IN NOTHING is the continuity of Ancient Greece clearer than in the superstitions and pagan religious practices (and many of the “Christian” ones) that still prevail in the Greek mountains and islands. I think it is true to say that the educated classes are less and the simple class more superstitious than their English counterparts. The only superstition that really seems to hold its own in the upper reaches of society is the class-defying and pan-Hellenic—indeed, almost world-wide—belief in the Evil Eye. But even in this, the strongest single superstition among the simple, there is a touch of levity. It is considered a bit of a joke among sophisticated people, certainly it holds a less tyrannic sway than it does in grand Italian circles. Nevertheless, nobody who has set even a tentative foot in Athenian high life would need to hesitate a second in naming someone credited with this baleful and perhaps unconscious power.
It is a wry paradox that the newly urban and semi-educated in Greece, whose knowledge of ancient literature is very limited, should be one’s prime stumbling block in approaching these matters. (This knowledge—it never seems to vary—is covered by the ability to quote the first line of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Hector’s single-line patriotic injunction about omens to Polydamas, the equally patriotic couplet of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae, the two laconic, and again, patriotic, phrases of Leonidas and the universal tags about self-knowledge and nothing in excess—forty-two words in all.)[1] These are the very people who deplore one’s curiosity about such matters and minimize or negate their existence and, in a few cases, try to hinder one’s access to them as “backward,” “primitive” and above all “un-European” elements in the modern Greek State. It is odd because these people are usually the very ones to insist most vehemently on the pure and unbroken descent of the modern Greeks from the Greeks of the Periclean age; and if there is one element in Greek life, after the language and the Greek character itself (I think it is true to say that they possess all the faults and many of the qualities of their ancestors), which points to unbroken continuity, not only from Periclean Greece but from a yet remoter past, indeed, from the very cradle of European culture, it is the survival of these ancient beliefs and practices that some seek to patronize out of existence.[2] Certainly nothing could more tend to minimize the volume of Slav and other barbarian invasions, or underline the fact of the invaders’ swift absorption in a predominating Greek population. The aversion of some of the higher clergy—though not of the rustic priests, who see nothing anomalous in Christian and pagan co-existence—is based on much more logical grounds.
This side of Greek country life, which evokes the scorn and hatred of some Greeks but few foreigners, has attracted, during the last hundred years, the interest and devoted study of a number of Greek and foreign scholars. The most profitable sources in Greece are Kambouroglou and the magnificent and monumental work of Polites. There is Bernhard Schmidt and there is Lawson. My own favourites are the Athenian Professor Alexander Polites and John Cuthbert Lawson, the Cambridge don. They usually agree but not always; and between them they cover a wide field. Both refer back to ancient sources with a scholarly fairness. Both of them have studied the works of St. John Damascene (whose condemnation of certain pagan practices, though ineffective—for many of them still exist—is very revealing in showing how little they have changed since he anathematized them), the great Byzantine scholar Psellus and that strange seventeenth-century figure Leo Allatius of Chios. Lawson is the one from whom I plan, in later pages, to crib most freely; perhaps because Professor Dawkins used to talk of his early travels with such amused affection. I can still hear him speak with a chuckle about the “dear fellow”; also because his work[3]—a rare book, now long out of print—is a real triumph of scholarship and detailed reasoning. Lastly, because he knew much more about it than I do.
It is impossible to wander about in Greece or live for long with peasant families without striking this supernatural back-ground. But it is steadily losing its grip. The industrial age, that impartial exterminator of gods and demons, is succeeding where the Fathers failed. Among country people there is seldom any bashfulness in discussing these matters, except when the semieducated have intimidated them into reticence. Old women are the richest repositories of knowledge and sometimes—through keeping company with their elders at the laundry-trough, the loom and the spindle—young girls. The attitude of peasant men and women alike outwardly resembles the upper class attitude towards the Eye; it is one of amused tolerance coupled with veneration; because, true or not, these beliefs are old and they are heirlooms.
What happened was this. Since they issued from the haze of pre-history in which a primordial Great Mother may have held universal sway, the Greeks have always been polytheists; and one of the marks of polytheism is that it keeps open house: all gods are welcome. Swarms of Asiatics moved into the company of the native Greek gods and made themselves at home; and, when Christ appeared on the Graeco-Roman scene, there was plenty of room for Him. Tiberius, according to Tertullian, suggested the apotheosis of Christ; and Hadrian (writes Lampridius) reared temples in His honour. His statue, with that of Orpheus and Abraham, was set up in the private shrine of Alexander Severus, and St. Augustine tells of Him keeping similar company with Homer, Pythagoras and St. Paul. This tendency was even more widespread and elastic among the common people. But monotheism, by its very nature, cannot reciprocate this easy-going welcome and when Christianity became the State religion of the Empire, the expulsion of the old gods, after thousands of years of happy tenure and the reduction of the Pantheon to a private cell, was a serious task. There was not much difficulty among the educated: Plato and his successors had prepared the ground; and when Julian the Apostate attempted to re-install the rites of Apollo in the groves outside Antioch, the sophisticated citizens deemed it not only a bad joke, but a rather vulgar one. But what was to be done about the unlettered and conservative masses? How to focus the wide scope of their veneration on a single point? It could not be done and a compromise was found. Temples and shrines and holy sites were rededicated to Christian saints and converted to basilicas. Columns and blocks from ancient fanes, hallowed by centuries of worship, were built into new churches and, to ease the changeover, saints were inducted to these old haunts with characteristics or names which corresponded with those of the former incumbents; sometimes both. Dionysus became St. Dionysios and still retains his link with Naxos and his Bacchic patronage of wine. Artemis of the Ephesians became a male St. Artemidos and, like Artemis, his help is sought in the cure of wasting and nymph-struck children, as it was before he changed clothes, when the handmaids of Artemis had wrought mischief among the offspring of mortals. Demeter suffered a similar operation and became St. Demetrius, who, under the additional epithet of “Stereanos”—“He of the land”—is a patron of crops and fruitfulness. In one place the metamorphosis was actually repudiated—she still continues to be worshipped as “St. Demetra,” a saint unknown in the Orthodox synaxary. Helios the sun-god became the prophet Elijah (the Greek form is Elias and, as the hard breathing had probably already fallen into disuse at the time of the changeover, the disguise was very thin). The name of this Hebrew prophet is now very common in Greece, but rare in Italy, where this name for Apollo was unknown. His shrine is always on mountains and hilltops where Helios, the heaven-born flaming charioteer, was worshipped. They symbolize, says the Church, Elijah’s whirlwind assumption to heaven in a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire; and hundreds of lofty peaks all over the Greek world still commemorate this personification of Apollo. Hermes became the Archangel Michael; his helmet changed its shape and his wings their position and the writhing snakes and the feathers of his wand became a flaming sword. We have seen that it is his inherited duty to guide the souls of the Maniot dead through the cavern of Taenarus and down the Herculean path to Hades. The Church of the Blessed Virgin—Panayiá, the All-Holy-One—sprung up in the temple of the Virgin Goddess Athene on the Acropolis and the warlike St. George stepped into the shoes of Hephaestos (the armourer?) in the Theseum. Much earlier, Poseidon in Tenos had usurped the healing powers of Asklepios and presided over a magic spring of healing; both have since been usurped in their turn by the Blessed Virgin.
