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MODERN GREEK FOLKLORE AND ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION
MODERN GREEK FOLKLORE AND ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London : FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, Manager Edinburgh : 100, PRINCES STREET Berlin : A. ASHER AND CO. Leipzig : F. A. BROCKHAUS New York : G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Bombay and Calcutta : MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. All rights reserved All rights reserved MODERN GREEK FOLKLORE AND ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION A STUDY IN SURVIVALS BY JOHN CUTHBERT LAWSON, M.A. FELLOW AND LECTURER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, FORMERLY CRAVEN STUDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY Cambridge: at the University Pr
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PREFACE.
PREFACE.
This book is the outcome of work undertaken in Greece during my two years’ tenure of the Craven Studentship from 1898 to 1900. It is therefore my first duty gratefully to commemorate John, Lord Craven, to whose benefactions of two and a half centuries ago I owed my opportunity for research. The scheme of work originally proposed was the investigation of the customs and superstitions of modern Greece in their possible bearing upon the life and thought of ancient Greece; and to the Managers of the
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§ 1. Modern Folklore as a source for the study of Ancient Religion.
§ 1. Modern Folklore as a source for the study of Ancient Religion.
The sources of information most obviously open to the student of ancient Greek religion are the Art and the Literature of ancient Greece; and the idea that modern Greece can have any teaching to impart concerning the beliefs of more than two thousand years ago seems seldom to have been entertained. Just as we speak of ancient Greek as a dead language, and too often forget that many of the words and inflexions in popular use at the present day are identical with those of the classical period and
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§ 2. The survival of Ancient Tradition.
§ 2. The survival of Ancient Tradition.
There may perhaps be some few who, quite apart from the continuity of the Hellenic race, a question with which I must deal later, would be inclined to pronounce the quest of ancient religion in modern folklore mere lost labour. The lapse, they may think, of all the centuries which separate the present day from the age of Hellenic greatness would in itself disfigure or altogether efface any tradition of genuine value. Such a view, however, is opposed to all the lessons that have of late years bee
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§ 3. The survival of Hellenic Tradition.
§ 3. The survival of Hellenic Tradition.
There may however be some who, while admitting that mere lapse of time need not have extinguished ancient Hellenic ideas, will be disposed to question the likelihood, even the possibility, of their transmission on racial grounds. The belief in the evil eye and the practice of sympathetic magic were once, they may say, the common property of the whole uncivilised world; and though the inhabitants of modern Greece have inherited these old superstitions and usages, there is nothing to show from wha
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§ 4. The Survival of Pagan Tradition.
§ 4. The Survival of Pagan Tradition.
It appears then that notwithstanding the immigration of Slavonic hordes, and notwithstanding also, it may be added, the influences exercised in later periods by ‘Franks,’ Genoese, Venetians, and Turks, the traditions of the inhabitants of Greece still remain singularly pure; and their claim to Hellenic nationality is justified by their language, by their character, and by many secular aspects of their civilisation. But in the domain of religion it might reasonably be expected that a large change
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§ 1. The Range of Modern Polytheism.
§ 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 w
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§ 2. Zeus.
§ 2. Zeus.
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 con
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§ 3. Poseidon.
§ 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. H
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§ 4. Pan.
§ 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, volunta
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§ 5. Demeter and Persephone.
§ 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
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§ 6. Charon.
§ 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 commo
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§ 7. Aphrodite and Eros.
§ 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,
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§ 8. The Fates.
§ 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 i
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§ 9. The Nymphs.
§ 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 Nere
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§ 10. The Queens of the Nymphs.
§ 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, a
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§ 11. Lamiae, Gelloudes, and Striges.
§ 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 t
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§ 12. Gorgons.
§ 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 ex
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§ 13. The Centaurs.
§ 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
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§ 14. Genii.
§ 14. Genii.
The tale of deities is now almost told. There remain only a few miscellaneous beings, identical or, at the least, comparable with the creations of ancient superstition, who may be classed together under the name of στοιχει̯ά [662] (anciently στοιχεῖα ) or, to adopt the exact Latin equivalent, genii . The Greek word, which in classical times served as a fair equivalent for any sense of our word ‘elements,’ became from Plato’s time onward a technical term in physics for those first beginnings of t
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CHAPTER III. THE COMMUNION OF GODS AND MEN.
