on his track. The man therefore called quickly to his wife and she opened the door and he entered in safety, but the mule was left standing without. Then the Callicantzari saw how he had tricked them, and they knocked at the door in great anger. So the woman, fearing lest they would break in by force, promised to open to them on condition that they should first count for her the holes in her sieve. To this they agreed, and she let it down to them by a cord from a window. Straightway they set to work to count, and counted round and round the outermost circle and never got nearer to the middle; nor could they discover how this came to pass, but only counted more and more hurriedly, without advancing at all. Meanwhile dawn was breaking, and so soon as the neighbours perceived the Callicantzari, they hurried off to the priests and told them. The priests immediately set out with censers and sprinkling-vessels in their hands, to chase the Callicantzari away. Right through the town the monsters fled, spreading havoc in their path and hotly pursued by the priests. At last when they were clear of the town, one Callicantzaros began to lag behind, and by a great exertion the foremost priest came up to him and struck him on the hinder foot with his sprinkling vessel. At once the foot fell off, but the Callicantzaros fled away maimed though he was. And thus the spot came to be known as “the Callicantzaros’ foot.”’

This story consists of three episodes. The first, in which the driver of the mule outwits the Callicantzari by lying flat on the animal’s back and making himself look like a sack of meal, occurs time after time in the popular tales with hardly any variation; indeed it often forms in itself the _motif_ of a whole story, in which, as soon as the man reaches his home, the cock crows and the Callicantzari flee. The second episode in which the wife effects some delay by bargaining with the Callicantzari that they shall count the holes in a sieve, is also fairly common, but the difficulty which the monsters find, in every other version of which I know, is that they dare not pronounce the word ‘three,’ and so go on counting ‘one, two,’ ‘one, two’ till cock-crow[532]. The third episode in which the priests chase away the Callicantzari is not often found in current stories, but the belief that the ἁγιασμός or ‘hallowing’ which takes place on the morning of Epiphany is the signal for the final departure of the Callicantzari is firmly held throughout Greece. This ceremony consists primarily in ‘blessing the waters’--whether of the sea, of rivers, of village-wells, or, as at Athens, of the reservoir--by carrying a cross in procession to the appointed place and throwing it in; but in many districts also the priests afterwards fill vessels with the blest waters, and with these and their censers make a round of the village, sprinkling and purifying the people and their houses and cornfields and vineyards. The fear which the Callicantzari feel of this purification is embodied in some rough lines which they are supposed to chant as they disappear at Twelfth-night:

φύγετε, νὰ φύγουμε, τ’ ἔφτασ’ ὁ τουρλόπαπας μὲ τὴν ἁγι̯αστοῦρα του καὶ μὲ τὴ βρεχτοῦρα του, κι’ ἅγι̯ασε τὰ ῥέμματα καὶ μᾶς ἐμαγάρισε[533].

Quick, begone! we must begone, Here comes the pot-bellied priest, With his censer in his hand And his sprinkling-vessel too; He has purified the streams And he has polluted us.

In the actual tales however as told by the people the intervention of the priests is not a common episode. More often the story ends in a rescue effected by neighbours armed with firebrands, of which the Callicantzari go in mortal terror, or simply with the crowing of the black cock.

The second type of story deals with the adventures of a girl sent by her wicked stepmother to a mill during the dangerous Twelve Days, nominally to get some corn ground, but really in the hope that she will fall a prey to the Callicantzari. Having arrived at the mill the girl calls in vain to the miller to come and help unload her mule, and entering in search of him finds him bound to his chair or dead with fright and the Callicantzari standing about him. They at once seize the girl, and begin to quarrel which shall have her for his own. But the girl keeps her wits, and says that she will be the wife of the one who brings her the best bridal array. So they disperse in search of fine raiment and jewels. Meanwhile she sets to work to grind the corn, and each time a Callicantzaros returns with presents, she sends him on a fresh errand for something more. Finally the corn is all ground, and she quickly loads the mule with two sacks, one on either side, clothes herself in the gold and jewels which the Callicantzari have brought, mounts the mule and lies flat on the saddle covered over with a sack, and eluding the Callicantzari who pursue her, like the muleteer in the previous story, reaches home in safety.