Examples of substitution could be cited ad infinitum. “God rains,” say the peasants, recalling cloud-compelling Zeus the Rain-Giver. Old mountaineers north of the gulf of Corinth—hundreds of miles from Crete—swear by “God of Crete,” unconsciously apostrophizing the Ida-born son of Kronos. When it hails, “God is shaking his sieve”; when it thunders, he is shoeing his horse or rolling his wine-casks; strangely unsuitable pursuits for the Christian Ancient of Days.... The clergy did what they could to reduce the pagan characteristics, but there was more truth in the gods’ claims to immortality than is generally thought. The saints satisfied the habit of multiple divinity, and Christianity, although a celestial hierarchy was maintained, became in a sense—in practice if not in theory—polytheistic. Rites are still practised in certain groves on certain saints’ days—on St. George’s in the Cretan village of Asigonia, for instance—which have nothing to do with Christianity; and the fire-walking Anastenari[4] of Thrace are in clear descent from the rites of the Orphic mysteries. The saints, whether of pure Christian or pagano-Christian origin, assumed local spiritual sway and presided over the various fields of human activity in the same manner as the gods. The Panayiá can remedy all human evils; SS. Cosmo and Damian—”the Unmoneyed Ones”—cure illnesses in general; St. Panteléimon is a specific for eye diseases, St. Eleutheros a help in childbirth, St. Modestos has veterinary powers, St. Blaise is sovereign against ulcers, St. Charalampos and St. Catharine ward off plagues, St. Elias—through his connection with the sun—is appealed to against drought, St. Stylianos against infantile complaints, St. James against deafness. The Athenian St. Maura controls warts, St. Symeon birthmarks—that is to say, they inflict these blemishes with the malignance of pagan gods if their feast days are ne-glected. St. Tryphon punishes women who spin on his day but he is sovereign, in Kythnos, against insects. St. George the Drunkard presides over alcoholic excess and smiles on its votaries. Sailors are under the protection, in the northern Cyclades, of St. Sostes and the SS. Akindynoi—“The Fearless Ones”—as well as the universal St. Nicholas, Poseidon’s heir. St. Menas of Crete—like St. Anthony further west—is in charge of lost property. St. John the Baptist cures ague and St. Paraskeve—whose name means Friday—headaches; and St. Catharine and St. Athanasius are appealed to in questions of matchmaking and dowries for girls. These appeals are invariably made via their ikons and by honouring their feast days, often in remote shrines only visited once a year. Sometimes feast days coincide with the rites of pagan predecessors on the same spot. The Graeco-Roman rosalia—still so called—was still celebrated during this century in the Theseum with dancing and feasting on Easter Tuesday. Sometimes there is no Christian excuse. Boys still parade with painted swallows on poles and sing an enchanting song (which is roughly the same as the ancient Che-lidonisma, or swallow-song of Rhodes) to welcome the return of the swallows. May-wreaths woven of various plants and flowers—but always containing the magically potent garlic bulbs—are hung over all the doorways of Greece till the following May Day, exactly like the ancient eiresióne. I have heard that sometimes they are kept after their anniversary and flung into the bonfires of midsummer on St. John’s day, but I have often watched children leaping through these fires (for which there are various explanations) but have never seen wreaths burnt.[5] I may have got it wrong, or it may be a regional thing. At all events, one can deduce from all this that Julian the Apostate need never have uttered his famous cry of despair. Even in Christianity itself the pale Galilean conquest was far from complete.
Some of the great gods, then, were compromised and frogmarched into collaboration. Others escaped and, quite literally, took to the hills. There, like divine maquisards, they have led a spiritual underground for close on two thousand years. Fed and supported by fishermen and mountaineers during the interim, they have, in a measure, gone peasant themselves. The quarrel lost its acerbity and, with the years, their rustic hosts, and almost everyone else, forgot the cause. Country people found nothing contradictory in serving both sides. Anyway, half of the conquering faction, in spite of the banners above their garrisons, seemed to be in tacit collusion with the ex-fugitives. Rivalry died and they settled into harmonious co-existence. Both sides appeared to co-operate and to complete each other in ordering the sorrows and happiness of men and all feeling of a split allegiance was lost. The mountain influences and those blazoned forth in ikons were indistinguishable. Village priests, who were peasants themselves, shared the attitude of their parishioners. Every century or so an explosion of protest resounded from some far-off bishopric but the echoes of these fulminations died away long before they could reach the highlands and archipelagos they were aimed at. Mountaineers and islanders have always been hostile to centralized authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical; and anyway, what was there to put one’s finger on? The brushwood ancien régime, unencumbered with giveaway temples or paraphernalia, travelled light. There was nothing, on examination, but murmurs, hearsay, candlelight and shadows and the bare limestone hillside.... The overt ceremonies (which still exist) had adopted enough religious camouflage to confuse all but the most penetrating. And a few have survived quite undisguised. Indeed, Christian and pagan practice—both the official (i.e. Christian in form) and unofficial—survive in the same way that the older Pelasgian and chthonian religion survived underneath and alongside the official Olympian paganism of the Achaeans in Homeric and classical times. Strangely enough, it is, on the whole, the old Pelasgian deities which have outlived not only the Achaean Olympians, but much of Christianity as well.
Zeus has been almost entirely swallowed up in God the Father, whose character, in peasant eyes, he has strongly affected; but little of him remains outside church walls except in mainland ejaculations referring to his Cretan birth. Some traces of his battle with the Titans still survive in Zantiot fairy tales. The same source commemorates Poseidon, “a demon of the sea” with his three-pronged fork; but St. Nicholas has almost entirely taken him over. There are clear references in folk tales to Midas, the Sphinx, Icarus and the Cyclopes, and occasionally to a figure resembling Pan who may also be the Far Away One I heard of a little further back.[6]
The clearest case of one of the ancients having the best of both worlds is Demeter. Young, almost imberb, astride a chestnut horse and clad in full armour, Diocletian’s megalomartyr is not only one of the most puissant saints of Orthodoxy, but, with the great St. George whose mount is white, one of the only two that ride on horseback. Pausanias talks of horse-headed statues of the goddess which may account for the insistence of iconographers on his or her equestrian status after the changeover. The one place where she resisted this change and became an uncanonical “St. Demetra,” was Eleusis, the former home of her most sacred rites in the Eleusinian mysteries. Here an ancient statue of her, escaping the zeal of the iconoclasts, was worshipped and crowned with garlands and surrounded with prayers for prosperous harvests until two Englishmen called Clark and Cripps, armed with a document from the local pasha, carried her off from the heart of the outraged and rioting peasantry, in 1801. An immemorial tradition was broken and this exiled goddess, who had probably been an object of worship as long as any other in the world, now languishes in Cambridge, ungarlanded, unhallowed and forlorn, as exhibit No. XIV in the Fitzwilliam Museum.[7] But her memory still lingers in the region of her ravished shrine.