CHAPTER III. THE COMMUNION OF GODS AND MEN.
Ἔτι τοίνυν καὶ θυσίαι πᾶσαι καὶ οἷς μαντικὴ ἐπιστατεῖ—ταῦτα δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ θεους τε καὶ ἀνθρώπους πρὸς ἀλλήλους κοινωνία—οὐ περὶ ἄλλο τί ἐστιν ἢ περὶ Ἔρωτος φυλακήν τε καὶ ἴασιν. Plato , Symposium , p. 188. The short sketch which has been given of the attitude of the Greek peasantry towards the Christian Godhead and all the host of assistant saints, and also the more detailed account of those pagan deities or demons whom the common-folk’s awe, not unmingled with affection, has preserved from ob
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§ 1. The Modern Greek Vampire.
§ 1. The Modern Greek Vampire.
The division of the human entity into the two parts which we call soul and body has been so universally recognised even among the most primitive of mankind that the idea of it must have been first suggested by the observation of some universal phenomenon—most probably the phenomenon of unconsciousness whether in sleep, in fainting, in trance, or in death. If it had been man’s lot to pass in this world a life of activity unbroken by sleep or exhaustion, and thereafter to be translated like Enoch
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§ 2. The Composition of the Superstition. Slavonic, Ecclesiastical, and Hellenic Contributions.
§ 2. The Composition of the Superstition. Slavonic, Ecclesiastical, and Hellenic Contributions.
Vrykolakes are not ghosts. Such is the first observation which I am compelled to make and which the reader of the last chapter might well consider superfluous. But so many Greek writers, and with them even Bernhard Schmidt [996] , have fallen into the error of comparing ancient ghost-stories with modern tales about vrykolakes , without apparently recognising the essential and fundamental difference between them, that some insistence upon the point is necessary. That a definite and close relation
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§ 3. Revenants in ancient Greece.
§ 3. Revenants in ancient Greece.
The Slavonic and the ecclesiastical elements have now been removed from the modern Greek superstition, and the Hellenic residue is briefly this: the human body sometimes remains incorruptible in the earth, and in this state is liable to resuscitation; persons so affected stand as it were halfway between the living and the dead, resembling the former when they walk the earth, and the latter when they are lying quiet in their graves or, if unburied, elsewhere; during their periods of resuscitation
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§ 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood.
§ 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood.
The conclusions which have now been reached show, among others, the somewhat surprising result, that the popular religion of Greece both ancient and modern has always comprised the belief that both the murdered and the murderer were doomed to the same unhappy lot after death. The murderer, in the class of men polluted and accursed by heinous sin, and his victim, in the class of those who have met with violent deaths, have alike been regarded as pre-disposed to become revenants . The two facts th
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CHAPTER V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION.
CHAPTER V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION.
The discussion of those abnormal cases of after-death existence, to which the last chapter has been devoted, has disclosed to us the fact that in all ages of Greece the condition most to be dreaded by the dead has been incorruptibility and the boon most to be desired a sure and quick dissolution; and that of the two methods by which the living might promote the disintegration of the dead, cremation and inhumation, the former alone has been accounted infallible. What benefit in the future existen
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CHAPTER VI. THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION.
CHAPTER VI. THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION.
Thus far the investigation of customs and beliefs in ancient and modern times relating to the treatment of the dead has established the fact that the dissolution of the body was a thing eagerly to be desired in the interests of the dead. With complete disintegration the summum bonum of the dead, so far as it was in the power of their surviving friends to win it for them, was secured. It remains to consider in what way the dead profited thereby. Now I have hitherto spoken designedly of dissolutio
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CHAPTER VII. THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN.
CHAPTER VII. THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN.
The similitude of death with sleep is an idea of ancient date and of wide distribution, which for many of mankind, whatever be the creed professed, has mitigated the fears or lightened the uncertainties which attach to the cessation of this life. Adopted by the founder of the Christian religion as an illustration of the doctrine that men ‘shall rise again with their bodies,’ the thought has become a part of the heritage of Christendom, and in our own language the word ‘cemetery’ bears testimony
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