The wicked stepmother seeing that her plans have miscarried and that her stepdaughter is now rich while her own daughter is poor, determines to send the latter the next evening to the mill. She too finds the mill occupied by the Callicantzari, but not being so shrewd as her half-sister either falls a victim to the lust of the monsters, or is killed and eaten by them, or, in one version[534], is stripped of her own clothes, dressed in the skin of her mule which the Callicantzari have killed and flayed, and sent home with a necklace of the mule’s entrails about her neck.

The third type of story, one which is known all over Greece, introduces us to the domestic circle of a Callicantzaros. A midwife is roused one night during the Twelve Days by a furious rapping at her door, and, imagining that the call is urgent, slips on her clothes in haste without enquiring who it is that needs her services, and stepping out of her door finds herself face to face either with an unmistakeable Callicantzaros who seizes her and carries her off, or else with a man unknown to her who subsequently proves to be a Callicantzaros[535]. On their way to his home he bids her see to it that the child with which his wife is about to present him be male; in that case he will reward her handsomely; but if a female child be born, he will devour the midwife. Arrived at the cave or house where the Callicantzaros dwells, the midwife goes about her task, and the Callicantzaros’ wife is soon delivered of a child; but to the midwife’s horror it is female. Her wits however do not desert her, and she quickly devises a scheme for her escape. Taking a candle, she warms it and fashions from the wax a model of the male organs and fastens it to the child. Then calling the Callicantzaros, she tells him that a fine male child is born and holds up the infant for him to see. Thereat he is content and bids her swaddle it. This done, she craves leave to go home, and the Callicantzaros, true to his word, rewards her with a sack of gold and lets her go.

The conclusion of the story varies. In some versions, the fraud is discovered before the midwife reaches her home, the Callicantzaros curses the gold which he has given her, and when she opens her sack she finds nothing but ashes. In others, she reaches home in safety with the gold and by magic means breaks the power of the Callicantzaros over his gift; and when he arrives at her door in hot pursuit, she has already taken all precautions against his entrance and lies secure and silent within.

The wife of the Callicantzaros here mentioned is in some stories pictured as being of the same monstrous species as himself, in others as an ordinary woman whom he has seized and carried off. But, apart from these stories in which she is a necessary _persona dramatis_, she has no hold upon the popular imagination. A feminine word, καλλικαντζαρίνα or καλλικαντζαροῦ, has been formed in this case just as the word νεραΐδης[536] has been formed as masculine of Nereid (νεράϊδα), and female Callicantzari are as rare and local as male Nereids. Their existence is assumed only as complementary to that of their mates.

Security from the Callicantzari is sought by many methods, some of them Christian in character, others magical or pagan. Foremost among Christian precautions is the custom of marking a cross in black upon the house-door on Christmas Eve; and the same emblem is sometimes painted upon the various jars and vessels in which food is kept to ensure them against befouling by the Callicantzari, and even upon the forehead of infants, especially if they are unbaptised, to prevent them from being stolen or strangled[537] by the monsters. If in spite of these precautions the inmates of any house are troubled by them, the burning of incense is accounted an effectual safeguard. For out-door use, if a man is unfortunate enough to encounter Callicantzari, an invocation of the Trinity or the recitation of three Paternosters is recommended.