Lenormant records, from the same district, an extraordinary tale, which he had from an old Albanian, of St. Demetra, an Athenian lady with a beautiful daughter who was stolen by a wicked pasha and carried off to Souli, but allowed to return every so often under certain conditions which were closely linked with the welfare of crops. It is not hard to discern Demeter and Persephone here and Pluto, dressed in a turban and a caftan. The heroic hills of Souli dominate the junction of Acheron and Cocytus, routes down to Hades almost as famous as the one at Matapan; and one ancient version of Persephone’s descent is placed exactly there. Lenormant found similar traditions in Epirus itself and Lawson in Arcadia, near the “devil holes” of Phonia in the mountains above the river Ladon and also in those desolate ranges round the temple of Bassae: parts of Arcadia where the old Pelasgian cults were least affected by the Achaean and Dorian immigrations. There are parts of northern Arcadia where, alone in all Greece, the eating of swine’s flesh is mysteriously taboo; pigs were held sacred to Demeter and Persephone. But apart from these scattered cases, a “Mistress of the Earth and Sea” or just “the Mistress”—a non-Christian immortal but nevertheless of flesh and blood, kindly to men, but quite distinct from the Blessed Virgin—presides in many remote and mountainous districts over the welfare of fruit trees, the abundance of crops and the increase of flocks. In Aetolia, where tobacco-growing is the main agriculture, she has the tobacco plant under her especial care. Sometimes she is just known as “the Lady”—“Kyra” or “Despoina”—but she has no church, although the same epithets are often applied to the Virgin. She lives in the deepest heart of the mountains as befits a chthonian; as, indeed, Pausanias tells of her dwelling in Mt. Elaion. She may have had temples but her true sanctuary was a splendid subterranean hall and from such haunts she still sends her benign influences forth. With her, too, is connected in folk tales “the beautiful one of the earth”—Persephone—guarded by a three-headed dog “that sleeps not day or night”; in other versions this warden becomes a triple-headed snake. Cerberus is also mentioned in most convincing detail, though not by name, as “Charon’s watchdog” in a Macedonian folk-song.
I have touched on the survival of Charon earlier on. Even he, probably from the excessive zeal of convert peasants at the time of the big shift—it must have seemed that the entire pagan world was to be enrolled lock, stock and barrel—has appeared at times as “St. Charon.” We have seen that he is no longer a ferryman,[8] but Death himself, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback. It is thus that he appears in innumerable peasant songs and poems from the days of Byzantium until now. Sometimes he acts on his own, sometimes as God’s emissary, sometimes he is a fully-armed warrior prepared for fierce and protracted combat. In the oldest sources, he was closer to his present character (to which the nearest approach in classical times is the mild Thanatos, in the Alcestis, who arrives to take Admetus’s queen to Hades; for even to-day he is not always fierce). His warlike persona corresponds to that boatless Charon, armed with axe, hammer and sword, on the flanks of some Etruscan sarcophagi. His boat, in fact, may be an Achaean novelty of comparatively late origin; probably his earlier Pelasgian form had sunk deep popular roots among the Greeks and the Etruscans long before his later imago took shape; and, when time’s current bore away the later Charon with all his fluvial gear, his hoary and long-established and land-lubbing forerunner took over and survives to-day more robustly than any of that ancient company.
Eros, complete with his bow and arrow, is often referred to in songs and tales; but as the same word is still used for “love” in modern Greek, one must be on one’s guard. Aphrodite, not styled by her name but as “the Mother of Eros,” has had only a vague and shadowy existence in Christian times, and now she has vanished. (Her duties were assumed by St. Catharine in church, and outside it by the still surviving Fates.) However, I was excited to discover that until recently the word “aphroditissa,” meaning a whore, still faintly commemorates Aphrodite Pandemos among the Maniots of Cargese.
Though they are less well known than Charon, the three Fates, sheltering in scattered grottoes hard of access, are still with us. Their shrines are scarce but they are dotted all over Greece. I have several times talked to old women who have consulted them. The most famous—in the peasant world that is—are near Sparta (a few miles from the start of this book, on the eastern flank of Taygetus) and in Aetolia, on Mount Pelion and in Scyros. There were many in Asia Minor, now, with the exchange of populations, stripped of their votaries. Well into this century Athens itself was their haunt, notably those rock-dwellings in the Hill of the Muses and more especially the one known as “Socrates’ prison,” which, during the last century, was often filled with their offerings:[9] “cups of honey and white almonds, cakes on a little napkin and a vase of aromatic herbs burning and exhaling an agreeable perfume.” This continued till a short time ago.[10] Love, weddings and childbirth are their special care; their suitors are nearly always women or girls; cakes and honey are their favourite offering and they are wooed with alliterative incantations beginning “O Moirais...” (“O Fates”); for their collective name is still the same and though they are no longer separately known as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, their rôles have only changed by a third. One spins, another holds a book in which human destinies are inscribed, a third wields the shears. (“His thread is cut” is a common phrase for “he is dead”; also “his spindle is wound full.”) Except in Andros and Kythnos, where they are sometimes known as “the Erinyes”—and, by inflicting consumption, they conduct themselves with the spite of Furies—they are now poor, soft-hearted old women easily moved to compassion. The Fates, like some nereids, are also known as “the good ladies.” They invariably visit houses three days after a child is born. The watchdog must be chained then, the door put on the latch, a rushlight left burning and a feast of cakes, almonds, honey bread and a glass of water laid out on a low table surrounded by three cushioned stools. Mothers have seen these three crones confer together in murmurs, stooping over the cradle to write invisible destinies on the child’s brow:—moles are known as “writings of the Fates,” as though they had accented or punctuated their messages in indelible ink. Then they steal off into the night. Neglect of due care in receiving them can stir their anger and call down on the baby an inauspicious destiny. “Moira” is also used in the singular in everyday speech for one’s own or somebody else’s ordinary fate; it is usually mentioned with noddings of the head and sad sighs.
St. Artemidos, by usurping the name of Artemis (and her incidental gift of curing nymph-struck children), has forced her for the last sixteen hundred years to roam the woods under various pseudonyms. She is “the Queen of the Mountains” in eastern Greece, “the Great Lady” in Zante, the “Chief of the Nereids” in Cephalonia and Parnassus; in Aetolia, Lawson discovered her under the name of the Lady Kálo—akin, surely, to the totally uncanonical, churchless (and now vanished) St. Kali of the humble Athenians. Both Psellus and Leo Allatius expatiated on the Lady Kálo, calling her “The Fair One of the Mountains.” Larger and more beautiful than the other nereids, fiercely virginal, a dweller of the mountains and woods, and given to dancing with her nereids and to bathing in streams and pools, she is merciless to men that come upon her by chance. The usual penalties of those that surprise the nereids visit them, only with greater severity.
