From 1898 to 1900, as a student at Cambridge University, John Cuthbert Lawson (1874–1935) held a coveted Craven Studentship, a fellowship that funded study abroad to facilitate research projects related to the study of the language, literature, history, and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome. Lawson’s project was the investigation of survivals of ancient Greek beliefs in the customs and superstitions of their modern counterparts. During his two years in Greece, he traveled extensively and spoke to hundreds of individuals about local lore, while also scouring information from little-known histories of particular regions and islands. The result of his inquiries was published in 1910 as a book-length study entitled Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals. Rich in knowledge of ancient and medieval literature and replete with colorful anecdotes from his travels, Lawson’s book provides the fullest modern summary of information about the Gellou. According to his research, these child-eating demons originated in a tradition from the island of Lesbos about the vengeful ghost of a young woman who died before marriage and preyed upon the flesh of children whose mothers she envied.
The surviving pagan deities fall naturally into two classes. There are the solitary and individual figures such as Demeter, and there are 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, 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 before she had known the love of husband and children, has been taken by withered witch-like beings who nonetheless bear her name and resemble her in that they alight, like Harpies, upon young children and suck out their bodily fluids.
The individuality of this Gello continued to be recognized to some extent as late as the tenth century; 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 (that is, the witches of whom Ignatius speaks), because they practice evil arts upon infants and by sucking their blood or in other ways cause their death, are called Gellones.”[2] In the story also which exhibits the chief qualities of this demon, her name (in the form Gulou) 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 geloudes as a popular word, the meaning of which he took to be the same as that of Striges (striggai); and Michael Psellos 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 Gillobrota, “Gello-eaten.”
The story of Leo Allatius, 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 Gulou, one of the forms of the name Gello; the second is Mora, the name of a kind of Lamia; the third Buzou or “blood-sucker”; the fourth Marmarou, probably “stony-hearted”; the fifth Petasia, for she can fly as a bird in the air; the sixth Pelagia, for she can swim as a fish in the sea; the seventh Bordona, probably meaning “stooping like a kite on her prey”; the eighth Apletou, “insatiable”; the ninth Xamodrakaina, for she can lurk like a snake in the earth; the tenth Anabardalia, possibly “soaring like a lark in the air”; the eleventh Psuxanaspastrai, “snatcher of souls”; the twelfth Paidopniktria, “strangler of children”; and the half-name Strigla, a kind of witch.
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 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 alone.”