But precautions of a more pagan character are often preferred to these or combined with them. Ordinary prudence demands that the fire be kept burning through all the Twelve Days, to prevent the Callicantzari entering by the chimney, and the usual custom is to set one huge log on end up the chimney, to go on burning for the whole period. In addition to this a fire is sometimes kept burning at night close by the house-door. Certain herbs also, such as ground-thistle[538], hyssop, and asparagus[539], may be suspended at the door or the chimney-place, as magical charms. If even then there is reason to suspect that Callicantzari are prowling round the house, the golden rule is to observe strict silence and, above all, not to answer any question asked from without the door; for it is commonly believed that the Callicantzari, like the Nereids, can deprive of speech any who have once talked with them. At the same time it is wise to make up the fire, throwing on either something which will crackle like salt or heather[540], or something which will smell strong, such as a bit of leather, an old shoe, wild-cherry wood[541], or ground-thistle; for the stench of these is as unbearable to the Callicantzari as that of incense.

Such at any rate is the current explanation of the purpose of these malodorous combustibles; but in view of the notorious gullibility of the Callicantzari I am tempted to surmise that both the crackling and the smell were originally intended to pacify them for a while with the delusive hope that a share of the Christmas pork, their favourite food, was being prepared for them. For certainly even now propitiatory presents to the Callicantzari are not unknown. At Portariá and other villages of Mount Pelion it is the custom to hang a rib or other bone from the pork inside the chimney ‘for the Callicantzari,’ but whether as a means of appeasement or of aversion the people seem no longer to know: in Samos however the first sweetmeats made at the New Year are placed in the chimney avowedly as food for the Callicantzari[542], and in Cyprus waffles and sausages are put in the same place as a farewell feast to them on the Eve of Epiphany[543]. Moreover in earlier times the custom of appeasing them with food was undoubtedly more widespread; for in places where, so far as I know, the custom itself no longer exists, a few lines supposed to be sung by the Callicantzari on the eve of their departure are still remembered, in which they ask for ‘a little bit of sausage, a morsel of waffle, that the Callicantzari may eat and depart to their own place[544].’

But propitiation of the Callicantzari, in spite of this evidence of offerings made to them, is certainly not now so much in vogue as precautions against them; and it is perhaps simpler to suppose that the choice of crackling or odorous fuel was originally prompted by the intention of conveying to the Callicantzari a plain warning that the fire within the house was burning briskly; for apart from the Christian means of defence--crosses, incense, invocations and the general purification on the morning of Epiphany--it may be said that the one thing which they really fear is fire. Everywhere it is held that so long as a good fire is kept burning on the hearth the Callicantzari cannot gain access to the house by their favourite entrance; and that the utmost they will venture is to vent their urine down the chimney in the hope of extinguishing the fire. For this reason the wood-ashes from the hearth, which are generally stored up and used in the washing of clothes, are during the Twelve Days left untouched, and after the purification at Epiphany are carried out of the house; but in some districts[545], though the ashes are not thought suitable for ordinary use, they are not thrown away as worthless impurities, but, owing I suppose to their contact with supernatural beings, are held to be endowed with magically fertilising properties and are sprinkled over the very same fields and gardens which the priests have sprinkled with holy water. Again there are not a few stories current[546] in which a Callicantzaros, attracted to some house at Christmas-tide by the smell of roasting pork, has been put to rout by having the hot joint or the spit on which it was turning thrust in his face. In one version also of the song which the Callicantzari are supposed to sing as they depart, ‘the pot-bellied priest with censer and sprinkling-vessel’ is accompanied by his wife carrying hot water to scald them[547]. In other stories again the rescue of a man from the clutches of Callicantzari is effected by his neighbours with fire-brands as their only weapons; and where such help cannot be obtained, a man may sometimes free himself merely by ejaculating ξύλα, κούτσουρα, δαυλιὰ καμμένα, ‘sticks, logs, and brands ablaze!’ for the very thought of fire will sometimes scare the monsters away.

Other safeguards are also mentioned; you are recommended for instance to keep a black cock in the house, or you may render the Callicantzaros harmless by binding him with a red thread or a straw rope[548]; but the latter method would in most cases be like putting salt on a bird’s tail.

Such, on a general view, are the monsters whose origin I now propose to examine; and the first step in the investigation must be to account for the extraordinary variations in shape exhibited by the Callicantzari in different districts.