She has sometimes been confused with the Lamia of the Sea, a beautiful sea-nymph who lures young sailors and—yet again—lonely shepherds pasturing flocks by the shore, down to her underwater alcove; to their destruction. She spins along luminously in the form of a whirlwind or a waterspout, and when one of the latter goes twisting past over the waves, sailors cross themselves and say “the Lamia of the Sea is passing” and stick a black-handled knife into the caique’s mast as a counter-spell. Her beguiling songs, which beckon seamen to their undoing, she seems to have borrowed from the Sirens. Of the ancient Lamiae, however, who are more closely related generically to the plural “lamiae” of the next paragraph, only one, who was the mother of Scylla mentioned by Stesichorus, is linked with the sea. But this lonely marine Lamia, who rules the sea-nymphs, has inherited in full the lasciviousness of the ancient Lamiae; of which fault, with all their gross demerits, the more easily traceable land-lamiae seem to be guiltless.
The plural lamiae are one of three sets of female monsters; two of them are not only monsters, but demons; they are of most ancient descent, and all three have a hideous passion for devouring babies. Babies and women after childbirth, it will be noticed, seem to share with shepherds and sailors the main onslaught of the supernatural world.
The progenitrix of the lamiae was a single Lamia, a Libyan queen who became a victim of Hera’s jealousy for the usual reasons. Robbed of her children by the spiteful goddess, she took to a lonely and morose cave-life and, her mind twisted by despair, she degenerated into a wicked fiend who preyed on the offspring of luckier mothers. Along with Empusa and Mormo, she became, even in the time of Apuleius, a bogey to frighten children with. This is still part of her rôle, but she has since expanded into a species; and typical lamiae are now filthy, bloated, slovenly creatures, dragons’ brides and abominable housekeepers, and so foolish that they attempt to bake bread in cold ovens, feed their dogs on hay and throw bones to their horses and are then surprised when they die off. They live in wildernesses and, though spendthrifts, they are often rich, owing to their link with dragons who “guard” treasure. They are, however, generous and honest and never break their word once given. Were it not for their cannibalistic passion for newborn babies, they would seem more pitiable than wicked. “The lamia has strangled it” is a peasant phrase which accounts for the sudden death of a baby.
The second category of these dangerous demons descends from a maiden called Gello whom authorities in classical times derive from a mention, now lost, in Sappho. Dying young, she haunted Lesbos and took grievous toll of the infants there. The archipelago is still her hunting ground. St. John Damascene, Psellus and the Chiot Leo Allatius mention her, and, like Lamia, she has multiplied and her offspring are called “gelloudes.” They sometimes cast spells on infants before eating them. This can be cured[11] by the mother summoning a priest to exorcize the child, whose cheeks she solemnly scratches. If this fails, she must choose forty pebbles washed up on the shore at sunset by forty different waves and boil them in vinegar. At cockcrow the Gello will then take wing for ever.
The third group of these baby-eaters differs from the demonic lamiae and gelloudes. For the striges are women with the power to turn themselves into fierce birds and animals to assuage this baleful hunger. They are of Graeco-Roman descent from the Latin strix, the screech owl.[12] The bird has a sinister mention in Strabo, and Ovid tells us clearly that they had the character of cannibal witch-birds among the Marsi of the Abbruzzi. Derivatives of the word—chiefly stregá—exist in Albania, and of course in Italy, Corsica and Sardinia. (I remember hearing the word strigoi, meaning a kind of witch, in Transylvania; it is probably inherited from the Roman legionaries and convicts who settled in Dacia in the reign of Trajan.) The modern Greek stringla, which we have met earlier on, is surely from a low Latin diminutive—strigula—of strix. It is in universal use to-day to describe a hag, crone or witch. They are as old women with a gift for flight, though their knack for transformation has dropped out of currency. Their cannibal bent was not always limited to babies, but, according to terrible tales told quite recently in Messenia, it wrought havoc among grown-ups of both sexes as well. Sometimes, according to Allatius, they were just poor old women in league with the devil; and sometimes they are little girls afflicted with a werewolf tendency. There is an old tale from Tenos which treats of a horse-devouring princess. They are always nocturnal.
Gorgons (to whom Polites is the best guide), while retaining their ancient name, have suffered a sea change: just below the waistline the flesh gradually laminates into scales and, like mermaids, they swell at the hips and then shelve away in long fishtails; sometimes, in lieu of legs, into twin sets of squamous and tapering coils. They are represented thus, holding up in one hand a ship and the other an anchor, on the walls of taverns, on the figureheads of old caiques and tattooed on the bronzed and brine-caked forearms of seamen.[13] Their chief habitat seems to be the eastern Aegean and the Black Sea. In these waters, beautiful solitary gorgons suddenly surface in the hurly-burly of a Cycladic or Euxine storm—especially, for some reason, on Saturday nights; they grasp the bowsprit of a pitching caique and ask the captain in ringing tones: “Where is Alexander the Great?” He must answer at the top of his voice, “Alexander the Great lives and reigns!” perhaps adding, “and keeps the world at peace!” At this the Gorgon vanishes and the waves subside to a flat calm. If the wrong answer is given, the tempest boils up to a deafening roar, the Gorgon tilts the bowsprit towards the sea’s bottom and the caique plunges to its destruction with all hands. This strange legend, which is widespread among seafaring men of the Greek world, has a strong hold on the imagination. It appears off the shores of Mitylene as a memory from his Asia Minor childhood, in Venezis’ book Aeolia, in Seferis’ beautiful poem the Argonauts, also in a book of Mirivilís, and even in a poem of Flecker,[14] whose wife was a Greek. It is remarkable that Alexander the Great should be the one Greek hero to survive in popular minds. He is the only one of them to appear, in splendid plumed silhouette, on the lighted screen of the Karaghiozi shadow play. O Megaléxandros is a household word. I think Lawson is wrong to attribute this to late demotic translations of his life by the Pseudo-Callisthenes, for his many legends, under the name of the Lord Iskander, in Arabic, Persian and several other languages, dominate Islam as far as the Himalayas; with how much greater reason, then, should he live and reign in the minds of his countrymen.
The human part of a gorgon is represented as a beautiful woman; but, in common speech, gorgona is often applied to women with hideous or frightening faces. In Rhodes, it means a virago, and in Cephalonia, where the name Medusa is also used, she is a scowling beldame. In Kythnos the word means a depraved woman or harlot, which tallies with another aspect of gorgons in a thirteenth-century Byzantine bestiary, whose author wrote under the name of “O Physiologos.” Here she is “a harlot-like beast with a beautiful white body and auburn locks ending in snakes’ heads and a glance that brings death.” She is both polyglot and gifted with knowledge of the language of beasts; tormented by wantonness and lusting after lions and dragons and other beasts, she woos them in their various tongues. Spurned by this wary fauna, she melodiously courts the embrace of mankind.[15] Men with sense are no less cautious than the animal kingdom. Aware of her terrible glance, they pretend, from a safe distance, to consent to her lures—on the condition that she digs a pit and buries her death-dealing head in it. This, guilelessly, she does, leaving her naked body exposed; “so she remains and awaits the pains of lewdness.” But, instead of drawing near with a lover’s step, the beloved rushes up and slices off her head with a sword; he then hustles it with averted eyes into a pot, in case he should need to display it for the destruction of dragons, lions or leopards (but lately his putative rivals). So much for the Physiologist. Again, there is something pathetic as well as ludicrous, in the fate of these medieval gorgons.
Modern gorgons have mixed attributes. Their faces are dangerous either from their hideousness or their fell beauty. Their gift of sweet song (suggesting, like that of the Sea-Lamia, a loan from the Sirens), they use, like the mermaids of the West they so closely resemble, for luring sailors. Medusa’s snake locks, originally an infliction of Athena (incurred by the love of Poseidon, to whom Medusa bore, according to Hesiod, the Winged Pegasus), seem to have disappeared. They were always, as they are to-day, sea creatures. Ancient vases display them in the company of dolphins, sometimes—like many female supernaturals—in groups of three. There is a modern story of one infesting some straits like Scylla and taking toll of a sailor from each ship; not as a lover, but to eat. They are always to be feared.
I had some news of a gorgon three years ago, the greatest of them, in the rocky little island of Seriphos, windiest of the Cyclades. An intelligent boy of nine took me under his wing the moment I landed, and turned himself into a most instructive guide. After explaining the windmills and the churches, he led the way, half on our hands and knees, up a steep rock face to a chapel jutting from the cliff. Once we were inside, he pointed to a spot between his feet on the floor, which was half irregular slabs and half excavated rock, and said with a broad smile: “Guess what’s down there!” I gave up. “The head of Medusa the Gorgon!” he said, “they buried it there out of harm’s way—fathoms and fathoms down. Her hair was all snakes!” He flourished his hands in the penumbra overhead, hissing and mimicking with his fingers the dart of forked tongues. “It was in case it should sting people....” It was in Seriphos that Perseus, with a flourish of his dripping and petrifying trophy, turned the tyrant Polydectes to a statue along with all his toadies at the banquet. This gesticulating boy made it seem as though it had all occurred last week.
* * *
The supernatural ancien régime presented a conundrum to the Early Fathers. When the Fathers came into their own after long persecution in the name of the old gods, they adopted, as we have seen, bold and sweeping tactics. The gods and the more presentable figures were captured, baptized and camouflaged; their headquarters were either wrecked or re-garrisoned by the winners and up fluttered, as it were, the new victorious flag. Some of the dispossessed managed to keep a leg in both camps. Others—insignificant as possible leaders of counter-revolution or totally ineligible—were (as supernatural beings can only be burnt or smashed in effigy)[16] outlawed en bloc. A banished mythology was left to skulk and roam in the mountains, eventually, it was hoped, to die of neglect. But from a mixture of ancient awe and, perhaps, Christian charity, the country people befriended them, and they are with us still.
These mythic moss-troops, then, included not only the lesser gods, but the rag-tag and bobtail of the sea and the woods—nymphs, nereids, dryads, oreads, gorgons, tritons, satyrs, centaurs and the like—and they are known collectively by a variety of revealing names. Ta paganá—“the pagan ones”—has a nuance of fairyland about it, suggesting the smaller, more mischievous supernaturals;[17] as daimonia they are divinities and demons, as phantasmata, or phasmata, apparitions—those phantasms of the night that are routed by the Compline hymn; as ta’ xaphnika they are “the sudden ones,” as eidolika, passing visions, as ta angelika, like angels, as aerika, denizens of the air, and as Tzinia, cheats or false gods. Perhaps their most significant style is ta’ xotiká, the exotic, extraneous, “outside” ones; indeed, “they that are without” the church—a narrowing and sharpening of St. Paul’s phrase in Corinthians I v. 12 and a shifting of it from the world of men to that of gods and demons. St. Basil also applies the same word to human pagans. This sense assumes added point at certain seasons, notably at Christmas. Then the pagan crew—usually known in this context as pagana and xotiká—are represented as an active nuisance but not a dangerous one. They are always trying to break in from “outside,” to start a row or to steal the roast pork which is the Greek Christmas fare; behaving, in fact, in an embarrassingly Nordic and trollish way. They are not, however, bent so much on trying to break up this Christian feast; they are trying to join in the festivities of the season, though in a different cause. In many places they are humorously tolerated and placated with left offerings. The invariable time for this yearly outburst is the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. This span included the great winter feasts of the Dionysia and the Kronia and, after the Roman Conquest, the imported Latin fasti (which were accepted and completely Hellenized by the Greeks) of the Brumalia and the Kalendae. The last celebrations, the New Year feast, became those horse marines of the almanack, the Greek Kalends.[18] All of them were occasions for rejoicing and excess but by far the most unbridled were the Dionysia; it was one of the great seasonal feasts where the supernatural riff-raff came into their own. The rejoicings among mortals in early days, especially at Ephesus, seem to have been as wild as the corybantic stampedes of Cybele. They were mixed with group ecstasy, orgy, maenadic frenzy and destruction not unlike those of Moharram and of the Rufai and other dervish sects to-day: bloodshed and even human sacrifice were not unknown. After Christian proscription, the four Graeco-Roman feasts merged into twelve days of underground pagan kermesse, and not always underground. Bishop Timothy, before Christianity became official, met his death trying to suppress one of these orgiastic swarms; the Kalendae called down the ire of St. John Chrysostom and Amasios in the fifth century; in the seventh, the pagan winter festivals were forbidden by the sixth Oecumenical Council; a tenth-century writer inveighed against the celebration, in the old pagan way, of the Kronia and the Kalendae; and Balsamon echoed him in the twelfth, when drunken masquers even appeared in the nave of the church. It was the pagan, more than the indecent aspect—improper disguise and travestitism—which had become the chief target of ecclesiastical anathema: men in women’s clothes, women in men’s, and “mad drunkards” dressed and horned as devils, their faces darkened or masqued, their bodies clad in goat-skins and simulating quadrupeds. It was mimicry, in fact (on the same principle as that on which Spanish penitents reproduce the slow and solemn stages of the Passion), of the entire dionysiac rout: rites which the pagana were simultaneously enacting in their aerial sphere. They were different in no detail from the mummers who career through the streets of many Greek towns and villages to-day, both at the identical magic period of the Twelve Days and during the Carnival that precedes Lent.
One of the rowdiest of the pagan exotics which disturb the peace of the Greek world between Christmas and Epiphany, the one of them most often aped by mummers and, perhaps, the best known by name, is the kallikantzaros.