I have already observed that the Callicantzari are sometimes conceived to be of ordinary human form, but that more commonly there is an admixture of something beast-like. Among the animals which are laid under contribution, first comes the he-goat, from which the Callicantzari borrow ears, horns, and legs. Almost equally common is a presentment of Callicantzari with the ears and the legs of an ass combined with a body in other respects human; or again the head of an ass, according to Pouqueville[549], may be combined with the body and legs of a man. In other districts again the wolf has once been a factor in the conception of Callicantzari. Thus in Messenia, in Cynouria (a district in the east of Laconia), and in parts of Crete[550] the Callicantzari are called also Λυκοκάντζαροι, in which the first half of the compound name is undoubtedly λύκος, ‘wolf.’ Similarly in some parts of Macedonia Callicantzari are often called simply ‘wolves’ (λύκοι), and both names are also applied metaphorically to any particularly ill-favoured man[551]. Resemblances to apes are also mentioned,

## particularly in the long, lean, hairy arms of the Callicantzari;

and Pouqueville speaks also of their monkey-like tails[552]. Next from Phoeniciá in Epirus comes the suggestion that Callicantzari may resemble squirrels; for there they have the two by-names σκιορίσματα and καψιούρηδες[553], in which it is not hard to recognise the two ancient Greek names for the squirrel, σκίουρος and καμψίουρος. Concerning the local character of these I have no information; but it is fairly safe to surmise that they possess the power, commonly ascribed to the smaller sort of Callicantzari, of climbing with great dexterity the walls and roofs of houses in order to gain access by the chimney. Finally in Myconos, as noted above, the Callicantzari are described as ‘savage four-footed things’--a description which need not exclude some human attributes any more than it does in the savage four-footed Centaurs of ancient art, but implies it would seem at least a predominance of the bestial over the human element.

What then is the explanation of these wide divergences of type? The answer is really very simple and final. The Callicantzari were originally believed to possess the power, which many supernatural beings share, of transforming themselves at their pleasure into any shape. The shapes most commonly assumed differed in different districts, and gradually, as the belief in the metamorphosis of Callicantzari here, there, and almost everywhere was forgotten, what had once been the commonest form locally assumed by Callicantzari became in the several districts their fixed and only form.

The correctness of this explanation was first proved to me by information obtained from the best source for all manner of stories and traditions about the Callicantzari, the villages on Mount Pelion. There I was definitely told that the Callicantzari are believed to have the power of assuming any monstrous shape which they choose; and the accuracy of this statement is, I find, now confirmed by information obtained independently by Prof. Polites[554] from one of these same villages, Portariá; he adds that there the shapes most frequently affected by Callicantzari are those of women, bearded men, and he-goats. Further evidence of the same belief existing also in Cyprus is adduced by the same writer. ‘The Planetari (πλανήταροι),’ so runs the popular tradition which he quotes from a work which I have been unable to consult, ‘who are also called in some parts of Cyprus Callicantzari, come to the earth at Christmas and remain all the Twelve Days. They are seen by persons who are ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι[555] (i.e., to give the nearest equivalent, ‘fey’). Sometimes they appear as dogs, sometimes as hares, sometimes as donkeys or as camels, and often as bobbins. Men who are ‘fey’ stumble over them, and stoop down to pick them up, when suddenly the bobbin rolls along of its own accord and escapes them. Further on it turns into a donkey or camel and goes on its way. The man is deceived (by its appearance) and mounts it, and the donkey grows as tall as a mountain and throws the man down from a great height[556], and he returns home half-dead, and if he does not die outright, he will be an invalid all his life[557].’