The kallikantzaros, which in the long off-season inhabits a subterranean cavern, is a problem-beast. It is, quite literally, an infernal nuisance and, in some cases, more. Its shape is as perplexing as its name and provenance and subject to as wide an ambit of variation. Physically, the kallikantzaroi are heteroclite and ill-fitting assemblies of elements drawn from various branches of the animal and human kingdoms, and there are two main types. The large ones can be several yards high. They are black and shaggy, their outsize heads are sometimes bald, and they are armed with outsize pudenda. Their eyes, set in swart faces, blaze red as coals. They have goats’ or asses’ ears, and scarlet tongues loll from their fierce fangs. Their bodies are thin and their arms are simian, their talons are long and they have goats’ or asses’ legs—or one is bestial and the other human. They are sometimes bipeds, sometimes quadrupeds, and often, understandably, lames. But they travel at great speed, and the Athenians have nicknamed them “needlebums”[19] from the pace they go pricking on their always unnecessary and often harmful errands. They are immensely strong. Very, very rarely they are quadrupeds with no human characteristics; and, equally rarely, ordinary men who may or may not be hooved. But, almost invariably, they possess some anthropoid characteristic. Usually the goat element predominates.
The lesser kallikantzaroi, though more rare, are nevertheless widespread, and, like their larger fellows, they are to be found from the Rhodope mountains to Cyprus and especially (according to Polites) at Oenoe on the southern shore of the Black Sea. These are jet-black human pygmies, not only bald but totally imberb and afflicted with varying blemishes: lameness again, a squint or features and limbs askew. Their leader is sometimes dubbed the Koutsodáimonos or limping demon. Often riding about astride various animals and birds, they are boisterous and interfering but harmless. These hideous little wretches, thinks Lawson, are casual, less ancient, and less grim by-products of their gaunt and gangling congeners. For the larger kind can be dangerous; they have been known, in some places, to prey on human flesh; though normally it is Christmas pork and pancakes and, above all, as much wine as they can get hold of, that kindles their gluttony. Gregarious creatures, they run wild at night in gangs, rending, bruising and trampling all who stand in their way. They are well known for breaking into water-mills, eating up all the corn and flour they can swallow and trampling and urinating over the rest. (Perhaps the nereids that sometimes frequent mills are an added draw.) Smothered in flour and not fit to be seen, they burst into houses by the door, the window or the chimney and upset and smash the furniture, drink everything in sight, swallow up the pork and foul any food, wine or water that is left over. Lurching into wine shops, they gag the taverner with droppings (an ugly trick), kick, stave in and shatter his casks and amphorae and then, having swilled their bellyful, let the rest run to waste.[20] Blundering and clumsy though they are, they have a passion for dancing, and pester not only the graceful nereids but the wives and daughters of mortals, whom they have been known to abduct as brides. Should they come on a benighted traveller, they force him to join their loutish gambolling, leaving him, at cockcrow, battered and groggy. They are thick-witted and prone to quarrels both with strangers and among themselves, usually over girls or dancing-partners. Like the lamiae, they are honest and frank in their dealings and strangers to falsehood; they are also extremely, almost pathetically, gullible. The most transparent device, the most obvious cock-and-bull story can outwit and send them careering off. They are frightened of flames and fires are lit to scare them away. In the Pelion district, a rib of pork or a sausage and a breadflap would be hung on a tree to appease them; or, so easily deluded are they, a bare pig’s bone.... They can be driven off by throwing scalding water in their faces or by flourishing firebrands or hot spitted meat. The smaller kallikantzaroi are very nimble roof-climbers and, to keep them from forcing an entry down the chimney, evil-smelling herbs are thrown on the fire and blazing logs set upright. Baulked and angered by flying sparks, they urinate down the chimney in the hope of putting the fire out. But this does no harm. The ashes are allowed to accumulate in the hearth all through the Twelve Days, husbandmen scatter them on the young crops later on, and they operate like a magical manure.
According to some local theories, they can assume the shape of many animals—wolves, dogs, hares, horses, goats, and in Cyprus, where they have the additional name (though both are in use) of Planetaroi, or “the Roving Ones,” even camels; and in Epirus, they are sometimes as small as squirrels. But, as a general rule, they are hybrids with, invariably, some anthropoid feature. Some sources declare them demons, others, transformed men subjugated to the sway of beast-like passions. The southern Euboeans were once considered kallikantzaroi.[21] It certainly seems to be a destiny which lies in wait for some unlucky mortals. Little boys—never girls, the female is almost unknown—who are born in the Christmas octave are at once suspect. Their toe-nails grow abnormally fast and to counter this their small feet used to be held over a fire to singe and hold them in check; and a violent temper, akin to madness, was said to afflict them, driving them to unruly and untameable conduct and even to laying fatal hands on their brothers and sisters. The taint, once implanted, is congenital. Indeed, all the sources point to a human origin.
If the layout of the data on these deplorable creatures has worked as I intend, the reader will have concluded long ago that they are either satyrs or centaurs or a mixture of both. And (here I lean on Lawson again) he will be right. For all the best authorities—Polites and Schmidt and Lawson—though they fall out on some smaller points, are agreed that they are related to satyrs. Lawson goes further. Basing his theory on Polites’ magnificent array of research, but at variance on the derivation of the word, he reaches different conclusions. Kali—the affix deriving from the modern kalos, good (the ancient “beautiful”)—can precede many words, changing little in the sense beyond giving it, like “goodman” and “goodwife,” a faintly benevolent and rustic flavour. This is in accord with the Greek mythological practice, both ancient and modern, of calling a bad thing good from precaution. The change from kentauros to kantzaros, to anyone acquainted with the dialect variations of demotic Greek, is not at all far-fetched; and Lawson traces its mutation with scholarly logic and regard to likelihood and precedent. If he is right, and I feel sure he is, the kallikantzaroi are “good-centaurs.” The centaur as we think of him—the exclusive combination of a horse’s body with a human trunk and torso growing from its breast, the denizen of the Parthenon metopes and poetical literature—was a late classical reduction and idealization of a much wider and more inclusive and variable range of hybrids. On coins and in archaic art, if not in literature, other types of centaur were commoner than the more correctly named hippo-centaur we all know. (I must have been obsessed by these creatures at school. My Greek grammar was smothered with scrawled and inky processions of centaurs, always bearded like Navy Cut bluejackets and often wearing bowler-hats and smoking cherry-wood pipes. If, by this, I meant to indicate that they lived near the sea and, though essentially rural, occasionally paid urban visits, it showed remarkable insight.) There were ono-centaurs, ichthyo-centaurs and trago-centaurs; ass-, fish- (or triton) and goat-centaurs, and even combinations of two or more.[22]
The word “centaur,” in fact, has nothing to do with a horse: it is the human part of a hybrid, and both the hippo-centaur and the trago-centaur—the centaur we all know and the satyr—were subspecies of a single species whose only constant was its human part. They could be either bipeds or quadrupeds. The plastic rule which confined satyrs to two legs while it allotted four to the centaurs, became inflexible only in classical times. In archaic art the ass-centaur seems to be the oldest of the tribe and it is probably the ancestor of both. “Satyr” is itself a fairly late word. Nonnus stated clearly that the satyrs were of centaur stock and awareness of this belief probably lingered on in the chthonian underworld of consciousness and rustic gathering while the grander, neatly-classified livestock, with their stipulated attributes and invariable sum of legs, paraded through the smart golden age of literature and sculpture.