Linguistic evidence is also forthcoming that the same belief in the metamorphosis of these monsters was once held both in Epirus and in Samos. The by-name σκιορίσματα, recorded from Phoeniciá, proves more than the squirrel-form of Callicantzari; it implies that that shape is not natural but assumed. From the ancient word σκίουρος, comes by natural formation an hypothetical verb σκιουρίζω, ‘I become a squirrel,’ and thence the existing substantive σκιούρισμα or σκιόρισμα (for this difference in vocalisation is negligible in modern Greek) meaning ‘that which has turned into a squirrel.’ Similarly in Samos the by-name κακανθρωπίσματα means ‘those that have turned into evil men.’ Whether the belief implied by these names is still alive in Epirus, I do not know; in Samos it has apparently died out, for the word κακανθρωπίσματα is popularly there interpreted to mean ‘those who do evil to men[558]’--a meaning which the formation really precludes.

Since then the belief that Callicantzari possess the power of metamorphosis either obtains now or has once obtained in places as far removed from one another as Phoeniciá in Epirus, Mount Pelion, Samos, and Cyprus, it is reasonable to conclude that this quality was in earlier times universally attributed to them, and therewith the whole problem of their multifarious presentments in different districts is at once solved.

The next question which arises is this; if the various forms in which the Callicantzari are locally represented are, so to speak, so many disguises assumed by them at their own will, what is the normal form of the Callicantzaros when he is not exercising his power of self-transformation? On reviewing the various shapes assumed, one fact stands out clearly; it is the animal attributes of the Callicantzari which are variable, while the human element in their composition (with a possible exception in the case of the ‘savage quadrupeds’ of Myconos) is constant. But the variation of form results, as has been shown, from the power of transformation. Therefore the animal characteristics, which are variable, are the characteristics assumed at pleasure by the Callicantzari, and the constant or human element in their composition indicates their normal form. In other words, the Callicantzaros in his original and natural shape was anthropomorphic, as indeed he is sometimes still represented to be.

And here too, while the various types of Callicantzari are still before us, it is worth while to notice, at the cost of a short digression, a curious principle which seems to govern the representation of Callicantzari in those districts in which the belief in their power of metamorphosis has been lost. On Mount Pelion and in Cyprus the shapes which the Callicantzari are said to assume at will are those of known and familiar objects--in the former place of women, bearded men, and he-goats, in the latter of dogs, hares, donkeys, and camels--but always complete and single shapes whether of man or beast; on the other hand in the large majority of places in which the remembrance of this power of transformation is lost, the Callicantzari are represented in fanciful and abnormal shapes--hybrids as it were between men and such animals as goat, ass, or ape. What appears to have happened in these cases is that, as the belief in the metamorphosis of Callicantzari was lost from the local folklore, a sort of compensation was made by depicting them arrested in the process of transformation, arrested halfway in the transition from man to beast. Now there are very few parts of Greece in which this change in the superstition has not taken place; and each island of the Greek seas, each district of the Greek mainland--I had almost said each village, for the folklore like the dialect of two villages no more than an hour’s journey apart may differ widely--may be fairly considered to furnish separate instances on which a general principle can be founded. The law then which seems to me to have governed the evolution of Greek folklore is this, that a being of some single, normal, and known shape who has originally been believed capable of transforming himself into one or more other single, normal, and known shapes, comes to be represented, when the belief in his power of transformation dies out, as a being of composite, abnormal, and fantastic shape, combining incongruous features of the several single, normal, and known shapes.

How wide may be the application of this principle, I cannot pretend to determine; but obviously it may supply the solution of certain puzzles in ancient Greek mythology. The goddess Athene, to take but one instance, is in Homer regularly described as γλαυκῶπις, an epithet which, though interpreted by ancient artists in the sense of ‘blue-eyed’ or ‘gray-eyed,’ seems, in view of Athene’s connexion with the owl, to have meant originally ‘owl-faced’; for the sake of argument at any rate, without entering into the controversy on the subject, let me assume this; let it be granted that the goddess was once depicted as a maiden with an owl’s face. How is this hybrid form to be explained? If our principle holds here, the explanation is that in a still earlier stage of Greek mythology the goddess Athene was wont to transform herself into an owl and so manifest herself to her worshippers, just as in early Christian tradition it is recorded that once ‘the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove[559].’

But this digression is long enough. Later in this