It was only in Graeco-Roman times that the formal hippocentaur fell in step beside the formal satyr in the Bacchic troop. These were, essentially, sophisticated pets; and when the big change came and the Dionysian zoo was broken up, both were impressed into Christian demonology and their natures re-adjusted for the torment of hermits. The satyr was supplied with a pitchfork and turned into a stoker in Hell and the centaur trotted away north-westwards, perhaps to start life again as a unicorn, unaware that biblical translators would muddle him with the hippopotamus.[23] At home meanwhile their matted, telluric and unfashionable poor relations floundered into the void and have wrought havoc ever since. The kallikantzaros now possesses—in his abandoned habits, his bibulousness, gluttony, turbulence, clumsiness and naïvety, his mania for dancing and horseplay—the attributes of both; and his baldness probably commemorates the Sileni. It is remarkable that though the creature is pan-Hellenic, the most abounding source of his legend by far, the region that he infests most thickly, is still his ancient stamping ground, the steep and beautiful villages and the Magnesian chestnut woods of Pelion. It is well known that an illiterate peasant, confronted in a museum by either a centaur or a satyr in marble, quite correctly recognizes it without a second’s hesitation by its pagan-exotic name—“Look! A kallikantzaros!”—and behind his back the semi-literate attendants exchange collusive winks of pity. I have had an instance of this. Some time ago, Joan and I were gazing at the bas-relief of the magnificent ithyphallic satyr in Thasos.[24] He is undoubtedly a satyr by his horns and cloven hoofs, but the phallic attributes and the stallion’s tail cascading from his rump are much more equine than goatish. When we turned to leave, a shepherd leaning on his crook under the olives pointed to him with a friendly and possessive smile and said: “Our kallikantzaros.”
But a question remains: were the original centaurs demonic or mortal? Our modern doubt existed even in Pindar’s time. He turns the wise, the scholarly and lyre-playing Chiron, tutor of Asklepios, Achilles and Jason, into a scion of Kronos, no less. In another place he mates Ixion with a cloud and the cloud, as part of his sentence of punishment for lusting after Hera—not a very heavy part of it—bore him a perverse and far from nebulous monster-son called Kentauros who fled to the dales of Pelion and sired the race of hippo-centaurs on the Magnesian mares. But further back, in Hesiod’s account of their drunken brawl with the Lapiths, they are human; and they are human, including Chiron—with no equine or hybrid suggestions—in the Iliad. Their other name, the Pheres (an Aeolian version of the word for “wild” or “fierce”), suggests to Lawson that they were a warlike Pelasgian tribe that withdrew to Mount Pelion when the Thessalian and Magnesian plains were swamped by the invading Achaeans. There, in impregnable mountain haunts, growing fiercer and shaggier as their siege wore on, these Pelasgian “centaurs” seemed to the newly-arrived strangers to be the guardians of all the old wisdom, knowledge and magic of the country; a brood of fierce mountain-dwelling wizards, in fact; with the same mysterious aura as that of the stubborn retreating Celts, at bay in the Welsh crags and the wilds of Cornwall, for the first uneasy Saxons. Hence the omniscient Chiron and perhaps the ruse of Nessus’ shirt; hence, above all, the possible Achaean belief in their ability to transform themselves into all kinds of animals, like the Pelasgian Demeter at Phiga-leia. Had they (this is my idea, not Lawson’s) herded up droves of horses and asses on their retreat? Flat Thessaly, from which Pelion springs, is ideal horse-country, almost the only one in Greece. (It is here, not in horse-taming Argos, that the Greek cavalry is based; and Larissa, the capital, is the most famous donkey-breeding centre and the seat of the greatest yearly donkey-fair in all Greece.) Did they, when the myth of their powers had taken root, sally down on horseback from the Pelion caves on the credulous pedestrian Achaeans? Their dwellings could have started the idea of the troglodytic habitat common to the centaurs and their modern epigones. Did they, uncouth and shaggy as archaic art portrays them, wield great branches—a centaur’s most usual weapon—broken from the Magnesian forests? Again, at some feast for a truce or a peacemaking—perhaps a wedding breakfast—did these rough Pelasgian cave-dwellers from the grapeless crags, already half-horse by hearsay, shock the urbane Achaeans (tamed now by long sojourn in the rich Thessalian champaign) by bolting their food, by getting roaring drunk and, finally by laying hands on the bride and starting a fight?
Yes, perhaps, to the whole of this rhetorical questionnaire; and again, perhaps, no. How enjoyable, how very enjoyable and luxurious it is, suddenly to emerge from the stern labyrinth of fact onto these dawn-lit uplands of surmise! Movement is free and the air is supernaturally bracing. Bright with unclassified flora, the dewy turf underfoot has a special spring. Choirs of birds break into song, groves beckon umbrageously in all directions and it is hard to discern what catches the charmed eye in the half dim, half brilliant haze at the end of the offered vistas: a sundial or a fountain, a delegation of Chinamen, a sedan-chair or a mammoth grazing.... Alien and unseen hands under the armpits lift us in easy parabolas to strange and sparkling destinations....
Pelion itself, the home of the centaurs for the last few thousand years, a precipitous, wide-skirted peninsula leaning into the Aegean towards the Sporades from south-eastern Thessaly, covered with grass and forest as the rest of Greece must have been before erosion, tree-felling and goats laid it bare, is such a region. Almost every acre of Greece is in some way venerable and, like most points in Greek geography thickly wreathed with fable, Mount Pelion—once its beautiful villages are left behind—is locked in a prehistoric hush that only birds and leaves disturb; as though the solitary stranger’s were the first mortal lungs to fill with that early air and the ancient legends were only beginning. Every rock and stream is a myth. But, in spite of the last few pages, it is neither the putative archaic tribesman nor the lop-eared primordial quadruped of old coins nor the cinder-eyed modern kallikantzaros that I detect in those steep Magnesian glades. Such is the power of early training that I hear the thud of a cavalcade and see sleek piebald and skewbald flanks, the fall of abundant tails and the slither of spatulate leaf shadows over hairy quarters and sunburnt biceps and the merge of muscular peasant backs into strawberry-roan withers. Classical centaurs are at large. Stooping to avoid the moss-covered branches and nesting in whiskers and speckled sailors’ beards, a couple of pleasant uncomplex faces gravely confer three yards above their eight loitering hoofs. Breaking into their colloquy, a dappled greybeard with garland of vine leaves all awry links arms and begs them in the obsolete dual mode to let it rip. There are unwieldy subsidences in the blue-green shade, a doubling-up of forelegs and tangled fetlocks and a sprawl of recumbent groups with chins cupped in horny hands. The leisurely swish of tails dispels the mayflies and there is a murmur of confabulation. Somewhere among the glaucous trunks a new-peeled spit is turning and a whiff of roast reaches the nostril. The tuning note of a plucked string vibrates in a hollow tortoiseshell. Sudden uninhibited laughter is heard and the glug of wine pouring from a calabash. From the islanded sea the rumour of far-away conches comes echoing up the ravines; while, scattered round them on the grass, among the half-whittled arrows, thorny green carapaces split open to show the dark gleam of chestnuts in the dew.
It would be pleasant to dawdle with them here; but the towers of the Mani are calling us.
[1] Nearly four times as much, in fact, as the treasury of English literature—“To be or not to be” plus “My kingdom for a horse,” a beggarly twelve words, though free of nationalism—that adorn the memories of their exact English equivalents. I very much fear that the Greek might win even more signally by also being able to quote the first of these Shakespearian fragments.
[2] There are understandable reasons, mistaken though they may be in this case, for this attitude. The last few centuries have been full of miseries, and it is natural to wish to forget them and the poverty and hardship that went with them, of which superstition can seem a part. During those sombre times, the only inspiration was the memory and example of klephtic heroes. As Greece re-emerged, these were joined by a remoter pantheon of ancient, more dimly remembered ancestors—warriors, rulers, philosophers and artists—who though they had yet to re-attain in rustic minds the same lustre as the klephts and the traditions of lost Byzantium, were considered by the rest of Europe, which the Greeks, by force of arms, had at last rejoined, as the glory of the world. A few decades later, Professor Fallmerayer sought to prove that the Greek population of the peninsula had been entirely replaced by Slavs in the Dark Ages. The theory has been discredited, but it was both bewildering and angering to the Greeks, not only as impugning their Greekness, but because, since early Byzantium to the present day, Slavs have been natural enemies and “barbarians,” and, the Bulgars especially, utterly abhorrent. This theory has left a legacy of touchiness. Fallmerayer’s main argument is based on the number of Slav place-names in Greece. It proves nothing one way or the other. A low ebb of national spirits, a brief foreign ascendency and a temporary change of land tenure may, though it is not the rule, do the trick in a generation or two. A minute English ascendency has changed thousands of place-names in the British Empire, a handful of English altered
[3] Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion by John Cuthbert Lawson, Fellow and Lecturer of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1910.
[4] I shall write of these at length in another book.
[5] Somebody—I forget who—told me ages ago that the fire-leaping which marks the summer and winter solstice—for it also occurs at Christmas—celebrates the victory over Antichrist. But I have asked and searched in vain for corroboration. Perhaps a reader may know.
[6] Surely it is Pan that the Greek Doctors, and St. Jerome in the Vulgate, had in mind when translating the Hebrew of the 91st Psalm. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flyeth by day.” The English translated it quite literally, “... Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” Symptoma kai daimonion mesembrinon, the Greeks rendered the last phrase, and incursus et daemonium meridianum, St. Jerome—the onrush and the noonday demon; both quite gratuitously.
[7] Like much else in these pages, Lawson is my source for this sad tale.
[8] Except twice in a late source which is perhaps to be suspected of sophisticated post-facto influences. In one old Maniot dirge he is called a “corsair.”
[9] Dodwell.
[10] By this sort of phrase I mean a matter of decades, never centuries.
[11] The Cyclades, Theo Bent.
[12] The word and the bird exist in ancient Greek, but with no sinister implications. Sad legends attach to its small congerer, the little owl—gioni in modern Greek—whose intermittent melancholy note haunts the whole Mediterranean night; but they have no relevance here.
[13] Tattooing is often practised by prisoners as well, “to pass the time”; and those patterns in blue gunpowder (which are never the erotic symbols of the West; stern village morality seems to veto them) often indicate unorthodox sojourns in the old fort at Nauplia, or at Levkas or in Itzeddin or the agricultural jails of Crete. There are less inhibitions about this in Greece than in England. Indeed, the uncensorious and charitable character of the Greeks and certain factors in the free life of the mountains—the many revolutions, blood feuds, smuggling, bloodshed in a rage, the armed abduction and marriage of girls, to a certain extent sheep-rustling in Crete—robs prison life of its stigma. I have often listened to uninhibited and often hilariously funny reminiscences between magnificent old greybeards who were at Itzeddin or some other—I was about to say university—together. The Gorgons, caiques, phoenixes, patriotic banners, saints and Virgins that cover their arms from shoulder to wrist have the same emblematic function as college blazers. Away from the northern mists, guilt is never quite at home. Among the poor in Greece it is only really crimes against the sense of personal or national honour—philotimo, in fact—that are burdened with guilt and scorn; and in this, they are implacable.
[14] Santorin.
[15] Probably in the person, as usual, of a shepherd or a sailor.
[16] Yet, given the vitality of gods, one has difficulty in accepting outright the efficacy of reconsecration. Swarms of Byzantine saints and angels and crusading Madonnas with their northern retinues must have troubled the air for centuries above the turbaned heads in Aya Sofia and Famagusta. What old popish numina really preside in secret over the Anglican asepsis of usurped pre-Reformation churches? A keen eye and ear should detect the flight of afrits and djinns and the ghost of a muezzin’s call round the great Giralda minaret which is now the belfry of Seville Cathedral.
[17] My friend Col. Thanos Veloudios is a great authority on these, as on many other odd matters.
[18] The Latin word has left deep traces in the language, in association with Christmas; it seems to have stuck in various parts of the Empire. Thanks, again, to Trajan’s victory over Decebalus and the colonization of Dacia, calînda is still the Roumanian word for a Christmas carol.
[19] Kolovelónides.
[20] During the war, when the occupying forces on one of their seasonal beat-ups in search of hidden arms had done exactly this (with the exception of the gag), an old woman, pointing to the wreckage of spilt oil and wine, compared the enemy, with rueful humour, to the creatures we are discussing.
[21] This may be a trace of native prejudice, for the southern Euboeans, though now completely assimilated, are largely of Albanian stock.
[22] It is interesting to see how the Alexandrian translators of the Septuagint dragoon the pagan fauna into the bestiary as symbols of wilderness and desolation. In Isaiah 34, the Hebrew words for various desert animals like wolves, jackals, “howling creatures,” etc., were unscrupulously Greeked as ono-centaurs, satyrs and sirens, which were quite unknown to the Jews; as though prematurely to ram home their outcast, exotic plight. However, it has not stopped some of them haring about the cities and having a wonderful time till to-day.
[23] One feels inclined to found a R.S.P.C.C.A., the extra C standing for “classical.”
[24] Not the small formal Pan piping to a listening goat on the rocks by Apollo’s temple on top of the hill but the life-size figure outside the town in an olive grove, on the solitary gatepost of the old town wall.